TOOELE — It used to be a convent housing nuns for the church across the street; now it houses teenage girls with their eyes on the same Master.
Inside, a large room upstairs that used to be the chapel has been converted into a school room with large mural of Jesus keeping the girls' focus on their objective. But from the outside the New Hope House would look like just another apartment building except for the small cross on one ridge of the roof, which makes it a good place to quietly change girls' lives.
"God is doing marvelous things here — Believe me, it's not us," Pastor Mary Bondi said. She is the director of New Hope House, a teen girls prevention center that is tucked away in Tooele. "The goal of this ministry is to catch them before they make decisions that have lifelong consequences . . . have the Lord intervene in their lives before they have to go to adult facilities."
New Hope House is part of Teen Challenge International, a faith-based youth prevention organization with 150 similar programs worldwide. While the program itself is non-denominational, simply teaching teens to trust in God and live productive lives, it is administered by the Home Missions of the Assembly of God.
Only girls between 13 and 16 years old can attend the one-year program, and they come from all socio-economic levels, Bondi said. Many are adoptees who have been shuffled around the foster care system. Most have been abused in some way, and many have suffered through sexual abuse. But some of them are just normal girls that have started to make wrong choices, said June, whose daughter has been in the program for four months.
"(My daughter) was not a troublemaker, unfortunately the choices that most girls make nowadays are life-altering," June said. "I think parents would be astounded that the girls that go into the program are not unlike their own daughters."
Because of their background, many of the girls who enroll in the program struggle with trust and order. Several said that submitting to authority and being obedient was one of their greatest challenges. So New Hope House runs on a rigid schedule to provide structure to the girls' lives.
"If you've been shuffled around from pillar to post . . . it's very comforting to have a lot of structure," Bondi said.
Teaching teens to "(turn) your life around and (give) your life to God," as one of the girls put it, is done through a three-pronged program. Daily devotions give a regular dose of spirituality and teach faith in God; a daily school schedule makes up for lost time and neglected studies; and Gift Discovery helps the girls find their talents and teaches them healthy pastimes.
"We tithe our day to the Lord, so we give him the first hour," Bondi said. Devotion starts at 9 a.m. and, though scheduled for only an hour, usually runs longer. They let it last as long as it needs to, Bondi said.
In devotion, program staff teach Bible study, which is augmented with discussion of how the teachings apply to each girl individually. They talk about their experiences and try to figure out what they can do to better live the things they study, especially the teachings on inner healing.
"More hearts are changed in devotion . . . " Bondi said.
One of the first things the girls encounter when they enter the program is gap testing, where staff determines which aspects of their education have been neglected. Teen Challenge has created an academic curriculum that can be personalized to each student to fill those gaps, and full-time teachers volunteer as tutors. The goal is to take them to grade-level and beyond, Bondi said.
The final part the program is called Gift Discovery. In Gift Discovery, volunteers from the community come to the house and teach various skills and crafts, hoping the girls will find something they enjoy and can adopt as a new hobby.
"We try to give them a smorgasbord of opportunities to discover their gifts," Bondi said. "God took away the bad and now he's showing them the good."
June has been impressed with the change that the program has made in her daughter since the day when she told her daughter they were going for dinner in the mountains four months ago. They did eat in the mountains, the daughter admitted, before continuing on to Tooele where daughter stayed as mother returned home.
"If it wasn't for this program, we would have lost our daughter," June said. "Today I have my daughter back."
Her 16-year-old daughter isn't mad at her for taking her to New Hope House. It is not a lock-down program, and for three weeks all she thought about was going home until she broke down, gave up and became filled with peace, she said. Now, during a quarterly counseling session with the family, her parents said that just to look at her she is a completely different person.
"The world is a huge place and you can get caught up in it so easily. But when you're here everything else falls to the ground and you just stand in front of God," the daughter said. "In the world you can trust so many other things and make God so small, but here it's just him."
Bondi tells every girl that they are not there because they are bad, but because God has chosen and prepared them.
"They come frightened, they come confused, they come abused. But I believe that they come prepared," Bondi said.
Usually the girls struggle with authority and try to act tough for a time, but after a few days they start going with the flow. No matter how tough they act, there's always a little person inside just crying out, she said.
"They come in broken and they leave complete, mended, healed, repaired, restored," Bondi said. "They have submitted to God and his authority."
It isn't easy, June said, it's not summer camp.
But for her daughter, "God is mighty to save."
E-mail: jrowley@desnews.com