Wood splitters and chainsaws aren't the usual tools of church missions work, unless your ministry is named the Woodchuck Society.

"I bet we're one of the few churches in the country that owns a wood splitter," speculates Chuck Rounds, a member at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Rapid City.

Rounds, along with his wife, Sybil, and a few friends, started a firewood ministry to Native American churches and communities back in 2001. What began as a small tree-thinning project on their Nemo Road property has grown over the years into the Woodchuck Society, a church ministry they founded in 2005 that now claims more than 100 members spread across the United States. This year, the group will deliver 22 cords of high-quality firewood to people living on the Cheyenne River and the Pine Ridge reservations.

A cord of firewood measures 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet, and on Nov. 15, the Woodchucks delivered more than 10 of them loaded in nine pick-ups and three trailers to Eagle Butte, where the Rev. Norman Blue Coat oversees its distribution to families in need of energy assistance.

On Dec. 6, a second caravan will deliver firewood to Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where homes, schools and churches lost electric power for more than a week due to a blizzard one month earlier. Many reservation homes heat with propane, but supplement with wood-burning stoves when propane tanks are empty, Rounds said.

Blue Coat pastors three of the dozen small United Church of Christ churches on the Cheyenne River Reservation. He sees to it that the wood goes to the neediest and the elderly first. In Wanblee, the wood is divided up at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church using one basic rule: Young families who get wood must first deliver a supply of it to an elder's home.

The deliveries happen at the start of each heating season, but the project is a year-round, multi-generational mission for the church. Kids participating in summer Bible school helped tie kindling bundles. Teens in the church youth group haul and stack firewood as service projects, usually when a church member has a supply of wood that needs to be hauled away or a plot of forest that needs to be thinned.

Other Woodchucks can get involved without ever touching a piece of wood. Baby blankets and hand-knitted stocking caps, mittens and scarves also are delivered to needy families along with the firewood. One offshoot of the Woodchuck ministry is a group of women in Florida who have sent more than 300 knitted caps for the church to distribute.

Most of the wood comes from church members, many of them Black Hills landowners like the Roundses, who keep the ministry supplied with trees that have to be removed because of age, disease or fire prevention. Throughout the spring, summer and autumn, a large pile of split wood accumulates behind the church at 1200 Clark St.

"Over 84 members of the congregation have been a part of this project - from young children to a 90-year-old who has donated wood and provided food for the workers," said the Rev. Ted Huffman, pastor of First Congregational Church.

But the work of splitting logs is usually reserved for the congregation's retired men, such as Rounds, who has earned the honorary nickname of Mr. Woodchuck for his enthusiasm for the project he founded.

His wife jokes that the women who help them stack and load it have their own nickname - Woodchicks.

As Chuck and Sybil Rounds and Alta and Dick Wade worked in bitter cold and blustery wind to load the last of the firewood for the Eagle Butte trip last week, they warmed their hearts, if not their fingers and toes, with the knowledge that the split logs would soon be heating homes in remote areas of western South Dakota.

"It's a blessing to get to do this," Sybil said.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com.