As the holiday season nears, area churches are doing their part to ensure children don’t go without.
One annual giving drive is accomplished through Operation Christmas Child, which provides shoeboxes filled with items as simple as non-liquid hygiene and school products, with each also containing a toy, a “wow” item such as shoes or a musical instrument, and a personal note.
Operation Christmas Child is an annual shoebox ministry conducted by Samaritan’s Purse, which is an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization that aims to help people.
“These boxes go literally around the world, often to areas that may have been affected recently by a natural disaster,” the Rev. Joseph “Jody” McGaha, Calvary Baptist Church pastor, said. “It’s not uncommon for Samaritan’s Purse through the other efforts that they conduct to use that as an inroad to bring shoeboxes in for children during the Christmas season.”
Calvary Baptist has served as a collection point for area churches for more than 10 years. It’s something McGaha believes is worth it to help spread the Gospel.
“It is a wonderful way to share the Gospel around the world through something as simple and as small as a shoebox,” McGaha said.
Calvary Baptist alone averages about 300 boxes each year, he said.
That’s the total the Rev. Charlie Barnard, First Baptist Church in Tellico Village pastor, hopes his congregation will collect this year. In 2017, the church donated 289 boxes. Just 13 years ago the total collected from First Baptist was about 40, he said.
“We’ve even had people out in the community bring prize boxes,” Barnard said. “We primarily just encourage our own people to do this, but there will be people that read about it and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind being a part of that,’ and they’ll bring four or five boxes to give to us to put with ours.”
Promotion for Operation Christmas Child began two weeks ago, he said.
“Our church has many ministries, but this is one of my favorites,” Louise Phillips, First Baptist member, said. “The reason it is, I see pictures of these children that receive boxes and they’ve got such smiles on their faces and such joy, and some of them this is probably the only Christmas they see is out of these boxes. As we share God’s love in that little small way, it impacts the families because they all have a little Gospel tract in the boxes and missionaries there are always ready to share the Gospel with them when they receive the boxes.”
Some boxes may include personally written notes to the children, although Barnard said that isn’t required. Members also pray for the children before boxes are sent to Calvary Baptist.
New Providence Baptist Church is aiming for 150 boxes, 25 more than last year. The Rev. Gary Smith, New Providence associate pastor, said the church has participated for about five years for various reasons, but the biggest is the number of people it reaches.
“Every 24 hours they reach over 30,000 kids with the Gospel, and out of those every hour on average over 5,000 accept Jesus,” Smith said.
For more information about Operation Christmas Child, visit www.samaritanspurse.org/what-we-do/operation -christmas-child.
“The Monday prior to Thanksgiving the boxes will be shipped from Loudon County to a collection point, a regional collection point, whether that is Atlanta or potentially even to Samaritan’s Purse headquarters in Boone, N.C.,” McGaha said.
