North Greenwood Baptist Church is accepting gift donations for children until Monday for the Operation Christmas Child program.
Operation Christmas Child is an initiative of Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian-based humanitarian aid organization. Samaritan’s Purse asks donors to fill shoeboxes with a variety of items suitable for children, including toys and school supplies.
“For the last several years, North Greenwood Baptist has simply served as a dropoff point for our region,” said the Rev. Dr. Jim Phillips, the church’s pastor. “Once people bring them to us, we crate them up in larger boxes and move them to the next link in the chain.”
Monetary donations are also encouraged to help cover shipping costs. The packed boxes will go to Indianola and then to Atlanta to be distributed around the world.
“This last Sunday in our church, we had a dedication service and probably dedicated over 300 boxes just out of our congregation,” Phillips said.
The congregation also was encouraged to provide a note or picture “that might on the other end cause people to realize who was the originator of this box,” said Phillips.
Jenny Clark, the church’s program leader, organizes a group of about six who work all year to accept and organize donations. Each year, the church has a “packing party,” enlisting the help of the youth and children’s ministries to fill their own shoeboxes as well as collecting donations from the community.
Clark said she was inspired by the story of a girl who shared one toothbrush with all the other children in her orphanage and received her own toothbrush in a shoebox that was delivered to her.
“People can hear how important it is, just the things our children take for granted,” Clark said. “A big necessity is school supplies, because school supplies are hard to come by, and children in other countries may not be able to go to school if they do not have their own school supplies.
Cups are another needed item, she said — “just anything that they can put food or water in, because many times they do not have those items available to them.”
In his sermon last Sunday, Phillips discussed visualizing the hands that go into putting the donations together all the way to the hands of the recipient.
“We all just try to think about the child on the other end who is going to open it with their hands and what they would find inside,” he said. “The joy is to watch on the Samaritan’s Purse website the videos of the different places that (the boxes) are taken and opened.”
Both Phillips and Clark said that the driving force behind Operation Christmas Child is to spread the word about Jesus.
“Wherever these boxes go and whatever language of the child that opens it, they receive the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Phillips said. “It’s not just for toys or goodies. It is that, but it’s a joy to share the gospel around the world, and we just pray over it.”
“The most important reason that we work to send these shoeboxes is so that each child can hear the gospel message,” said Clark.
- Contact Kevin Edwards at 662-581-7233 or kedwards@gwcommonwealth.com.
