Saturday, August 22, 2009
School supply giveaways: Supplying students
At a time when family budgets are squeezed, faith groups step up efforts to help out the community.
JOHN W. ADKISSON I The Roanoke Times
Participants in a "Tent Crusade" at Calvary United Methodist Church pray prior to canvassing the neighborhood Thursday in Salem. The crusade includes cookouts, raffles and school supply giveaways and continues through Sunday.
Click the button above to see all of our community coverage, or go straight to your community's homepage with the menu below.
More religion stories
- Answering each other's prayers
- Religion calendar
- Scholar to speak in Roanoke
- Religion calendar
- Rosalind Hills Baptist Church: Making a pitch for the pipe organ
Archive
When the Rescue Mission set up tables to distribute school supplies for Roanoke students this week, parents arrived an hour and a half before the event and lined up down the street and around the block.
About 780 students got book bags stuffed with materials Monday, according to the mission's spokesman Lee Clark.
"Folks that are at the bottom of the scale are really struggling," Clark said.
The annual back-to-school outreach events held by faith groups in their communities are being met with heavy demand in a time of increasingly tight family budgets. As a result, congregations are stepping up their efforts to help people.
Faith groups aren't the only ones that give away supplies. For example, Roanoke County radio station Q99 FM hosted a Pack the Bus campaign earlier this month, and Roanoke City Public Schools have scheduled the eighth annual Back-to-School Extravaganza for August 29.
But Stefanie McAdam, an organizer of "Jesus Jam" at Tabernacle Baptist in Salem on August 30, says churches organize such events because it's important for them to engage their neighbors.
"We want to let people know that we're here, and that if they need anything, they can come to us," McAdam said. "We'll pray for them and try to do what we can for them."
Meanwhile, Steve Parker, the pastor of Living Well Church of the Nazarene in Salem, says the Bible directs Christians to reach out to their communities. His congregation has adopted the slogan "Our church has left the building," and he regularly cites Luke 14:23, which says, "Go out into the highways ... and compel them to come in."
His church and four others of different denominations are hosting a "Tent Crusade" through Sunday in Salem, where they will have school supplies along with free cookouts, games and a raffle for a 2005 Mercury Sable. They will also host 45-minute gospels.
"I have this passion that we can't keep on doing the same old thing and stay within our church," Parker said. "We believe in the value of the Christian message to change people's lives."
And at the Old Southwest Congregations in Action, one member says one of the driving forces for outreach is to prepare future generations. The organization, composed of eight area congregations, has adopted Highland Park Elementary School, and directly donates school supplies and provides other service programs there.
"We concluded the best way to reach out was to do it through the school because it touches an awful lot of people in the neighborhood," said Gerald Carter, pastor of congregational care at Second Presbyterian Church.
"The children are our strength of tomorrow and ... if we have resources we can share, we can help make a healthier community."
