A church can do great things when they are one in mind, body, and spirit.  

About three weeks ago, I had the privilege of sitting around a kitchen island with three friends discussing how to raise money to help kids in our local area. We know there are people in our local community who will have a hard time providing Christmas presents for their children this year, including some of our own members at Stevenson’s Chapel United Methodist Church.  We decided that we had enough gently used items not being used within our own households, that perhaps we could sell some. The idea of a Christmas Thrift Shop was born.

We had rather short notice in getting this all together, but with the help of our congregation, Facebook advertising, and our local radio station, we were able to pull it off. We took the idea to our church and, as always, they were excited and willing to do whatever needed to be done to help.

Friday, Nov. 20 was spent setting up the fellowship hall and pricing all our items. I was quite impressed with the selection of toys we were able to come up with and how generous our own children were to donate their personal items to be sold. Along with toys, we had many household items and very nice clothing in all sizes.

We were set to open Saturday at 8 a.m. I was nervous on my drive to the church that morning. I wondered if all the fliers and advertising had been enough for people to show up and shop. I shouldn’t have been worried, after all. When you are doing something that you feel God has led you to do, He always provides. To say we were busy the first three hours of the day is an understatement. We did have a downtime around the middle of the day and then it picked up again in the afternoon. We were able to raise $1,015 to donate to Bro. Joe’s Family Christmas.

This turned out to be a wonderful fundraiser! People were able to come and buy affordable Christmas presents for their families, a large amount of money was raised to buy toys for children in Logan County, and the remaining items were donated to Logan County Helping Hands to be donated and help others in the community. You can find information about Logan County Helping Hands at https://logancountyrussellvillehelpinghands.wordpress.com/

We would like to thank the people of Logan County for helping us to far exceed what we hoped to achieve for this fundraiser. This may become an annual thing for us and we look forward to helping more people in the future.