By Sharon Mager
FORT WASHINGTON, Md. — Members of New Hope Baptist Church of Fort Washington, Md. (NHBC), partnered with Kettering Baptist Church, Upper Marlboro, Md.; Abyssinia Baptist Church, Capitol Heights, Md.; Fort Washington Baptist Church, Md.; Forest Heights Baptist Church, Oxon Hill, Md., and Forest Hills Baptist Church, Rockville, Md., to collect flip flops for shoeless men, women, boys and girls in East Africa.
Prince George’s Baptist Associaton churches sent 700 flip flops to East Africa.
New Hope Baptist Church Pastor Carl Tilghman said the church kicked off the collection following Evangelist Octavia Caldwell’s presentation in September. Caldwell is founder and president of “Global Mandate,” a nonprofit organization that strives to provide for unmet and undermet needs throughout the world
“In her sharing of her missions experiences and God’s call to mission work, she mentioned that the people of Rwanda and Democratic East Congo had to go daily without shoes. She told about the risks, physical and medical, of walking through human and animal waste, stones and glass without shoes,” Tilghman said. “I believe the message of God is to move us to action to have compassion as He did…” That compassion involves taking action. Jesus asked the disciples to feed the 5,000, he said.
Feeling God’s call to help, Tilghman challenged those who heard Caldwell’s
Mi-reta Oburota, who oversees the evangelism and missions ministry at Fort Washington Baptist Church shows the flip-flops the church collected for the multi-church initiative.
presentation to collect flip-flops for 30 days. He also sent a letter to the Prince George’s Baptist Association, (PGBA) challenging other churches to partner with them in the collection.
The logo on some of the flip-flops read, “GOD DID IT.”
“It will be a witness to those who wear the flip-flops and those who see others with them to know and see what God will do as the Almighty God,” Tilghman said.
Altogether New Hope Church, with the others, collected a total of 700 flip-flops in the 30-day period. They presented them to Caldwell, who is sending the flip-flops to her contacts in East Africa.