A COVID-19 Christmas Commendation
We would never want to repeat this last year, right?
But there are some things that have happened during this “year-never-to-be-repeated-we-hope”, that are actually worth doing again.
Every year just before Christmas, FAIR produces an Advent Calendar that provides a means by which families can contribute to various FAIR projects as part of their celebration of Jesus, God’s gift to us. During this past COVID-19 Christmas, when physically meeting together as congregations was not possible, one Fellowship church found a way not only to encourage individual families to think beyond their borders, but discovered a means by which to stimulate the entire church family to work toward a common objective. This project not only helped a community thousands of miles away but brought their own congregation together even while COVID-19 kept it apart.
The funds collected were donated to FAIR’s, Weathering the Storm special appeal, created to support Fellowship missionaries seeking to meet the needs within their communities during the pandemic. This included places like Colombia, Lebanon, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, France, Pakistan, and among international students in Canada.
Pastor Thomas Telfer from Faith Baptist Church in Echo Bay, ON, wrote to the Fellowship National office recently to describe the impact of the project on his congregation.
“The COVID-19 (pandemic) has had a huge impact on the way our church connects and ministers together. One of the things our leadership really struggled with is how to continue to build one another up in a season when we are intentionally distancing from our brothers and sisters in Christ.
“One of the great blessings we received, as a church family, was to be able to participate in the 2020/2021 Advent calendar from FAIR. We distributed these to the church family, along with FAIR banks, and we asked as many as were able to participate in our 2020 Advent event. We agreed that the Weathering the Storm special appeal was a great opportunity for us to work together toward a common goal. We were able to contribute every day in a shared objective, knowing that, even though each of us was physically removed from the others, we laboured with a common purpose. I can’t overstate how important I feel that was. This project reiterated, for every single one of us, just how blessed we are, refocusing our praise and reminding us, in the middle of what, for many, has been a very dark season, that God is good.
“Thank you for making us part of your work. Thank you for the work that you do in the name of Jesus. Please put our small contribution to good use. May God be glorified through it.”
Thank you, Pastor Telfer and members of Faith Baptist. And thank you to everyone who has looked beyond COVID-19’s local impact to respond to its global implications through the Weathering the Storm special appeal.