A story in today’s Goshen News recounts how a donation made to an effort sponsored by Grace Community Church (Jim Brown, senior pastor), a Charis Fellowship congregation in Goshen, has come full circle. A portion of the story appears below. Click here to read the complete article.
Approximately 30,000 N95 masks find their way back home
An act of compassion has returned home.
About five years ago, Beacon Health donated about 30,000 N95 masks and 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner to Grace Community Church’s Iraq refugee mission, Grace4Iraq.
“ISIS was invading Iraq and we saw that taking place as a church, so we wanted to obviously help out there in Iraq,” said Grace’s lead pastor Jim Brown. “So we formed some teams and sent some teams over to help refugees. Our church kind of rallied around that. On one of the trips going there, we realized one of the needs they had was masks and hand sanitizer.”
One member of the congregation who had connections with the health community connected with Beacon, which owns Elkhart General Hospital. Beacon donated 30,000 N95 masks and 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner to the ministry, which would be used to help refugees and the emergency workers in Iraq. The church readied everything for shipment.
“The team tried to get them in, but we could not get them into Iraq,” Brown said. “We were left with, I don’t know, 30,000 masks and probably 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner and didn’t really know what to do with them. So one of our guys put the word out and said, ‘Hey is there any place we can ship these masks, these N95 masks and this hand cleaner, that they can be used?’” Brown said.
Another congregant, Nick Miller, said he was connected with a group of people who are in Haiti and they could ship them there.
He tried to get them into Haiti, but, again, the shipment couldn’t take place. “There was just no way to get them in because of the emergency situation on the ground, just because of politics,” Brown said. “So we were left with 30,000 masks and 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner and didn’t know where to put them. So Nick, who had these, put them in storage in a garage somewhere that he has and they have been there for a few years in storage, just sitting there.”
Click here to read the complete article.