Community projects set to fill shelves
First Baptist Church, Brookshire's benefiting Philadelphia Blessing
BY SUZANNE LOUDAMY Staff writer

Hannah Martindale, Lauren Gentry, Cayden McDonald, Joseph Martindale and Spencer McDonald sort non-perishable goods collected at First Baptist Church of Whitehouse to be donated to Philadelphia Blessing.

The Whitehouse community came out in force during the recent holiday season to fill the shelves of the Philadelphia Blessing food pantry. The tinsel is down and lights put away and the shelves are growing bare. This is a call to the community to help those in need by restocking those shelves.

The youth choir at First Baptist Church has devoted the month of February to that mission idea. The project stemmed from a song the youth choir sang at Christmas entitled "Change the World."

"The more I began to think about the spring semester, I began to think that we should really carry the theme of that song out when we came back after Christmas," Amy Culpepper, youth choir director, said. "So we will be doing a mission type project each month while we also learn new songs to sing. We started with a canned food drive."

The church's Disciple Now event in April will have mission projects also.

"I just feel like we need to actually show them what it is like to 'Change the World,' to put our words into practice and not just sing about it; but to actually do it," Culpepper said.

Along with the campaign under way at FBC, Brookshire's in Whitehouse is offering the community a great opportunity to help out with the shelves of Philadelphia Blessing, a food pantr y in Whitehouse that serves the local area.

The store will be changing over their value-priced product brand of Hytop to another brand name in the near future. With the plan to clear the shelves of Hytop products, all of the nonperishable items will be sacked up and offered for $5 per bag to be purchased by consumers and donated to the food pantry.

According to assistant manager Danny Vaughan, each bag will be worth considerably more than $5, so the consumer's money is going much further than just a regular purchase.

Any and all non-perishable items can be purchased and donated through the store, but the pre-bagged Hytop items offer the best value.

The Brookshire's program begins today.