Operation Christmas Child
Boonville United Methodist Church is an official Collection Center, as well as a Relay Center, for Operation Christmas Child.
How Did It All Begin?
Click here for details about the history of our OWN Operation Christmas Child program!
Operation Christmas Child is a project of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief ministry headed by Franklin Graham. Since 1993, the program has brightened the lives of millions of hurting children and their families living in desperate situations around the world, by delivering gift-filled shoe boxes in the name of Jesus Christ.
In 1993, Operation Christmas Child collected 28,000 shoe box gifts in the U.S. Since then, this Samaritan's Purse project has collected and hand-delivered more than 86 million shoe box gifts to needy children in more than 130 countries and territories.
In 2010, over 8.1 million shoe boxes were delivered to children in 97 countries. A total of 5,503,968 boxes were collected in the United States alone.
Above and at left: Volunteer Site Coordinator Connie Gallo and volunteers Chris and Rhonda Spiros pack Operation Christmas Child Shoe Box cartons after Sunday services on November 20, 2011. Gift-filled shoe boxes from parishioners had been placed at the altar and were blessed during worship. Together with boxes from the surrounding Boonville area, they were packed into 883 cartons, which were loaded onto two waiting tractor-trailers. This year's Samaritan's Purse evangelism project was another resounding success, with a total of 13,270 boxes collected, an increase of about 3,000 more boxes than collected in 2010!
This page was last updated: February 6, 2012
