Content provided by Rev. Jerry Bass and Greta Whelan, St. Thomas UMC

This fall, members of the St. Thomas United Methodist Church in North Dakota, “picked” a mission project they named "Apple Pies for Africa." The project entailed making homemade apple pies and selling them frozen.

Photo: Members of St. Thomas UMC pose with the pies they made for the "Apple Pies for Africa" fundraiser before they are frozen. Photo courtesy of St. Thomas UMC.

The purpose of the mission event was to raise funds to help support Sarah Moquist, a young woman from the local area, who has departed for Uganda to work with a mission team and live among the Ik people. The Ik are a marginalized tribe, who live on the peaks of mountains on the Kenyan/Ugandan border escarpment. This is an area of Africa where persons reportedly have never heard the Good News. Moquist and her team will be working in Uganda for two years.

St. Thomas UMC felt a close connection to Sarah and her family and wanted to support her with this apple pie fundraiser. The church set out a goal to make 30 pies. Orders started coming in and before long, there were orders for 100 pies. Members of the church got busy making pies and freezing them.

A couple of days before the pies were to be picked up, the small town of St. Thomas had a power outage that lasted from 2:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. A dozen or more pies ended up thawing out, so those were baked. The church sold the baked pies as well as the frozen. So a difficult day for the community ended up raising even more funds.

With monetary donations, over 1,000 dollars were sent to support Moquist's work in Uganda.  God is good!

Photo: Samuel Green (right), member of St. Thomas UMC delivers apple pies to a customer of the "Apple Pies for Africa" fundraiser. Photo courtesy of St. Thomas UMC.