Prison Fellowship

Montana Volunteers help keep inmates’ families together

Catherine Larson

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.—Matthew 13:31-32

Sara Box, a retired schoolteacher, was kneeling in the church flower garden with a fistful of weeds in her hand the day Pastor John approached her about Angel Tree®. The First Baptist Church of Great Falls, Montana, had started the program two years before at Christmas. They’d begun small, delivering gifts to just two children of prisoners, but the pastor knew that if the outreach to these children and families were to grow, he’d need someone like Sara to turn her gardener’s eye and determination to imagine a harvest of changed lives and patiently work and wait for it.

 

“But pastor,” said Sara with a flush of self-doubt, “I don’t know anything about how to grow an Angel Tree.”

 

A Seed of Faith

Pastor John smiled. He, too, was no stranger to doubt.

 

Though he’s a bit ashamed to admit it now, he had been hesitant to start the Angel Tree program. He feared that the families served would see the church as a Santa Claus and would begin calling looking for handouts.

 

Sure enough, not long after they’d begun the Angel Tree program, the church office got its first phone call from an Angel Tree mom. Pastor John’s secretary took the call, and then a second one later. Both times, she scribbled the message and put it in the stack for him to return. He didn’t. When the Angel Tree mom called a third time, the pastor was in the office and answered the phone.

 

“Hi, Pastor,” said the woman, “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me, but your church delivered Angel Tree gifts to my daughter, Mikayla, this past Christmas. Well, my mom just inherited a large amount of money and she was wondering if there was a church that would be able to use it. I told her there was this wonderful little church . . .”

 

When Pastor John recovered from his shock, he says, “I apologized to God and I kept apologizing.” Her donation became the seed of faith that Pastor John needed to believe God could grow an Angel Tree at First Baptist.