My first experience with One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS) began while I was in college. My childhood church needed to find a quick replacement for one of our elders, who broke his elbow before a scheduled mission trip to Goche, Mississippi with PDA to help rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. During the week of sleeping in a corrugated shelter illuminated by flashlights, cutting tiles with a wet saw in sub-zero temperatures, and doing flooring on my knees for eight hours a day, I somehow managed to develop a love for PDA, and by association, to see the importance of the One Great Hour of Sharing offering.

When I arrived at Hildale, the congregation already had a longstanding tradition of contributing to OGHS, but the reason behind their generosity was somewhat checkered. Decades ago, one family in particular, wishing to spur the congregation to think outside the operating budget and focus on mission, began contribute approximately half of Hildale’s OGHS offering at that time. Their plan worked to a degree, and the congregation’s offerings to OGHS increased first into the low $3,000 range, and then into the low $4,000 range, supported by a letter-writing campaign during Lent, newsletter articles, and denominational resources.

During COVID, our congregation underwent an amazing shift in its mission philosophy, and I gotta brag here—it was imagined and implemented entirely by the Ruling elders—which opened up previously sequestered investment resources to give thousands of dollars in aid to Ukrainian relief, to the housing-insecure in Morristown, to the hungry in other nations, and, three years ago, to match our congregation’s donation to One Great Hour of Sharing, dollar-for-dollar. The Session was prepared to do the same thing again in 2023 and 2024, but found that it was unnecessary—congregational donors, who are not affiliated with the family that began the tradition of earmarked giving to OGHS, came forward to match the congregation’s contributions. The result is that in the last three years, Hildale Park, a congregation with about 45 regular attendees, has contributed a grand total of $29,000 total to the One Great Hour of Sharing offering. We are truly blessed to be the means of conveying this level of generosity to people in need.

If that isn’t enough reason to celebrate, God’s Spirit was also moving when I connected with Hanover Township resident Arlene Maynard at a community memorial service last October. Arlene’s Quaker congregation in Morristown was part of a mission team that took a $10,000 grant (exactly the amount Hildale gave to OGHS each of the last two years) from the Presbyterian Hunger Fund (one of the programs funded by OGHS), and used it to build a water decontamination facility at a lake in Masaya, Nicaragua.

This lake, which was once too polluted even for swimming, now provides potable water and edible fish to thousands of men, women, and children living nearby. The impact of this offering is so great that neighbors from as close as Morristown, and as far as Central America, Presbyterians and Quakers and others, have been touched by One Great Hour of Sharing.