Background

Our Church is participating in Prison’s Ministry Angel Tree program this year.

Due to Covid, we did not want to go from house to house delivering gifts.

We chose the Virtual route.

 

Processing

Near By Angels

Observation

As our congregants visit our personalized virtual Angel Tree website, they are offered Angels to buy gifts for.

One of the participants made an interesting observation.

He emailed the Church and stated, “Most of the Angels reside in faraway states”.

Continuing, he asked, “Do we have any Angels located nearer to us”

 

Is he right?

A good question deserves some exploration.

I went back and reviewed the Angels, paying attention to their city.

I acquiescence with his insight.

 

Thinking It Over

I thought it over a bit.

 

Questions

To help me answer his question, I came up with my own questions.

1. How come no one complained about the location in previous years
   • Well, in previous years prior to Covid, we went the traditional route
   • When on the traditional path, we are asked for our preferred location
   • We thus gain an opportunity to pass along our preferred cities and zipcodes
2. Additional Angels
   • Thankfully, our Church has a voracious appetite for adopting Angels
   • Once we adopt all of our assigned Angels, we request additional batches of Angels
   • Often our request for additional angels come in sizes of 20, 30, 40, or 50
   • As our request ( for additional Angels ) ends up later in the cycle, most of the newly assigned Angels are from out of state
   • I think the reason why the additional angels are not often sourced from our local communities, is due to the high regard and uptake of community service in our region

 

Take Away

A couple of takeaways.

Angel Tree Co-ordination

1. Angel Tree prefers to assign Angels via the traditional path over the Virtual path
2. Angel Tree’s preference is communicated by fully serving traditional requests before fulfilling requests for virtual angels

Church Congregants

It is always important and good to get buy-in and participation within church ministries.

Each of us has blind spots in life.

With the help of human relationships and participation in group projects, we learn to listen well and accommodate needs and preferences.