By Michael Wacht
  
LAKELAND — Florida Conference churches are being challenged to raise enough money to purchase more than 10,000 School Kits for children in the Eastern Angola Conference and throughout Florida. The challenge, called “Children’s Harvest ’03,” is being issued by the conference’s committee on the Council of Bishops’ Initiative on Children and Poverty (BICAP).

The goal of Children’s Harvest ’03 is to raise at least $100,000, which will be used by the BICAP committee to purchase supplies for more than 10,000 School Kits, according to the Rev. Pam Cahoon, the committee’s chairwoman and executive director of C.R.O.S. Ministries in West Palm Beach. That breaks down to a goal of $150 per Florida Conference church.

The committee decided to collect money instead of supplies because purchasing items in bulk would allow the conference to provide more School Kits for the same amount of money. Cahoon said each school kit would cost less than $10. The goal of 10,000 was set because an overseas shipping container will hold that many School Kits. All additional kits will be distributed to the Florida Conference’s outreach ministries.

Local churches are asked to collect their money and mail a check to the conference offices by April 1 so that School Kit supplies can be purchased and delivered to the 2003 Florida Annual Conference Event May 27-31. Delegates and other volunteers will assemble the kits there. The BICAP committee is also inviting United Methodist Women and Men and youth groups to help.

A BICAP offering will also be taken at this year’s Annual Conference Event, but it will be separate from the Children’s Harvest, Cahoon said. The BICAP offering will be divided between the Florida and Eastern Angola Conferences, with 25 percent of the funds used to support grants and other BICAP ministries in Florida and 75 percent going to Angola.

The focus on Angola is a change in BICAP’s focus this year. With the fund-raising completed and construction started on the Bishop Cornelius L. and Dorothye Henderson Secondary School in Mozambique, the Council of Bishops asked the Florida Conference to turn its attention to the Eastern Angola Conference, according to Melba Whitaker, wife of Florida Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker and a member of the BICAP committee.

Whitaker said there are eight U.S. conferences working with Mozambique, but only two, the Rocky Mountain and Detroit conferences, working with Eastern Angola. The Florida Conference is the third and largest conference to enter into a relationship with Eastern Angola.

Whitaker traveled to Angola earlier this month as part of a three-person team to build relationships with and explore the needs of the church there.