Year-round Volunteer: Building Church Partners
Missouri Churches Send Shoebox Gifts Off with Prayer
The farming community of Belle, Missouri, has a population of just 1,300 people, but on Sunday, they accomplished much through prayer. At their 23rd annual Operation Christmas Child dedication service at First Baptist Church, 120 people from more than 25 different churches gathered to commit 1,744 shoebox gifts to God’s purposes around the globe. Each…
Attention Shoebox Shoppers
As back-to-school items are placed front-and-center in stores this time of year, many Operation Christmas Child year-round shoppers are rolling up their sleeves to find great deals. School supplies are a fundamental component of quality shoebox gifts. In addition to capitalizing on seasonal sales and off-season clearance merchandise, shopping year-round divides shoebox purchases over several…
New Hearts, New Purpose in Mongolia
At first glance, Erdembayar seems like an ordinary 12-year-old boy. He enjoys participating in physical education class at school with his friends as well as riding horses and cooking Korean food, fried rice, and cakes. But up until three years ago, he didn’t have energy for any of these things. For years previously, Erdembayar had…
Operation Christmas Child Brings Hope to Fire-Ravaged Community
Notebooks and pencils were some of the items that immediately caught Fernanda’s attention when she peered inside of her shoebox gift. She’d be going back to school in a few months and had no supplies to take with her—everything she owned had burned during a fire a few weeks earlier. The inferno had attacked the…
Franklin Graham Thanks Processing Center Volunteers
Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham today thanked the thousands of volunteers who are currently working in eight processing center locations across the U.S. to prepare millions of Operation Christmas Child shoebox gifts for international shipment. Headed to over 100 countries this year, the gift-filled shoeboxes will bring great joy and the Good News of Jesus…
OCC Schools 2025
She’s Got a Passion for Sharing Christ Through Shoeboxes
The first thing you notice about 24-year-old Amanda Urgolites is her smile—bright, warm, welcoming, continual. That’s not so unusual, you might say. But Amanda’s radiant smile is all the more remarkable because she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a rare and incurable collagen deficiency disorder that causes her ligaments to stretch and malfunction. Her bones dislocate…
‘The Lord Loves Even His Enemies’
In a small town on the plains of Central Asia, most people are hostile to the small group of Christians living among them. Though these courageous believers are continually harassed, they faithfully persevere. Two Christian women named Aigul* and Dinara* were meeting regularly to pray for their town. Persecution flared up when Aigul’s mother died.…
Shoebox Gifts Encourage Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia
Well more than 2 million Venezuelans have left their nation over the past few years, many fleeing to neighboring Colombia. They’re leaving because the situation in Venezuela is bleak—with runaway inflation, increasing crime, and critical shortages of food and medicine. As the economy collapses, families simply can’t afford to eat. Some Venezuelans go back and…










