A couple of churches about 1,500 miles apart are helping poor farmers in countries about a thousand miles apart, and it’s all for Christ and coffee.
When the devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, many groups sent relief teams to the area. One such group was the Woodlands Church, located outside Houston.
Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, received much of that relief and most of the news coverage. But the Woodlands missionaries found that villages in the mountains were also in need of help.
Coffee Missions
“We were there and saw that there was coffee actually lying on the ground, coffee beans lying on the ground, just scattered. And we asked, ‘Tell us about that? What’s going on?,'” Chris Shook, co-pastor and director of missions at Woodlands Church, said. “And they said, ‘Well, no one will buy our coffee. We have no one to sell it to.'”
The problem was the remoteness of the village.
“These are people who were starving and didn’t have enough food or clothing or education for their kids. But yet, they had a means there but no one to buy it,” Shook explained.
“And so we said, ‘Well, it turns out that you’re good at growing coffee; we’re good at drinking coffee,” she said.
Now, these green coffee beans are shipped to Miami then trucked to Houston.
“And then volunteers here will roast and package the coffee, and then our congregation buys it like crazy and drinks it,” Shook said.
With an 18,000-plus church attendance each week, their coffee — formally called Summit but now branded as WC Trading Company coffee — has a built-in market.
“It’s an easy buy,” Shook told CBN News. “We tell people in our congregation, ‘Hey, you’re going to buy coffee anyway, so why not make a choice here, make a difference in this place.”
The church estimates the joint-coffee business is probably helping close to 8,000 Haitian family members.
“We basically give them a fair trade price,” Shook’s husband, Woodlands Senior Pastor Kerry Shook, told CBN News.
“It’s three times more than any other coffee dealers would give them,” he continued. “But then when we sell it here, we take the profits and we go back and do clinics and feeding programs and teaching programs.”
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SOURCE: CBN News
David Mims
