Idlewild Baptist Church, a megachurch in Florida, has paid off $38,000 in school lunch debt to Hillsborough County Public Schools and Paso County Schools.
According to Yerusha Bunag, the director of local missions at the church, the blessing was part of a greater movement to be involved in the local schools.
In a statement to The Christian Post, Bunag said, “Our church has been very invested in helping public schools in our community. Before COVID, we were involved in tutoring, mentoring, campus rejuvenation, student supplies, teacher appreciation events, etc.”
This isn’t the first time the church stepped up to live out the Bible’s call to help the poor. When the pandemic first started, the church began giving parents groceries as they picked up their children’s lunches. However, this was just a beginning step.
The church wanted to find out how much they could do. “After talking to the school districts in the two counties where our church is sandwiched between, we found out that, though lunches are being funded this year, the debt that students owed to the schools was very high,” Bunag explained.
It was after these talks that the church decided to pay off as much of the debt as they could. According to Bunag, the church wanted to “be a witness” for Christ and remind the community that “God loves them; that in God, all debts are paid. So that’s what we did. We paid the debt for juniors and seniors at Hillsborough County and the debt for all students at Pasco County.”
“We want to be a good testimony of what real love is,” Bunag told The Christian Post. “We want our community to be curious about what God’s love is. We want them to be attracted by our good works so that they will be open to listening to the Gospel.”
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Monkey Business Images
John Paluska has been a contributor for Christian Headlines since 2016 and is the founder of The Daily Fodder, a news outlet he relaunched in 2019 as a response to the constant distribution of fake news.