A church in Ohio recently donated 20,000 pounds of food to local families in need this Thanksgiving holiday. Rust City Church, based in Niles, Ohio, undertook the mission to truly demonstrate what it means to love your neighbor, ensuring those struggling to make ends meet would not go hungry.
Volunteers delivered the food on Wednesday during an event called “Give Back Before You Kick Back,” illustrating the call as Christians to abandon comfort to help the poor and those in need. In addition to food, the church was able to dispense necessities such as diapers and other essentials.
Pastor Karl Wendel explained to the Christians Post that his congregation was able to collect such vast quantities of food to distribute through “a combination of generous donations from our congregation, partnerships with local businesses, and our collaboration with Second Harvest Food Bank, whose support has been instrumental in helping us reach this milestone.”
While the church has engaged in the giving back event each year, Wendel noted that there has been an increased in need this year. He explained that “the scale has grown significantly, reflecting our church’s deepened commitment to serving the community and addressing food insecurity.”
“We hope to convey God’s love and care through this outreach, reminding people they are seen, valued, and not alone,” Wendel added. “This is about more than meeting physical needs — it’s about fostering hope and connection.”
The Christian Tribune reported on other evangelical efforts in Ohio, where hundreds gather to pass out Bibles and engage in Baptisms in an event organized by members of the Ohio State football team. Reportedly, over 10,000 Bibles were passed out to the surrounding community.
“These Ohio State football players just did something on campus that I have never seen before, a free event put on by some of the Buckeye’s biggest stars collected 1000s from the Ohio State community and grew even more throughout the night,” a narrator said in a mashup of the event posted on TikTok.
“It was all about sharing their faith in Jesus, which started with everybody coming together to worship, and the energy was amazing. Each of the players went up to share their stories of how their relationship with Jesus has changed their lives and how much God loves each and every person in the crowd,” he added highlighting the power of communally worshipping God.
“Courageous attendees took a leap of faith to come up front and pray a prayer to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. And it only gets better, late into the night, with everyone taking notice, person after person made the decision to get baptized, which is a public profession of their faith, and lives are going to be changed forever,” the narrator concluded.
Commentator Nick Adams reacted to the powerful video writing, “WOW: Ohio State football players hand out 10,000 bibles, lead thousands of students to Christ!” Many users commented underneath the video expressing how delightful it is to see such evangelical action taking place on America’s college campuses.
Featured image credit: Pru.mitchell, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvest_Festival_altar.jpg