The Brewster (Wash.) Church hosted the Adventist Community Services (ACS) spring meeting of Upper Columbia Conference's northwest-area ACS federation last month.
Nearly 40 people from five ACS organizations enjoyed a half-day meeting, which included music by several different people and a devotional by local ACS director Fay Roberts.
The conference ACS director, Jim Kilmer, introduced the guest speaker, Larry Mays, pastor of the Sunnyside and Granger (Wash.) churches. Mays showed a video of his experiences helping to set up a large receiving and distribution center for emergency use in North Carolina soon after a heavy hurricane had blasted through that region.
Mays demonstrated and explained step-by-step how to prepare for truckloads of donated supplies to be received, sorted and ready for distribution to those in desperate need after a disaster.
UCC offers federation meetings to bring guest speakers to local ACS groups to help them better learn how to handle disasters and other important functions of their organizations. The speakers travel to each district over the course of one week in the spring and fall each year.
Those attending the northwest-area meeting included volunteers from Brewster, Ephrata, Moses Lake, Omak and East Wenatchee churches.
In Brewster, under the direction of Roberts, the volunteers work weekly, sorting donated clothes and other items. Good, top-quality clothes are packed into Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) boxes, for shipment by ADRA anywhere in the world when a disaster strikes or there are great needs due to poverty. Other items are boxed for the Northwest Center for Retarded People in Yakima, Wash., which gives work to disabled people in that area.
