[Montclair Patch] “It’s amazing,” said the Rev. C. Melissa Hall, surveying the boxes and shopping bags filling the St. James Episcopal Church parish hall. “Look what’s happened. It’s the loaves and the fishes!”
What happened was a massive ingathering of donated items to benefit needy people locally and around the world. The Upper Montclair parish collected and packed 1,100 pairs of gently used shoes, filling 37 boxes; 120 shopping bags of groceries; and two overflowing grocery cartfuls of diapers and baby formula.
Hall, the church’s interim rector, blessed the items during a special harvest-themed worship service on Nov. 23. The shoes – all 994 pounds of them – will be shipped to Soles4Souls, a nonprofit agency that has distributed 22 million pairs of shoes in 127 countries. The groceries were delivered to Montclair’s Human Needs Food Pantry in time for Thanksgiving. And the baby items went to North Porch Women & Infants’ Centers, a program of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark that provides emergency supplies to needy mothers and their infants in northern New Jersey.
The collections, especially for Soles4Souls, represented a community effort.
The Rev. C. Melissa Hall, interim rector of St. James', Upper Montclair, blesses donated shoes, food, baby-care items and
parish monetary pledges during a harvest-themed worship service on November 23. DOMINIQUE GERARD PHOTO
