Grahame Walker is Senior Pastor at Ranui Baptist Church, West Auckland.
It's a tradition at Ranui Baptist to deliver Christmas Hampers to members in our community. We started in 2018 with just twenty-three hampers. Over the years the number has grown. To date, including 2025, we have delivered four hundred and eighteen hampers. This year our aim was to deliver sixty large hampers full of all sorts of Christmas food and goodies.
About three weeks out from assembling and delivering these, we had fundraised about three thousand dollars. Our budget was seven thousand dollars. So, we prayed and to be honest worried a bit. We shouldn't have been concerned as by the end of the next week we had just under ten thousand dollars. We actually had to tell our church to stop giving! That was a first. This allowed us to deliver not sixty but seventy Christmas hampers.
Then of course we needed more volunteer help to make them up. The team took real pleasure in making these up knowing that they were going to people in our community. So, how did we decide who gets a hamper? Our trust (Ranui Baptist Community Care Trust) referred some of the people and families that they cared for. We contacted a number of our local schools who were only too happy to send us the details of those they thought might need a hamper. Finally, our church elders and ministry leaders referred some people too.
I personally helped deliver some hampers, and it was clear how much they were appreciated. We, of course, make sure that they know the church is showing them love at Christmas. There are so many spiritual truths to appreciate at Christmas and giving is always one of them. I was reminded of the famous and blind believer and hymn writer Fanny Crosby who wrote, To God be the glory, great things he hath done, so loved he the world that he gave us his Son, who yielded his life an atonement for sin, and opened the life-gate that all may go in.
Photo credit: Grahame Walker
