For Buck Brown, the road between Leatherwood Baptist Church in Anniston and the Fellowship of American Indians Mission in Chickasha, Oklahoma, is well-worn. Since 1999 he’s gone annually, sometimes multiple times a year.
And every December he makes the trip loaded down with more than 100 bags packed with Christmas presents for children in the Chickasha community.
Perfect partners
It’s a partnership that started with a vision and a phone call.
“My husband received a call from Buck Brown, and [Brown] shared that he had a vision that he was supposed to help [a Native American] church,” said Tewanna Edwards, whose late husband, John, was FAIM’s pastor at the time. “He said, ‘This is where the Lord is leading me, and I wondered if there was anything I could do at your church to help, whether it’s repairs or anything else.’
“My husband said yes, and he said, ‘When could I come?’ My husband said, ‘You can come anytime you want to come.’”
Brown came the next week, and Edwards said she and John didn’t realize at the time that he had never flown in an airplane or been away from his family for long.
“He was just obeying what God told him to do,” she said.
When Brown got there, he realized the couple did need help.
The area where they served was coping with a lot of issues. The church had no paid staff. Five adults were attempting to keep a ministry going that was primarily aimed at reaching children. Edwards remembered seeing tears in Brown’s eyes when she asked what he’d noticed about the people in the area.
He said, “I just see that they feel there’s no hope.”
So in the coming months and years, Brown found ways he could plug in, like supporting the church financially on a monthly basis and returning with teams from Leatherwood Baptist to lead Vacation Bible School and revivals and help with renovation projects at FAIM.
And one day a children’s ministry leader at Leatherwood asked, “If we do something similar to the Samaritan’s Purse shoeboxes for the kids in Oklahoma, will you carry it out there?”
“We’ve been going ever since,” Brown said.
‘A blessing’
The people of Leatherwood collect and assemble the bags, and Brown and others deliver them. They’re given out to families in Chickasha on the Sunday before Christmas.
“We’re hugged to death that Sunday,” he said.
Edwards noted Brown and the other volunteers from Leatherwood have “just been a blessing.”
She said they’ve seen lives changed, and they’ve seen the children impact their parents as their faith has grown.
“[The volunteers from Leatherwood] just don’t know how many lives they touched, and to this day, we still have kids that come back and tell us how much that church meant to them with the giving and the love and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ,” Edwards said, “feeding them something when they were hungry, learning about fruit because they’d never eaten fruit before … They’ll never know how much they gave to that community, because that was our ministry — the children.”
Joe Lucero, who currently serves as pastor at FAIM, agreed.
“We’ve been able to reach out to a lot of unchurched families,” he said. “I know the community really has been blessed and always expressed their gratitude toward us and Brother Buck for what he has done.”
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