Blood Drive Evangelism

This week the pastoral staff met for our annual retreat in Cape May. It's a wonderful place to be, particularly when the weather is nice, which it was for our stay. We always work hard at this retreat, brainstorming, discussing goals and dreams and problems we need to confront. This year we discussed, among other things, how we could reach out to Center City more effectively.

When we returned home on Tuesday afternoon, the Red Cross Blood Drive at the church was in full swing. I maintain that this is one of the most effective outreaches that we do, inviting neighborhood people into the church to donate blood for the good of the community. Often some of our people have the opportunity to share our faith with our neighbors. "The Christian faith is all about blood", said one of our greeters. This year, Janice Roberts, who heads up the church blood drive, was concerned that so few of our people signed up to donate. The Red Cross had raised our goal to 60 units of blood, and Janice was certain that we needed to have 90 people signed up to get that much. Actually only about 35 Tenth Church people signed up, which left a large gap. Always the conscientious one, Janice went out to the sidewalk at 17th and Spruce and stopped passers-by and asked them to come in and donate blood. She certainly is effective! Here is her report.


Once again we have an answer to prayer! I was so unprepared in terms of the goal that all I could do was pray!

62 were signed up as of the start of the drive. I knew, and the Red Cross knew, that I needed 90 signed up to get our goal of 60 productive units.

Early in the drive it was clear that the street response on Spruce was amazing. So many people volunteered that I could hardly believe it. At 3:45 our Red Cross coordinator came out to ask that I halt the street effort because they couldn't handle the crowd! Wow!

By 4:30 the Head Nurse told me we were on our way to overachieving. Great news and we all knew that the signup numbers were now past speculation.

In the end we had 72 people "presenting;" 6 deferrals, (very low) and only 1 rejected unit of blood. In all we collected 70 productive pints of blood against our goal of 60. ( +17%!) We were also fortunate that the MCS machine gave us an extra 8 units