How Churches Around The World Are Showing Outrageous Love To Their Neighbours [0:00-5:05]

Join us for a quick chat, director, also the founder and visionary behind the big gift, which is happening this Saturday, by the way, June 6. It's Kathy Blakely. Kathy, it's been far too long since we've chatted. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me. Thank you. It occurs to me that there will be people listening to this interview, watching this interview that have never even heard of the big gift. So let's begin right there. As the person who first envisioned the big gift, what is it from your perspective? Yes, from my perspective. So I was on staff at a local church in 2009, but we'll paint it costs, we'll church actually in Ottawa. And we had just finished 40 days of community by Rick Warren as a congregation. We had done it together. And so we were challenged to do something in our community that would reach everyone around the church. So we weren't trying to reach the whole city, just our church community, and to just show them that we cared about them, loved them. Anyway, I woke up with an idea one morning of a free giveaway free drive sale. And so I was like, you know what, I think this is it. I think that this could work because also we didn't want it to cost the church a lot of money. And you know, we wanted everybody to be able to be involved, whether they were younger old. And so from there, it just that day, we started planning it. I think it was like right after Christmas, maybe like February, we started planning it and had it the first Saturday, June, and that was 2009. And that day grew into just one of the craziest days. And I was so mind blown of what happened that day. There were so many miracles that happened. People in our church started saying, hey, I can do free haircuts, or I can give free back that we didn't have phones. So we can do free photos for families, you know, we did a free barbecue, which became the only thing that actually cost us money. Everything else was just like, and the church was jam packed with stuff. We could not believe how much stuff came in. So let's fast forward then like we did that. And then I was transferred into another church. And so for a long time, I had this dream of doing it citywide. Why couldn't all churches of all denominations give away things in their parking lot or their church buildings for free on the same day? And so Richard Long from One Way Ministries, he called me, and this was 2014-15, and he said, I hear you have a dream, and I knew right away what he was talking about. And so that's kind of how it started. And so the whole idea of the big gift is that all churches of all denominations that believe in the Bible will give away things in their parking lot, in their buildings. Everything has to be for free. Doesn't necessarily have to be like a free grifesail as long as everything's free. So the small churches can do it, the big churches can do it. We've got examples of both that just blow my mind of what people come up with to give away. And so we just really see that it works. It works to reach your community with the love of Jesus. People cannot believe it's free. Yeah. So true. Right? And the big gift has assaturated, just saturated the Ottawa area, and it's moved into other provinces and also other countries. There's a church this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo that's involved. Tell us a little of the backstory there. Well, I can tell you like, so that was a couple in church here in Ottawa. They have some roots in that area, the wife does, and so she really felt such, she really felt conviction to take it to her home country, right? And so we started working with them, meeting with them, her and her husband. And so just today, just this morning, I got the whole document of what they're doing in that church. It's one church. Honestly, Brock, it would blow your mind. It was all in French, so then of course, I translated chat and GPT, and I was like, you