Sand Creek Chapel Missionary Baptist Church to award scholarships on Sunday

Sand Creek Chapel Missionary Baptist Church will be presenting its memorial scholarships to this year’s recipients during its service on Sunday.

The ideal recipients of these particular scholarships are graduating high school seniors who are members of Sand Creek Chapel Missionary Baptist Church with the requirements being to show selflessness in the church.

“We try to bestow a $500 scholarship per semester for one school year for them to utilize and help them with some of their college expenses, and all we ask them is to be as faithful as they can be,” said Memorial Scholarship Program Member Orlando Trainer. “After they do the 12 years of grade school and then they decide to go on to college, we hope to give them a little encouragement and support financially.”

The program started off as a Memorial Day pro

gram to pay tribute to individuals who gave their lives while fighting for our country.

Around 2005, the Memorial Day program was restructured into the memorial scholarship program with the collected funds going into the church’s scholarship funds.

“We still pay honor to deceased individuals who laid down their lives for our country, but then we take the proceeds and

instead of putting them into the church’s general funds, we put them towards our scholarship funds,” said Trainer. “The fund has grown; now I think in the past, we’ve had one person win a scholarship one year, and there was a year where we didn’t have anybody win from our church, but we did have a list of community members. So, what we did was we made a list of people we knew who were out in the community, doing good things, and we gave them a little donation. Not just a whole lot, but just enough to let them know that we were thinking about them and to encourage them to continue being a positive light in the community.”

Trainer’s sister, Marilyn, has been coordinating the scholarship program with her brother for 25 years, and her intentions with the scholarships are to spread the love of God.

“I thank God for the opportunity to do this program which started 25 years ago,” she said. “It’s all about him and he’s the one who has made this all possible.”

The winner(s) of this year’s 25th annual Memorial Scholarship Program at Sand Creek Chapel Missionary Baptist Church will be announced at the church during its morning service this coming Sunday.