63 thoughts on “Reader Submitted Photo: Fundraiser”

  4. Oh definitely if all tracts were made of chocolate they’d be better received, that’s for sure. Especially if it was for free. :mrgreen:

    This reminds me of when the Christian school at our church in Michigan was selling chocolate bars, I forget what they sold them for, since they were always doing fundraisers. They expected church members to buy them. I was coming out of the local Walmart and one of the girls was selling them and I apologized saying I was trying to lose weight so I couldn’t buy any. Her parents were there with her and they gave me the evil eye. 👿 I guess I was supposed to forget the diet and buy them just to support the school? Sorry. 😳 😕 🙁

    1. Because you were on a diet and didn’t buy their candy bar, you’ll be going to hell, and look good doing it!

      1. Your point about tracts with chocolate reminds me of the church that goes to the College World Series in Omaha and hands out free bottled water to the people standing in line for general admission seats every session. The bottles labels have Bible verses on them…no one turns them down!

        Although, having drank that water, I’m reasonably certain no one pays much attention to the labels, either!

        1. That sounds like something my church might do. Unobtrusive, actually doing something to help people, and, hey, you never know, someone might wonder about the nice people handing out water! 🙂

  5. I suppose I’m evil…I bought a lot of them. They taste good…I ignored the packaging.

      1. $1 a piece. They’re not as good as the World’s Finest Chocolate, but they’re still great for indulging in the sin of gluttony.

        They’re made by “The Candy Lady”

  7. What would be awesome would be “bait and switch” “chocolate” bars, kind of like the fake $100 bills. You think it’s a Hershey bar, you unwrap it and behold…a candy-bar-sized thick cardboard tract. 😈

    1. The tagline inside could read, “Dying And Going to Hell Will Be A Way Worse Disappointment.”

        4. So, I’ll get back at them by telling the REAL story of the BJU Anorexia Inquisition. >: P

        5. Ooh! Tell us, tell Sims and me! We are old HAC-ers, so we are not in the know on the BJU garbage, just the garbage that came out of it. 😉

  8. I was that kid outside the grocery store trying to sell this type of chocolate bar (without the verse). The hardest thing was selling them door-to-door in the neighborhood, in the late 80’s, and having people lecture me about asking them to support my Christian school when they already pay taxes to support the public school. I never had an answer for them.

    1. You could have told them…”yeah, well my parents pay taxes to support your public schools, pays for my private school and buys my candy bars”. 😀

  10. I sold my share of World’s Finest Chocolate back in the 70’s for ol’ Fundy High. Ours had coupons for (I think) a sandwich shop on the back of the label. I can’t believe we didn’t “preach” with them. What a missed opportunity!

    1. Although I never understood why fundraisers for the school were okay, but the youth group at the church couldn’t have fundraisers, because that didn’t show proper faith. I still don’t see a difference, by the way.

      I can say no to the chocolates, but have a serious problem saying no to Krispy Kreme fundraising ploys.

      1. I won a trip to the Mall of America by selling Krispy Kremes for my fundy school! Apparently, a lot of ppl can’t say no to them, lol.

  11. OK, so I am not up to speed on the Pensacola realm of fundydom. Is Pensacola Christian Academy different from Pensacola Christian School? Seems I remember hearing that the school associated with PCC is acronymed PCS.

    Not that it really matters, but it did strike me as odd when I opened the page and saw an Indian mascot associated with Pensacola.

    I also love the fact that there is an ad for World’s Finest Chocolate on this page. Nice thought, but I sold way too many of those in the 80s.

  12. My first thought was to wonder if they had to pay more for their verse fundraiser bars than they would have paid for the World’s Finest bars that are usually sold for fundraising. And if they did, isn’t that financially irresponsible? I suppose that would be trumped by the whole “gettin’ out the authorized word!” angle.

      1. They did World’s Finest for the longest time, then in the late 90’s they switch over to See’s chocolate. I loved the See’s toffee bars. Then a few years later they switched to Candy Lady chocolate. When they sold World’s Finest I am pretty sure that it had a verse on it as well as a coupon for Dominos Pizza.

  13. This one doesn’t bother me so much. Not so sure why. I guess I would prefer it to be another version, but this one is fine too.

  14. Most of our church leaders were transplants from Hammond, and they had this idea that New Yorkers were far too sophisticated to buy generic candy bars, so for the bi-annual cheerleaders’ fundraisers, we sold $5 cupcakes from a gourmet bakery. Since I was the only girl who lived in Manhattan, I had to pick them up. Apparently, every woman from church was always too busy to help, so I was expected to manage 10 boxes of cupcakes on my own. But of course, I still got in trouble for accepting when more considerate heathen men on the subway offered assistance. The pastor’s wife would say, “If you HAVE to let them help, at least give them a tract!” 🙄 (I’d always buy a couple of mini cupcakes to give to my helpers, though. I knew they wouldn’t just throw those away!)

    For other fundraisers, we’d sell special blends from McNulty’s, a very well-known tea shop. These were popular with church members because, while the tea and coffee is amazing, everyone wanted to avoid the actual shop on Christopher Street, a formerly very gay area (the Stonewall Inn used to be there). 😯

    1. ” everyone wanted to avoid the actual shop on Christopher Street, a formerly very gay area (the Stonewall Inn used to be there). ”

      Oh, it’s still gay, and the Stonewall Inn is still very much there. I live in the NYC area, and I’ve often wondered how a fundy church would survive in the city. It’s amazing that they could keep the same insular attitude while being in the middle of everything NYC has to offer.

      1. Is it still gay? I thought it had straightened up (pardon the pun) quite a bit. I still live in Manhattan, but I don’t go over that way much (amazing how a person can live in this city and have no idea what’s going on just across town).

        And being fundy in NYC was a very strange experience, though we *were* more liberal than most other IFB churches. Most of the native NYC families were recent converts from Catholicism, so they didn’t expect everyone to go full-on fundy right away, especially since it was still in very heathen Manhattan. It really started to get more conservative once the church relocated to Staten Island (where its school was already located). That’s when they decided that the native NYC girls needed to dress more like the Indiana girls (before, we’d basically gone by a sorta LDS standard of modesty). I didn’t realize quite how cultish it all was until they tried to make me wear culottes! 😯

        1. Yeah, the west Village is still pretty gay. Chelsea has mixed somewhat, and now Hell’s Kitchen is the new Chelsea…

          Yeah, I grew up in an IFB church in Southern California, and because it was in an urban area it was also more “liberal” than other IFB churches…but certainly not by much! My sister had to wear culottes and pretty much all of our staff were graduates from Hyles. Our pastor wanted to be Jack Hyles, so he patterned himself after that.

          It’s interesting to think of that kind of enclave in Manhattan though. So much…temptation around, I’m amazed a congregation could form and thrive.

  15. Hm. I remember seeing these around during my internship there at good ol’ PCA. I bought a ton of them, too. Starving TA needing a pick-me-up.

  16. I remember well the struggle to sell my case or two (mostly to my parents and family) of World’s Finest each year at PCA (then PCS). Of course, there was always the over-achieving boy or girl who sold 100 cases (gasp–is it really possible?). We would stare in wide-eyed amazement while the over-achiever was being rewarded with a brand new bicycle and all the chocolate he could eat for the coming year during the award assembly. Glad those days are over!

    1. Yeah, we always had the overachiever too. Looking back, I think they had quite a lot of “help” selling that chocolate. They seemed to have an extended network of people selling for them, taking it to work, etc.

  17. Selling candy bars… for Jesus! …Seriously? It’s not very hard to imagine Jesus flipping over a few tables here.

  18. The local fundy school used to have the World’s Finest bars with a coupon from a local fast-food joint that would look at you very strangely if they had to fulfill the coupon.

    I just wished that they had sold the caramel bars. it was either plain chocolate or the rice crunch bars.

  19. I can still smell the wrappers on those candy bars. Can anybody else? You’d start to unwrap the bar, hear the sound of the crinkling wrapper, then smell the wrapper itself, then lift that first bite of candy to your mouth and inhale the aroma of that, too, just before popping in that little bit of heaven. Them things were good!

      1. Sigh. And, your excellent prose style has made me have a dreadfully deep chocolate craving RIGHT NOW. Thanks ever so… 😉

    2. LOL, yeah, except I can only remember the World’s Finest version. It was the smell of cardboard and chocolate, LOL! I swear, you could smell the chocolate through the cardboard boxes they came in, and then of course there was the paper wrapper.

  20. i was expecting a verse like “sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb” or perhaps something about how the rod of Aaron “bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds.”

  21. Odd,the fundy churches I went to never had fundraisers, not quite like this. Of course you were expected to buy anything that the traveling preachers or singers dragged along with them. But that wasn’t a fundraiser, that was “supporting their work for the Lord”.

    More often, I heard sermons about how true Christian churches didn’t bother with “bazaars” or selling hot dogs or anything like that, because God would raise the money up, AMEN? Now we’ll pass the offering plate around . . .

    1. My church never had fundraisers not because “God would raise the money up, AMEN? Now we’ll pass the offering plate around . . .” but they actually believed that if they had a yard sale, bazaar, etc. on the church grounds, that it was the equivalent of the “moneychangers in the temple” and that God would send someone to the church to drive them out.

      I’m not kidding

        1. Did they have a “Bookstore” in the lobby? Because one of the churches after HAC that I went to did, and the other found a loophole by locating the “Bookstore” across the parking lot in an old house that the church had purchased (probably for a parsonage until they realized that no Man-o-gid would want to live in such a small house so accessable to the people.) Anyway, it seems like that would be a double standard.

  22. I sold my share of those things. Every year. One year a kid ate a few of his and didn’t have the money to turn in. I felt so sorry for him. He got whipped. 🙁 If I had any money back then I would have paid for his. Who doesn’t understand the power chocolate has over a person’s ability to think clearly. It was only about 5 or 6 dollars… (At the time they were a dollar each) Why is it all my strolls down memory lane end up in a sad place?

  24. Somehow, no matter how many bars I sold, it was never enough to get the prize. Interesting…maybe they were trying to teach me a lesson about fundyschool.

  26. We always sold World’s Finest at our fundy school. However, I’m probably the worst salesman ever. Very shy, and hated pestering people to buy my chocolate. My sister and I would go door-to-door in our neighborhood and it was always so painful. We hardly sold any. It didn’t help that our fundraiser was poorly timed to coincide with every other school’s.

    Needless to say, I never really got good prizes for selling. I was lucky to sell one box. The big prize was a trip to Disneyland (we were in SoCal, so it’s not an exotic destination). If you could sell 4 boxes, you got to go on the school trip.

    Finally, at one point, my mom felt sorry for me as most of my classmates went to Disneyland every year, while the “loser” kids had to come to school and work. The last year we did the chocolate sale, she just outright bought the four boxes for me. I was really grateful for that…however we were stuck with quite a lot of chocolate to eat! I got my trip to Disneyland though and had a good time.

    Two things I hated though, soulwinning and selling candy bars…

  27. Inside six of the candy bars is a golden ticket. The six lucky young people who find the golden tickets are invited to visit Dr. Arlin Horton’s private mansion. After a series of tests of character, the survivor will be given an honorary doctorate. What! You thought you would be the next president of PCC. What were you thinking; this is a fundie institution, not a meritocracy!

  28. I don’t see anything wrong with the verse on the candy bar. (Maybe its because I’m such a chocoholic they could put almost anything on the wrapper and I’d scarcely pay attention? High pressure on kids to sell them, or on people to buy them, on the other hand…

  29. They tried to make us sell those things in school in IL. My buddy drove around with a case of them in his car and we all ate them over a two week period. They were good. Not sure if they ever got paid for. Maybe that’s why our principal hated us…

  30. What a great reformed verse on that wrapper “you will be saved and your house” — funny how they never mentioned reformed theology the whole 4 years I went to PCC…

  31. There are two things I remember about that particular chocolate bar from my time there (besides the fact that it tasted really good 😀 )

    -During fundraiser season, the staff with kids would sometimes sign their kids into the college dorms so that they could sell them door to door. Most of them were pretty polite, but there were a couple who my roommates and I wished we could have kicked out of the building. They were the ones who would tap once on the door (so they could say they had “knocked”) and then barge right in without waiting for an answer, and then loudly “ask” us to buy candy from them without regard to what we were doing at the time (not like college students are busy or anything). Thankfully, most of the kids were polite about it.

    -The best memory is of my awesome supervisor, who would randomly buy everyone in the office one of the chocolate bars each for no reason and with her own money. She was one of those people that made fundy U more bearable. 🙂 😎

  32. I still remember selling chocolate every year, with a bit of help from my longsuffering parents. One year I was commended for selling about $100 worth of chocolate bars (this was back in the ’70s) and refusing to select a prize about it. I didn’t have the heart to say all the available prizes were just plain crummy. 😳
    I still try to buy World’s Finest whenever I see kids selling them. 😎

  33. This post could spawn a companion post on “Worst possible verses to include on a candy bar wrapper.”

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