Westminster’s Amani bead project — a partnership to support New Life Homes, a Kenyan care facility for sick and abandoned children — took root more than 20 years ago. The church’s Honest to God winter sermon series on the importance of prayer sparked a renaissance of sorts for Westminster’s Amani beads.
Cindy Higgins, Westminster’s parish associate, was pleased by the enthusiastic response to the Honest to God series. As part of the series, Westminster gave more than 500 prayer bead kits made up of imperfect Amani beads to our community, family, and friends.
“It was partly the timing of offering a sermon series that prepared people’s hearts for prayer,” Cindy says, alluding to the Covid pandemic, racial unrest, and political dissent that plague our community, nation, and world. “It is the collision and collusion of all the challenges we have been facing that we cannot just ‘fix’ that has brought a lot of people to their knees. Literally.”
The brightly colored beads are handcrafted at Kenya’s Kazuri Bead Factory, which donates imperfects to the Amani Children’s Foundation to benefit New Life Homes. Westminster teams make periodic trips to Kenya, bringing home pounds of purchased and donated beads. The church has supported New Life partly through the sale of jewelry and other crafts that church members make from the Amani beads.
Ann Hooker, a driving force behind the Amani beads project for years, reports that although the jewelry making paused with the coming of Covid, the crafters are “gearing back up” to make more products to sell for the children’s foundation. But, she says, it is the imperfection of the prayer beads that makes them so perfect. “We are as imperfect as they are; that’s why we need to pray.”