The Christian Post is reporting that “churches are responding to the recent Nike boycott over its Colin Kaepernick advertising by asking those who want to destroy Nike products to give them to those in need instead.”
Nike recently launched a campaign featuring Kaepernick, a football player who in 2016 became a national figure when he choose to kneel on one knee rather than stand while the national anthem was being played before the start of NFL games. Kaepernick said the point was to portest racial injustice.
Reporter Samuel Smith notes that a church in Oklahoma and another in Georgia are asking those who want to burn Nike products as a protest donate items to the poor instead.
Jessica Joslin, a member of Claremore Restoration Church in Claremore, Oklahoma, saw the controversy over Nike as an opportunity to promote the church's recently launched Matthew 25:35 charity mission. Joslin posted on the mission's Facebook page Monday that the church will take any unwanted Nike clothes and provide them to the homeless population in downtown Tulsa.
"When I saw that people were throwing things away, burning, destroying all the Nike products over the political issue, I just posted and asked people to give it to us because we can give them to people who really are in need," Joslin told The Christian Post.
J. D. Sumner, a member of First Presbyterian Church in Albany, Georgia, took to his Facebook page to issue a plea for donations.
"I'll be happy to donate everyone's #Nike stuff to our homeless population if you feel some kind of way. No need to burn it. #BePositive," he wrote in a Facebook post.
Sumner told a local ABC News affiliate that burning or destroying Nike products is a waste of products that can help the needy.
"If you feel so moved in some kind of way that you want to get rid of your stuff rather than burn it, which is not going to benefit anybody, I got with some of our church people here and I was like, 'why not do something positive?'" Sumner said.