A Baptist missions organization has received a $1 million donation from a Virginia mega-church, boosting its efforts to help girls in Africa.

Lott Carey, a predominantly Black organization long known as the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, has traditionally had fundraisers as part of its annual gathering, which this year occurred Aug. 12 through 15 in Memphis, Tenn.

The Rev. Gina Stewart, Lott Carey president, had announced beforehand she hoped to raise $1 million on the last night of the convention. But Alfred Street Baptist Church, a historic Black church in Alexandria, decided to raise money ahead of that occasion.

Its pastor, the Rev. Howard-John Wesley, told Religion News Service he learned during a church trip to Ghana arranged by the Rev. Emmett Dunn, Lott Carey’s executive secretary-treasurer, about the plight of girls caught up in the Trokosi tradition in that country: 

Girls are turned over to priests at religious shrines for forced labor and ritual, sexual servitude as payment for the sins of their relatives. Although Ghana criminalized forced labor in 1998, Trokosi priests have continued to practice their servitude system “unchallenged” by law enforcement, according to child rights experts.

“It was our trip to Ghana that exposed us to the slave trade industry that you wouldn’t believe still existed in 2024,” Wesley said. “We really felt like God gave us an opportunity to make a difference in freeing some of these young ladies.”

The money will be used to support the ministry of the Ghana Baptist Convention, one of the largest denominations in Ghana, to rescue young girls whose families have sold them into the long-established system opposed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

The ministry works to rehabilitate the girls, teaching them at a vocational training center that aims to give them skills to allow them to reintegrate into society.

The $1 million donation is rare for Lott Carey, which has an operational budget of $2.5 million. It received an equal sum from Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, N.J., for relief efforts related to Hurricane Katrina.

The donation sum also is not the first for Alfred Street, which gave $1 million to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2015 and donated the same amount to Jackson State University, a historically Black institution in Mississippi, to help students and officials as they dealt with a crisis in 2022 after high levels of lead were found in its water.

Lott Carey, named for a former slave who gained his freedom and was a pioneer missionary in Africa, was founded in 1897.

The infusion of money to support the girls in Africa comes as Stewart concludes her historic leadership of the organization. In 2021, she became its first woman president, marking the first time a Black Baptist organization had chosen a female leader. She has been by Dr. Jesse T. Williams Jr., senior pastor of Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem.