One local church is lending a hand to the Selma-Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, and showing its love and support for service members at the same time.

Members of the Trinity Lutheran Church’s Lutheran Women’s Missionary League recently participated in the Chamber of Commerce’s Cell Phones for Soldiers project, which helps collect cell phones for members of the U.S. military so they can stay in touch with their family while deployed.

Dianne Harris, vice president of the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League, said the organization and its 24 members were able to collect the phones along with the help of their fellow church members of Trinity Lutheran, located at 1900 Marie Foster Street.

“We noticed that the Selma-Dallas County Chamber of Commerce had this project going, so we started collecting the cell phones,” Harris said, “and the cell phones will be given to the military personnel so that they’ll be able to call home. We did this along with our missionary group, in conjunction with our congregation collecting them.”

The LWML is an international organization, and the group at Trinity Lutheran, which is a part of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod., is also a part of the central Alabama zone that includes six other churches in Ozark, Dothan, Prattville, Enterprise, Montgomery, and Wilcox County which also participated in this mission service project back in April.

Gracie Hollins, president of the LWML, said the project is a good way to show the troops how grateful people are for their many sacrifices.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing to do because we love our military, we love the people that are serving our country, and we want to do anything and everything we can to support them,” Hollins said. “This is just a small token of the commitment they are making to us that we’ll be making back to them, so that we can help them stay in contact with their loved ones and their families back home. This is a tremendous project.”