They might have given the shirts off their backs, if he'd asked. Instead, Pastor Jack Perry of South Valley Community Church asked for shoes.

Perry had heard that the New Orleans evacuees at Camp Williams were in need of men's shoes, size 10 and up. So last Sunday the pastor challenged the men in his congregation to take off their shoes and put them in a box at the front of the church.

"They could have gone home and thought about it and maybe brought back a different pair," Perry says. "I thought it was a bigger challenge to do it then and there."

By the end of the 11 a.m. service, 28 pairs of shoes had been donated. That meant 27 men (Perry donated two pairs) who then had to walk to the parking lot in their stocking feet, thinking about sacrifice and people in need.

Church member Harry Holder of West Jordan donated the loafers he had bought the week before, the very pair that, earlier that morning, he looked at and thought, "These are my favorite shoes."

Donating those shoes was "a really unique opportunity," says Holder. "Here these people had lost everything." The least he could do, he says, was to give them the shoes off his feet.