If you see Charlotte in action while serving at a community event at Grace Church, you’d probably notice she seems right at home training team members at a cotton candy station, calling vendors or helping a family at the registration table. She seems to have found her niche, but it wasn’t always that way.
While most people who serve at summer community events with Grace Church are also part of a weekend service team, Charlotte’s work and family schedule made it difficult to commit to a team on a regular basis in the non-Summer months. Still, with a passion for impacting families in the community, she yearned to find a way to do that through Grace Church somehow.
Then she discovered the opportunity to help out at Grace Church community events in the summer. With her open summer schedule, a keen eye for details, and most importantly, a huge passion for people, she knew a community events team would be just the thing for her. So she met with a community events director and decided not just to lend a hand, but to dive in head first.
She put her natural knack for event organizing to work, and started helping the director by taking on preparatory work before the events even took place. She contacted venders, assigned team roles, and ordered materials. And the more community events she helped organize, the more she realized the impact they were having on local families. “An event at no cost to the community that is friendly, fun and safe for families can be a rarity,” says Charlotte, “Being able to show God’s love through a giant blue tuft of cotton candy is the best!”
These days, she has become more and more excited about the details, finding ways to tailor each community event for the needs of its city or town, whether by adding extra support and resources for towns with a higher number of single parents, or by mobilizing a specialized team for communities with groups of people with special needs. “It matters how we serve,” says Charlotte, “If we aren’t fulfilling their needs where they are, then what is all the effort for?”
Charlotte is passionate about it all because she knows there is a very specific purpose: “We think about this months in advance, plan for activities, food and entertainment, and hope that our love comes across so that [people] leave feeling that there is a church that just wants to serve and love the community.”
To join a community event service team at Grace Church, select “My Community” on our app.