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Story | Celebration Church

“Our Faith in Action Took Us All Over Georgia!”

With 100% percent participation, Celebration Church was able to complete 12 projects that day...

Celebration Church in Hoschton, Georgia, isn’t a mega-church. On any given Sunday, attendance averages 200. Yet when the leadership of the church, led by Pastor Mike Day, asked the people to step up to serve, they did: all 200 of them.

“Everyone was involved,” explained Suzanne Eason, Faith in Action coordinator. “With full participation, we were able to complete 12 projects.”

Many of the projects they chose were a result of ongoing ministry and service through various area organizations.

One such ministry is Friends of Refugees, located in nearby Clarkston, home to hundreds of refugees and refugee families from all over the world. The ministry distributes food and clothing to these refugees, many of whom do not speak English or know anyone in the U.S. A team from Celebration took groceries they’d collected in a food drive to families they’d previously “adopted” and visited with them, in some cases sharing a meal from the family’s native country.

At a nearby children’s shelter, another team cleaned up the soccer field and basketball court and revitalized other recreation areas. At another local children’s home that was about to begin building a new meeting area, they cleared the grounds before construction began.

Other groups ministered to the elderly in various ways: they visited a nearby nursing home, holding worship services and then staying afterwards to visit with residents; they worked through a food pantry who gave them the names of 20 local seniors, to whom they brought bags of groceries. “Several individual families did this,” Suzanne explained. “They bought the groceries, delivered them, stayed and visited awhile, and have continued to follow up with these seniors.”

Another group drove to a specific street corner in Atlanta where they knew homeless people would pass by, and they handed out biscuits and coffee that Sunday morning. Meanwhile, other teams handed out water bottles, Gatorade and snacks to people in a local Hoschton park and to kids in a nearby skate park. “We just handed these out, no strings attached. We didn’t try to corner people, but we answered their questions about our church and why we were doing this,” she recalled.

A local mobile home park with several hundred homes also has a church inside the park that has struggled for some time. One Celebration team led worship service that Sunday morning, singing, preaching, leading youth and children’s activities, and afterward hosting a cookout for everyone that lived there.

Tool belts and work boots were used at two projects: My Sister’s Place, a shelter for abused women, where workers did clean-up, painting and other handyman tasks; and, through the church’s Neighbor in Need ministry, they worked at three homes that needed basic maintenance and yard work.

“Response from the community – and from our people – was overwhelming,” Suzanne said. “We kept hearing, ‘Can we do this again?’ ‘Can we do this once a quarter?’ ‘How soon can we do this again?’ In many cases, this has really changed people’s views of what a church should be.”

Celebration Church is planning another Faith in Action Day in the spring, she said. Meanwhile, several members are continuing to follow up with the people they served in the project.

“One of our goals in organizing a Faith in Action Day was to provide opportunities for not just one day of service – but to motivate our people to be ‘on mission’ as a way of life,” she explained. “I think we succeeded!”