Over 500 volunteers from the four Nazarene Churches in Mount Vernon joined together for Big Serve, April 20-21.

Big Serve is a Church of the Nazarene community service event with hundreds of churches participating across Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Because Mount Vernon has a unique number of Nazarene Churches, the four churches – First Naz, Lakeholm, New Life, and Shepherd’s House – joined together for this combined service opportunity. 

The Nazarene churches provided over 1,500 volunteer hours of service to assist with nearly 40 projects across the county. Groups served at many community support agencies such as Escape Zone, Salvation Army, Touchpointe, Freedom Center, Habitat for Humanity and Place For Grace through painting, cleaning, maintenance and landscaping.

Many area schools benefited as well, including Twin Oak Elementary, Dan Emmett Elementary, Wiggin Street Elementary, East Elementary, Pleasant Street Elementary, Loudonville City Schools and the Knox County Career Center with cleaning, organizing, painting, and various playground and landscaping projects. Volunteers also served at Ariel Foundation Park, Lamb Park, Wolf Run Park and Kokosing Gap Trail with light maintenance, landscaping and trash pickup. Additional groups picked up trash downtown, offered a “dumpster day” for area residents with four dumpsters donated from Rumpke, assisted local veterans, as well as sang with residents at Brookdale and Danbury senior living facilities. Volunteers also wrote 1,200 appreciation cards for teachers and assembled 480 care packages for local service workers and first responders. 

As a culmination of the weekend, the four churches hosted a worship service at Mount Vernon Nazarene University Sunday evening and took an offering to support the Salvation Army child care building campaign.