How One Church is Creating Beauty and Restoring Dignity for Local Families
“There are so many people who aren’t going to enter the doors of a church. But Jesus went out to where people lived, where they worked, where they got water. If that’s what He did, then why wouldn’t we do the same?”
This is the passion of Jana Czerwonky on display. Serving as a missions coordinator at Victory Church in Buford, Jana helps mobilize her church to serve — a mission across Victory Church’s campuses and congregations.
“We have partners doing everything from feeding [people who are] homeless to foster care to prison ministry,” shared Davis Burnett, Victory Church’s community transformation pastor.
“We want to be a church that’s part of the community. Jesus didn’t just give people money and say, ‘Hope you have a better life!’ Jesus served. He got down on people’s level. He looked children in the eye. When the woman with the issue of blood reached out and touched him, he turned around to say, ‘Who was that?’ Because He cared enough to ask.”
Each month, Victory Church donates funds to several ministry partners. As Jana, who was fairly new to her role at the time, was reviewing church partners earlier this year, a name stood out.
“I realized [Home of Hope] was less than 3 miles away from our church campus, close to where people who attend our campus live,” she said.
As a former foster parent, Jana loved that a place that originally cared for children only — the Gwinnett Children’s Shelter — now supports both mothers and children, giving children a safe home and mothers an opportunity to change their family’s situation.
Together with Rhilee Johnson, Victory Church’s community transformation coordinator, Jana reached out to see how her church could offer volunteer support.
Home of Hope’s Volunteer Coordinator, Samantha Pryor, replied with a list of five projects the organization needed completed.
At Home of Hope, staff work to make a shelter feel less like a shelter and more like a home. That’s accomplished through a clean, safe and welcoming exterior and interior.
“These projects didn’t have us interacting with any of the residents or the children who lived there,” Jana said. “But they would allow us to create beauty.
“We filled the playgrounds with playground-safe mulch and filled the beautiful garden that [Trillium Garden Club] created with mulch. We also cleaned the gutters on the houses so water could flow through them,” Jana explained.
“Our members were enthused to see that great things were happening just three miles from our campus.”
Jana then coordinated with another Victory Church campus to bring a group to deep clean one of the homes.
“They cleaned the whole house from top to bottom and prayed over it. They were just pumped that new families would be living there,” she said.
With these projects behind them, Jana hopes to continue organizing project days and finding more volunteer opportunities for her church.
“We ask ourselves, ‘How can we go out to the community and be His hands and feet?’ This [kind of work] is what Jesus did,” Jana said.
Rhilee added, “I’m always telling myself, ‘I never know what someone’s going through.’ So the way I show up matters most. Showing up with love and care is something I can choose to do.”
To moms and kids at Home of Hope, showing up doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it looks like playing with kids at Kids Club. Sometimes it looks like bringing a meal.
And sometimes it looks like emphasizing dignity by making sure a family’s temporary home is safe, beautiful and functional.
If you and your group would like to tackle an upcoming project, please reach out to Samantha at [email protected].