Nancy Lewis
First Christian Church has established a four-member team in an effort to expand its partnership with Love Chapel and to better connect members of their congregation to the organization and its needs.
The church serves as one of 24 member churches within the Love Chapel Ecumenical Assembly, and they appoint a member to serve on the Love Chapel Board of Directors. With the retirement of Allen Dillman after 25 years in this position, that led to the appointment of Nancy Lewis to serve as board representative.
“I was on staff at First Christian for 17 years,” Lewis said. I was the Women’s Minister of Connections and Connections Minister there and retired last summer… (I) just kind of was giving it time to see where God may be leading on what I do and I love to do things in the community, I’m a lifelong resident of Columbus and love the mission of Love Chapel, so it was a good fit.”
Lewis said she then appointed Kathy Thompson, Linda Merk and Rosa Deal to work alongside her, as she believes the more people you can get involved in supporting a cause, the more energy you can generate around it and the more people you can get to understand the mission. The purpose of the team, she said, is to partner with Love Chapel through communication within the congregation and to have more people to connect them to what Love Chapel does.
Thompson had recently retired from being the volunteer coordinator at Love Chapel and now coordinates First Christian Church’s Helping Hands Hot Meals service, and both Merk and Deal also volunteer with Love Chapel, Lewis said. She said she brought these three women on board to make sure more than just her knows of what is going on at Love Chapel and their needs.
“It’s kind of a team of ambassadors for Love Chapel within our congregation, and it’s just started,” Lewis said. “We’re just figuring it out, we just got together so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes but my hope is that the more people we have involved, the more entrenched this partnership between Love Chapel and First Christian is.”
Part of Lewis’ goal in creating the team was to better connect Love Chapel to other committees within the church, including their Missions Team and CareBnB. She said this team expands on what it is Dillman had been doing for years and is simply a small piece in a larger puzzle of helping Love Chapel.
Love Chapel Executive Director Kelly Daugherty said he knows each member of the team from their volunteer work or work with the church and believes they are all great fits to serve on this team. He believes that this team will lead to an increase in volunteers from First Christian Church and an increase financially as well.
“I think what they’re trying to do is become much more organized in how they respond to needs in our community and I think the new system will actually do that,” Daugherty said. “First Christian has been a member of Love Chapel for quite some time, but with Nancy taking over as the director, she’s really organized it into the key pieces of being able to be effective, to mobilize their congregation to help with Love Chapel and to make sure that the needs in our community are met. And I think the system that she’s put in place is going to be so much more efficient and more effective in meeting those needs.”
