The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
Volunteers from the Point Community Church of North Brunswick spent three days of their summer fixing up the garden at Pine Grove Manor School on Highland Avenue.
The work was seen by church leaders as a way of introducing themselves to the community in advance of them founding a new congregation in Somerset.
The work included clearing old vegetation, turning over the flower beds and constructing a new fence, according to a Board of Education resolution thanking the volunteers for their work.
“The school’s staff, parents and students will be especially appreciative once they return from summer vacation,” schools Superintendent Edward Seto said at the school board’s August meeting.
Audra Wood, a science teacher at the school, also thanked the group.
“They ripped out 50 (fence) poles, re-dug the holes, installed new poles and cemented them in,” she said. “They got the whole project done in three days.”
Wood said the volunteers were “good people who want to help.”
The church volunteers saw their effort as the embodiment of their “core value,” according to one of the church’s pastors.
“We’re your neighborhood church,” Pastor Thomas Wong said in an email.
“We believe a local church should be fully engaged with the community in which it resides,” he wrote. “So as we prepare to start a new congregation in Somerset, the natural question is ‘How can we be a blessing to this community?'”
The church was alerted to the school’s need in May by Wood, Wong said.
During the week of Aug. 19, about a dozen church and youth group members started the work, the bulk of which was to erect a new cyclone fence around the garden’s perimeter.
When they were done, the church hosted a block party for the neighborhood at the church, Wong said.
The church will begin holding services at the Villagers Theatre, DeMott Lane, in January, he said.
