Creating a Culture of Service

We recently got the opportunity to sit down with Summit Governing Board member, Rene Vazquez, and talk about the history of niceSERVE. Rene has been attending Summit for almost 20 years. He was on staff for six of those, but even more importantly, for the sake of this blog post, he played an instrumental role in starting our church’s most notable annual outreach event, niceSERVE!

In those early days, Founding Pastor John Parker and the rest of the Summit Staff team had a dream of becoming a church known for serving the community. Rene ended up coming on to coordinate all the projects for those first couple of niceSERVE events and more. He was instrumental in getting niceSERVE off the ground, but he’d soon see there was a lot Summit had to learn when it came to service.

You see, Summit’s staff and leadership were much younger back in 2003. It was in those days that niceSERVE got its name—according to Rene, our now Worship Pastor, Andy Simonds, came up with it. Volleyball was a popular pastime that often got played at appreciation events etc. and “Nice serve!” was said with great frequency. It just slotted right in and became part of the culture. Like the name, wearing matching t-shirts for every niceSERVE became a thing as well. We’ve now had over 45 of these events, and there have been A LOT of t-shirts.

As Rene and the team served the community through these events, they began to realize their projects didn’t always turn out as they hoped.

“We would send volunteers to paint houses, and about 50% of the time they (our volunteers) would do a terrible job. I mean, terrible.” Rene said. “So, we learned, from that point on, we're going to put professional or semi-professional painters as project leaders for every painting job, and we're going to have a backup professional painter that will go to every job site and clean up, making sure everything looks great after the event day.”

It was these types of lessons that made niceSERVE more robust. It actually made it a name that started to get recognized around town—niceSERVE was becoming famous! Rene largely attributes this to Summit being an early adopter of the research and curriculum Phil Hissom put together. In 2005, Phil started a research project commissioned by Central Florida that assessed how communities met the human need. The project birthed a model, an urban institute, and a course.

This course based on Phil Hissom’s research is still used at Summit today, and has greatly inspired the way we go about service as a church. You may have even heard of this curriculum, it’s called “Serving with Dignity”, and Summit has hosted several iterations of this class over the years. (If you’re reading this and want your connect group to go through it, we can make that happen!)

Anyway, Rene had this great example of how Phil’s research affected leader training for niceSERVE in those early days. He would tell his leaders to, “Imagine there's a little lady you're helping, and while your team is out working, she's busy in her kitchen making brownies for the team. She comes out a couple of hours later with fresh brownies. What's your response? Inevitably someone would say, ‘Well, we'd probably say, no, no, no. Keep your brownies.’ You know, in our minds we're thinking we have so much. They have so little. How could I ever take this little old lady's brownies? Well, that's what we don't want to do. Your instruction is to take the brownie. Eat the brownie. Enjoy the brownie! That's the reason why it's meaningful! Jesus actually tells us that we’re more blessed to give than to receive. So, if we allow other people the opportunity to give, we actually empower them to be a part of the service, to feel their own worth in the context of this experience, and to join in the service, not just be relegated to being a recipient of it.”

As a result of Rene’s hard work as well as the many others who have filled his shoes since, coordinating projects and organizing the special events, we have a 20-year legacy of serving hurricane victims, sending care packages to our partners in Africa, painting locals homes and schools, and even projects that encouraged our fellow believers and Summit attendees in the 33rd Street Jail.

“…As soon as that shirt was put on, it was kind of like a uniform. A transformation occurred from someone who had been maybe relegated to need and sharing their need with others, almost exclusively, to now feeling their own worth and being empowered to serve a community. That was a powerful transformation.”

As Rene continued reminiscing, he said, “One of the coolest expressions of niceServe was when a group of homeless individuals put on niceSERVE shirts, and went out and served alongside the masses. That changed things, at least in my mind. It was interesting to watch. As soon as that shirt was put on, it was kind of like a uniform. A transformation occurred from someone who had been maybe relegated to need and sharing their need with others, almost exclusively, to now feeling their own worth and being empowered to serve a community. That was a powerful transformation.”

Anyone who has been around these events for some time has likely seen how the vision behind it really can empower us. It helps us see how easy it can be to serve, not just personally, but collectively. In that way, niceSERVE has the ability to show us another vantage point of what it means to follow Jesus.

Rene’s closing words might sum it up best, “I think of it almost as a spiritual discipline. You're getting out there. You're putting your body in the right place. You're showing up when you're needed … You're doing it within the context of community. We’re there being reminded again that this is a practice of ours, as a community, making a point to emphasize the need to not only be hearers of the word but doers also.”

niceSERVE has been a very important fixture in the life of our church for almost 20 years, and we hope we continue to approach service with the same passion and creativity that Rene and his team did for years and years to come. Join us on October 22nd as we meet up in the Summit parking lot once again, wearing our green shirts, to go out and serve with our community.