ST. LOUIS — The Gathering Church, which has locations across the St. Louis area held their Easter Sunday services inside the Stifel Theatre downtown.
It's the one time of the year the church comes all together to celebrate.
According to the lead pastor, Matt Miofsky, 100% of the offering collected during Sunday's service goes back into the community to help kids throughout the city.
Inside the Stifel Theater on Sunday hundreds gathered together in praise and worship.
Between the songs and the sermon, Miofsky said, The Gathering Church's mission goes beyond the theater walls.
"We want to be a church that doesn’t just exist for ourselves, but makes an impact on the city," he said.
Miofsky said his church tries to do that in many ways, but on this Easter Sunday, they were focused on one particular way.
"Easter morning is a time where all of us, regardless of whether we have time during the week or not can be a part of impacting kids in the city of St. Louis," he said.
Every week the church collects an offering to fund church's ministries, but this week 100% of the donations go to the church's literacy project, according to Miofsky.
It's a program the church has been doing for nearly 10 years now.
Literacy Project Director, Beth McClure, said volunteers work with kindergartners and first graders on reading skills in two St. Louis Public Schools and one Normandy Schools Collaborative.
"We've served probably close to 1 thousand students over the years through one-on-one tutoring and giving books to build home libraries," she said.
The schools include Pierre Laclede Junior Career Academy,
Peabody Elementary School and Washington Elementary School.
McClure said they will use the funds to buy supplies and books for the children they work with.
"It’s really special that we are able to do that and boldly just say none of these funds will go towards operating the church, it’ll all go out into the community," she said.
According to Miofsky, over the last decade, they've seen the impact of the project.
"We’ve seen test scores improve overtime because of literacy. We developed a curriculum in conjunction with the school district," he said.
Kimberly Wilson, Pierre Laclede Junior Career Academy Principal, said the literacy project is a huge benefit for her school.
"I think the literacy project really is an awesome benefit to really help our students reach those goals of being lifelong learners and readers and actually having passion for literacy. That’s what I want, my students to have passion for literacy," she said.
Miofsky said while they love to see the positive academic impact the project has inside the schools; it's also helping with relationships outside of the schools.
"It’s important first because the success of our city is the success of our region, we really believe that. It’s important because the church doesn’t want to just exist for itself but exist for the betterment of everyone that lives here, whether they go to church or not. Lastly, because we are so divided, not only geographically but politically and in so many other ways. This is just one small way we can come together across divides to have relationships and that changes everything," he said.
This was the first time in four years The Gathering Church was able to all come together for Easter service because of the pandemic.
You can donate online to the literacy project here.