Emily, her husband Jay, and their son Vee began visiting CCC last Fall. It soon became evident that she is a great fit for our new Director of Assimilation and Church Life position, so she started on March 1. Emily will help build relationships so people can find their place in the life of the church. She will enable all of us to play our part in building a warm and welcoming church community that fosters connecting the riches of Christ to the realities of people’s lives.
Q. What brought you and your family to Chapel Hill and to CCC?
Our family recently relocated to the Chapel Hill area so that Jay could pursue a 3-year residency in Orthodontics at UNC. Prior to moving to NC, we spent 4 years living in Germany while Jay served as a dentist at Ramstein Air Base. Jay still serves as an Air Force Reservist at Seymour Johnson Air Base. As soon as we moved to Chapel Hill, we began looking for a church with strong community and sound teaching. We particularly loved how welcoming the members of CCC were to us and how genuinely they seemed to engage with one another!
Q. Tell us a bit about how you came to know Jesus.
I was baptized as a covenant child and raised in a believing home among a rich community of professing believers who, together, faithfully raised me in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. At a very early age I was presented with the gospel through a play depicting Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and shortly afterwards asked God to rule in my heart as my Lord and Savior. I truly don’t remember a day when I didn’t know the Lord. Throughout my life, He has graciously provided strong, biblical teaching and a healthy, local body to consistently shepherd me in my spiritual growth.
Q. I know you’ve worked a lot with volunteers. Tell us some about that.
I have spent considerable time working on both sides of volunteer efforts. Since middle school, I have been involved in volunteer roles in my local church - working with nursery and children’s ministries, youth ministries, local and global missions teams, worship teams, communications teams, and most recently, the women’s ministry team. I have also formally worked as program director for a company that led fundraising for elementary schools. In that role, I primarily coordinated and cooperated with the parent volunteer base (PTA, PTO, etc.) so I have a unique perspective on the benefits and challenges of working with volunteers who are committed to an organization but also have busy lives caring for their families and engaging in their careers.
Q. At its heart, your job will be “to help each person at CCC, from first-timer to old-timer, to be meaningfully connected.” What excites you about that?
I am passionate about the church being the truest expression of community. What other group of people has the depth of commonality and longevity of relationship that believers do? Brothers and sisters, as co-heirs in Christ, can really dig into the nitty gritty of life alongside one another because we share in the hope of eternity. But, in order to cultivate these authentic and vulnerable friendships, we have to be proximate to each other. That’s what I am excited to do – to create opportunities for believers to gather together for the sake of engaging more richly in one another’s lives and edifying one another for the sake of the Gospel and the Kingdom.
Q. How can we be praying for you as you step into this new role?
Practically, I would love your prayers for good recall. A key element to this job is listening well and remembering what people have told me so that I can help them connect with other folks in the church. Since having a baby, my memory just isn’t what it used to be.
Additionally, pray that I am posturing myself to rely on the Lord and not on my own strength or knowledge to perform in this role. I want to be sensitive to His leading as I work to orchestrate opportunities for our local body to connect with one another and to be inviting towards others.
As a family, Jay and I would also particularly appreciate your prayers for us as we learn how to steward Vee faithfully and lovingly. And, most importantly, we covet prayers for the Lord to work swiftly in Vee’s heart and reveal his need for a Savior at an early age.
