Kenansville church joins forces with local schools for campus clean-up

KENANSVILLE — Members of Kenansville Baptist Church joined the Tiger family Saturday morning for a clean-up day at both James Kenan High School and Kenansville Elementary. Principal Michael Holton and his assistant Brian Jones donned power tools to cut back overgrowth and blow debris from parking lots at James Kenan. Teachers, parents, students and employees trimmed bushes and gathered debris for disposal. At Kenansville Elementary, members of Kenansville Baptist Church helped put down pine straw.

Partnerships like this between schools and the community are needed more now than ever.

Amid unprecedented cutbacks to government programs that affect education and low-income families, rural schools require additional support to meet the needs of the families they serve. According to KBC’s Senior Pastor Aaron Smith, “The heartbeat of any community is in its schools; if you want to have an impact in the community, you have to have an impact in the schools.”

Smith, who grew up in Beulaville, became the pastor of KBC five years ago. His vision to help the community through its schools started small.

“When Principal Holton started attending church with us, that opened doors for us to do things at James Kenan, and things just grew from there to help Kenansville Elementary too,” Smith recalled.

“At first, they just let us buy food for the teachers, and that was an easy thing we could do,” Smith said. Then the church gave grocery bags of food to kids in need at Kenansville Elementary and James Kenan.

“We discovered that no matter how many backpacks we gave away, no matter how much food we gave away, it was never enough,” Smith said. The backpack program revealed a real hunger problem in the area. Ladies at a Women’s Conference gave funds to start a food pantry in one of the schools. It served 30 families in its first year of service. Now the church continues its Backpack Buddies program with supplemental food for needy children in both Kenansville Elementary and James Kenan.

Additionally, they launched the Tiger Adoption program, which allows church members to serve as secret prayer partners and gift-givers to teachers at the schools.

“The most important thing we do is pray over our schools,” Smith said. “All summer long, we have been praying that the Lord goes before us and our teachers in the schools and that the Holy Spirit will already be there and working.”

Looking for additional ways to serve, Smith became the coach for the James Kenan’s Girls’ Basketball team. In this role, he heard more firsthand stories of kids working to support their households and struggling.

“So often we have our heads in the sand about what is going on around us, but coaching gives me the opportunity to know and make a difference. There is a weightiness that kids at James Kenan have that I never had to deal with growing up. I just want to help them be successful and leave the world a better place by being a positive role model for them now,” Smith said.

He encourages his church to check the pulse of their effectiveness by how much impact they have in their community.

“If we closed our doors, would our community know if we weren’t here? I’d like to think that our community would miss us if KBC ceased to exist,” Smith said.

Access to schools in Duplin County has improved due to cooperative principals and school boards. Smith noted that such opportunities arise through leadership that fosters community involvement. He credited principals like Holton, Hargrove, and the late Austin Obasohan, who actively encouraged local churches to be involved in the school system.

“Opportunities like this don’t happen without leadership at the highest level opening doors and making it happen,” Smith said.

Despite its modest size of around 100 members, KBC has made a notable impact, demonstrating a strong commitment to its community outreach.

“One of the most important aspects of any ministry is consistency,” Smith said. “Spiritual impact is difficult to measure; we may never see the fruit of all this in our lifetime, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Showing long-term faithfulness in the same direction is what we are after.”