When does a church become a breakfast café?
When it’s raising money for an important community project, of course.
This Sunday (June 23), Oceanview Community Church is hosting Eggs Benefit 2 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the church at 381 Davis Rd.
A group of individual volunteers from the community and volunteers from the Kinsmen Club and Oceanview Community Church will be lending a hand during the day to serve omelets with your choice of toppings, toast and coffee supplied by Tim Hortons. Twenty celebrity chefs — including Mayor Rob Hutchins, Fire Chief Ray Delcourt, Chronicle publisher Teresa McKinley, Ladysmith Primary School principal Parmjit Parmar and many others — will be cooking the omelets, which will be offered by donation.
All money raised at Eggs Benefit 2 will go toward replacing the Holland Creek Trail walking bridge. The bridge is 23 years old, and because it was built with untreated wood, it has become necessary to replace it, explained Oceanview Pastor Darin Phillips.
“You can expect to have a great breakfast, enjoy some live background music, put your kids in the fantastic kids area and feel good about making a donation to a great cause where every single penny goes directly to the replacement of the walking bridge,” said Phillips.
The first Eggs Benefit was two years ago, and it raised about $4,500 for the Brown Drive Kin Park. The idea came about when Jim, the church’s custodian, was working for Island Eggs, and Cheryl Guay, the company’s director of operations, said they were looking for a charity to support in the Ladysmith-Chemainus area. He told her that Oceanview was raising money to help build the park, and she thought it was a great idea and offered to donate eggs.
Unsure how eggs could help, he brought the idea back to Oceanview Community Church.
“Jim brought it to our leadership team, we prayed about it, discussed it and thought ‘why don’t we turn our church into a breakfast café?’” said Phillips.
Mayor Rob Hutchins approached Phillips in November and asked if Oceanview would be interested in doing another Eggs Benefit fundraiser because the Holland Creek Trail walking bridge needs to be replaced.
“I guess when they originally built it, it’s all untreated logs, and over top of the creek, it’s a wet environment and it speeds up rotting,” said Phillips.
Howie Davis is donating all the steel and structure for the new walking bridge, as well as the heavy machinery to move it into place and all the work.
“He’s doing the bulk of the donation, and Eggs Benefit will hopefully pay for the decking material, rails and all the surface, basically,” explained Phillips. “If we can raise $4,500 or $5,000, we’ll be able to pay for it all.”
Phillips says the first Eggs Benefit was a big success, which has made recruiting for this year’s event easy.
“The first one went really well, and everyone loved it,” he said. “It’s been really amazing getting volunteers. I’ve had to do no arm twisting. People say ‘fantastic; I had so much fun last time.’ We had a lot of comments at the last one that people just liked the environment of it. You have eight or nine people chatting around a table, music playing.”