Community Christian Church and Fort Scott Church of the Nazarene are partnering this year to produce “Halloween on Horton” on October 31.
“We are partnering to do advertising on social media about both churches doing something the same evening,” Paul Martin, children’s pastor at CCC, said.
“We thought, let’s promote it together,” Jeff Dillow, associate pastor at the Nazarene church, said.
The CCC event is from 5 to 8 p.m., the Nazarene event is from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Halloween evening. Both the churches are located on Horton Street near Fort Scott Community College.
“This is the sixth year we’ve done it on-site,” Dillow said. “A small army gets involved that night.”
Susan Lemon heads up the Nazarene volunteers, Dillow said.
“We want to take the opportunity to let our community know we care about them and their families,” Dillow said.
The Nazarene Church will have their Trunk or Treat event in its parking lot, at the corner of 18th and Horton Streets.
Community Christian Church has been doing a Halloween event since Martin came, in the late 1990s.
At first, they did a trick-or-treat event but when the church went through a fall sermon series in 2008, the event changed, he said.
“We were going through a fall series called 40 Days Of Community by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California,” Martin said. “We wanted to pull more people from the church to serve. We added more food and inflatables.” They changed the name of the event to Fall-O-Ween at this point.
The church staff and volunteers work with Martin each year to plan and facilitate the event.
“It’s an opportunity to love on the community and provide a safe place on Halloween evening,” Martin said.
“We would love to have people be a part of both events,” Dillow said. “You could easily fill a night of trick-or-treating between both.”
Check out the events on Facebook: Fort Scott Nazarene and Community Christian Church.
I’m new in town and I just heard about the Trunk or Treat from an employee at Walmart. I was buying candy and asked if I should expect many children. I was told no because of Trunk and Treat. I still bought candy and hope to see many scary and masked faces at my door but I was a little dismayed that the door-to-door Victorian American tradition of tricks or treats was once again being diverted to another cause. Across the country children are being taken to malls to go shop to shop, they are participating in evening school parties, and now churches are offering an alternative to the excitement of being able to go spooking about at night to neighbors’ houses, delighting the community with costumes and candy, jack-o-lanterns and spiderwebs. We say we don’t want things to change in America, that we want to keep our traditions but this one is quickly dying as it is pulled out of neighborhoods where children need to learn who their neighbors are who are willing to play and celebrate and foster their childhood and experience that community participation starts right on their own block. Halloween is not a church event; it’s a pagan holiday in any case, but since Victorian times has been a neighborhood celebration for children. Visiting two churches on Halloween is not “a night of trick or treating” as Pastor Dillow suggests. Not for more than 100 years anyway.