Tea in the Parking Lot

We are all familiar with how COVID-19 has impacted our lives. Coffee Break Director, Jonae, in Merced, CA shares how her team thought outside the box to reach their community.

"For almost 20 years, we have done a Spring Tea at Coffee Break. We use it as an outreach opportunity and we encourage our members to invite their friends. We also introduce a new study for the spring and encourage these new ladies to join us. The last few years we have had over 300 women attend!

We knew we could not do that this year because of the COVID-19 restrictions, so that is how we came up with doing a parking lot tea party! We had done a couple of other parking lot events that had gone well, so we decided to build on that type of venue. To market the event, we sent out post cards to our mailing list. We told women to bring a tea cup and a thermos of hot water and that we would provide the rest.

Our theme was a “Royal-Tea”. We knew our new study would be on prayer, and we were working with the idea of how prayer is like having an audience with the King. I was the speaker for the event and I talked about how we are daughters of the most high King and that we have the privilege of having an audience with the King whenever we want. I spoke about how God desires to spend time with us and that prayer is a way to do that. We had a woman who leads worship sing songs about how Jesus is our King.

Women were greeted as they drove into the parking lot with a goody bag. The bag contained tea bags, sugar, a mini spoon, and lots of treats to eat. They also received a song sheet with the words of our worship music. We included a prayer calendar and even a tea party word search. The bags also had a glittery paper tiara to wear….to get them in the “Royal-Tea” mood! We did a really fun ice breaker where the women had to honk their horns when we shared things that applied to them (like honk your horn if you are tired of Zoom-ing!).

The highlight of the event was seeing the smiles on the women’s faces! They are so hungry for fellowship and this was a great opportunity for women to get out in a safe way and do something fun. We were blessed with great weather and had about 165 women participate. It was a great team building opportunity for our Coffee Break Leadership Team because we all pulled together and used our unique gifts to serve our ladies.

Another highlight was what we called a “wink” from God. Since our theme was royalty, we used the color purple for all of our decorations and for the goody bags. When we received the box of books, Discover Prayer, for our new study, the cover had been updated. . . and it was purple! We had no ideas the books were purple. It was like God winking at us and reassuring us that we are on track in serving Him at Coffee Break, even in a parking lot!"