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Thousands flocked to Veterans Park on Saturday, April 19, as Cultivate Church provided a memorable highlight to the Easter weekend with its egg drop which was fully open to the community. (For the Reporter/Jonathan Pearce)

By NOAH WORTHAM | Managing Editor

ALABASTER – Eggs rained from the sky littering Alabaster’s Veterans Park with dozens of shiny eggs ready for kids to claim during Cultivate Church’s annual Great Big Helicopter Easter Egg Drop.

Veterans Park saw 15,000 visitors enter through its gates on Saturday, April 19, as Cultivate Church provided a memorable highlight to the Easter weekend with its egg drop which was fully open to the community.

“It was incredible,” said Brandon Matthews, lead team pastor at Cultivate Church. “We had just the best day. The weather was beautiful. It was the best setup for the Easter weekend that we could of asked for.”

The doors to Veterans Park opened at 9 a.m. for registration with the very first egg hunt occurring around 10:30 a.m. for ages 0-3. Subsequent egg drops were then held for ages 4-5, 6-8 and 9-11.

“We try to provide for each age group so that everyone gets a chance to participate,” Matthews said. “The idea here is for even moms and dads that have babies that want to get out and have a family fun day with… they can get out there and give their kids a great experience hunting eggs.”

Matthews shared that each egg drop was appropriately spaced out—providing families with the chance to spend time with each of their kids.

“We try to prepare one at a time so that everybody gets the experience of seeing the helicopter each time,” Matthews said. “If you’re a parent and you have children of different age groups, you have a chance to be there with each child and each age group for each hunt. We try our best to think about it in terms of a family’s experience.”

For those with special needs or with sensory issues, a separate area was also set up with accessible activities set up. Volunteers were also spread across the park, ready to assist visitors as well as provide free lunch in the form of hot dogs.

“We had hundreds of people serve at our event this weekend,” Matthews said. “People who were parking cars, people who were registering, people answering questions, people who were picking up trash, grilling thousands of hot dogs, wrapping those hotdogs… people really worked so incredibly hard,” Matthews said.

Throughout the event, bilingual volunteers were spread about the park ready to assist visitors and all the information shared from the stage was translated in Spanish in order to make the event as accessible as possible for members of the local Hispanic community.

“We say our church is the church God wants it to be when it represents and looks like our community and we have an incredible Hispanic population in our community,” Matthews said. “And so, we want to be able to serve and love on and include everyone.”

Matthews expressed his gratitude to the city of Alabaster for allowing the church to utilize Veterans Park which provided the space to serve the thousands of visitors that poured through the gates on Saturday.

“We’re really appreciative to the city for allows us the space and the park,” he said. “We’re really grateful for Alabaster Parks and Rec. They always do such an incredible job assisting us with the park and making that day available and accessible.”

According to Matthews, all of the work, time and effort that went into the free event was in order to serve the community.

“We’ve always said, ‘We want our community to know that we want something for them and nothing from them,’” Matthews said. “It’s really just an extension, a picture of the hands and the feet of Jesus to come and serve our community… So, all the attention to detail and the hard work from that team was just really incredible to watch because they literally did it just to serve and love on our community.”

In addition to the helicopter egg drop, Cultivate Church also held worship service on Good Friday at both of its campuses and on Sunday, April 20 on Easter.

“It was just really exciting to see,” Matthews said. “We just feel this incredible momentum of what God’s doing in the hearts of and lives of people and so it’s cool to see that reflected. I know for everybody, Easter is a big day in the church world but to still see people respond to Easter, it’s really incredible. It’s something to be excited about.”

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