Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

It’s about serving the community.

That’s why Trinity on the Hill Community Church fed police, deputies, firefighters and other emergency responders throughout most of the day on Wednesday, said Rev. Claude Herbert.

The church hosted the first of what it hopes will become its annual First Responder Appreciation Lunch.

Herbert said the luncheon is something they have done multiple times during his three decades of ministry but they had never done it at Trinity.

“It’s a way of outreach and good ministry to the community,” Herbert said. “They serve the community and so to the church.”

Herbert suggested the idea and church leaders were on board. He said he has also helped with similar luncheons for nurses and colleges while ministering in North Georgia.

Herbert has ministered locally for about two and a half years pastoring Hillcrest and Trinity, then a United Methodist Church.

“I was pastoring Hillcrest and Trinity and then when the disaffiliation happened and they retired me as a Methodist preacher,” Herbert said. “That’s fine. My credentials can’t be taken away.”

“So come January, [Trinity] offered me this job but I had been here two years prior,” he said.

Herbert said Trinity is now standing on its own as an independent church and is no longer affiliated with the Methodist Church, United, Global or otherwise.

Sheriff James Woodruff brought some of his deputies by the luncheon that afternoon. He said events like these are reassuring.

“It reassures us that we still have the support of the community,” Woodruff said. “For a while, there was talk about disbanding the police and defunding the police, but there’s always been that small remnant of people that stood quietly behind us. Every time we had a big group come against us and say what we were doing wrong or how we weren’t doing our job, there was always a group, whether it’s a church or a civic club. They would step forward and say, ‘You know what, we want to say thank you for what you’re doing.’”

For Trinity, feeding the first responders was a no-brainer. The church’s kitchen is already working throughout the week to help feed a squad of volunteers who are in town with Mission Serve, as featured in Tuesday’s edition of the Daily News.