God’s Pit Crew Rebuilds Appomattox Home

By Crystal Vandegrift, Staff Writer

EVERGREEN – As part of Southside Electric Cooperative’s new community volunteer initiative, employees Joey Schnepf, George Felts, Allan Sharrett, Donnell Taylor and Mark Thomas recently lent a hand to God’s Pit Crew and others working to rebuild the home of Nancy Harris.

Harris’s home was destroyed during the tornado that hit the Evergreen area of Appomattox County back in February. Not only did Mrs. Harris lose her home, she even lost her husband of 50 years.

Harris’s new home is nearly complete thanks to an outpouring of generosity and support from the community and God’s Pit Crew who partnered with WSLS 10 and Spirit FM to complete the rebuild.

“Our calling is to bring hope, healing and restoration to those in need in times of crisis. Our calling is too serious to be taken lightly, too urgent to be postponed, too vital to be ignored, too relevant to be overlooked, too significant to be trivialized, too eternal to be fleeting and too passionate to be quenched,” said God’s Pit Crew founders, Randy and Terri Johnson.

In May of 1999, the Johnsons answered the calling upon their lives by responding to the devastation caused by the largest tornado in recorded history in Oklahoma City, OK. After using borrowed trucks and trailers to deliver three loads of supplies, they returned home from Oklahoma with a sense of great accomplishment. Soon the non-profit crisis response organization known as God’s Pit Crew was born.

God’s Pit Crew is comprised of nearly 300 volunteers. The annual average of volunteerism is over 45,000 hours! The in-kind hourly rate for 540,000 hours (45,000 x 12 years) at the current rate of $22.60 per hour equals approximately $12,204,000 worth of volunteerism.

To learn more about the project and God’s Pit Crew: www.godspitcrew.org/rebuilding-hope-in-appomattox-va/