FIRST CHURCH MISSIONS
LOVING LANCASTER & LOVING THE WORLD.
First Church seeks to connect people to Jesus Christ and the church; Grow Christian disciples, & relieve suffering.
These mission partnerships and connections help First Church to fulfill that mission.
First Church has a vision to be a central hub of Christian ministry in Lancaster County & beyond.
ANCHOR LANCASTER
The breakfast program runs 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. A free breakfast is served to an average of 150 per day. The low income, unsheltered and socially excluded population, as well as any and all who are hungry come to eat. Breakfast is served from 8:30-9:45 am each day with a regular menu of juice, milk, cereal, eggs, toast, a hot beverage and fruit. During Covid, the breakfast continued with breakfast bags to go.
A continual Anchor Lancaster fundraiser is the sale of 12 oz. coffee bags roasted by RedRoseCoffeeRoasters.com. 100% of the profits from the purchase of coffee goes to support the program. The coffee is always available at First Church.
For more information, check out the website.
AARP TAX MINISTRY
MISSION
This is an First Church signature mission that has been in continuous operation since tax year 2007 with a mission to provide Free Tax help. Our volunteers prepare tax returns for local people in Lancaster City and the surrounding area at no charge. This tax service is equipped to file electronically for Federal and State returns, and at the same time, prepare paper returns for the Lancaster County Tax Collection Bureau (LCTCB). We also provide either property tax rebate or rent rebate preparation for low income taxpayers who qualify. The wireless internet infrastructure at First Church is critical to the success of this mission.
SCOPE
We serve low to middle income taxpayers with special emphasis on retirees and the elderly. The scope of the returns we can prepare is defined by the IRS and is quite detailed. We rarely have persons who are out of scope and denied service. Every tax return is mandated to have a quality review by a Team Leader before being electronically filed. The average gross income of our clients at First Church was $19,770. We secured more than $1,667,000 in refunds for 1443 clients who filed federal returns at the First Church tax office in 2018.
Our First Church site is an affiliate of the AARP Foundation and is the largest affiliated site in Eastern Pennsylvania in terms of the number of e-filed returns. Our process is 100 percent computer and network based, and runs in a Windows 10 environment running the Taxslayer application and Internet Explorer. We electronically file 99 percent of our tax returns to the IRS.
***Due to Covid, our tax ministry is not able to service clients currently. We have hopes that our tax office will be back and running for 2022.
