Long tables lined with vegetable trays, pasta salad, pulled pork and chili. Another table filled with mountains of cookies and apple pie cupcakes. Little kids weaving through grown-ups’ legs. The sound of fiddles and banjos filling the large room. People laughing on the dance floor, boasting their best fall flannels.
Exit Church hosted their annual Fall Fest on Oct. 24. The festive night took place in the new building that they purchased January 2025.
Tyler Shirley, co-pastor of Exit, compared Fall Fest to Israel’s Feast of Tabernacles. The Israelites were called to celebrate the harvest through this week-long celebration and remember how God delivered them from Egypt.
“God commanded his people to celebrate far more than we do today, which is not something we voften think about,” Shirley said. “It’s often like, ‘tone it down, follow the rules.’ And there’s a place for that, but there’s a place to have fun and celebrate as well.”
The event started at 6 p.m. with people grabbing dinner and settling at some of the round tables. Eventually, there were so many attendees that people started getting comfortable on the floor, forming circles with their friends.
Later in the night, the band started playing bluegrass music and people were invited onto the dance floor to learn square dancing and line dancing. Parents, young adults and small children alike flooded the floor. All could be seen smiling from the fun of learning something new and laughing at themselves when they didn’t get the steps down right away.
The event also offered pumpkin painting, cornhole and facepainting.
Zoe Newhof, junior orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) major at Taylor and attendee of Exit’s Fall Fest, said her favorite part of the event was simply the community that was on display.
“Especially seeing the little kids running around,” Newhof said. “It brought me back to when my church would do these kinds of events –– just running around the church, playing games with all your friends from all the different families and stuff.”
Fall Fest 2025 was the church’s first event in their new building. With this in mind, Shirley said it is wild to think back to the festival’s humble beginnings. The earliest Fall Fest he can remember featured only a couple corn stalks up front and some pumpkins, he said.
This year, however, their space included string lights, hay bales, tables of food, large speakers, several pots of chrysanthemum flowers and lots of large, round pumpkins.
Deaconess Jeanette Voss was one of the lead organizers of the Fall Fest. Voss agreed that the night was a testament to God’s goodness.
“Seeing the faithfulness of working together with people who have the same heartbeat, the same desire to see the Lord,” Voss said. “It’s done seamlessly. Like last night, when we were all setting up, it was just like everybody had a place. Nobody was told what to do. Everybody just did it. It’s like the work of the Holy Spirit.”
Alaina Ventry is a student at Taylor and member of Exit Church. She said it was cool to be in the new building and see how the large space made activities like cornhole and pickleball possible.
Shirley said they do not deserve to be in the new building, explaining that much of the money to afford it came from the generosity of people outside the church.
As people played their last games of cornhole or grabbed a desert for the road, Shirley closed the night with worship, leading the remaining attendees in “Great is Thy Faithfulness.”
