Based on:Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21)

Pre-planning: We asked women to pre-register for the event and charged $5 per person. Several women donated money to cover scholarships for other women. We simply asked each woman to put her registration and donation in a box in the foyer. For anyone who had financial issues, we asked them to simply put their registration in. We do this for all our paid events and have always seen the Lord provide more money than registrations! We spent an afternoon making the decorations and training our team leaders.

Refreshments: We used half of the money we collected to purchase veggie, cheese, and meat trays from a local grocery store. We also purchased crackers and ingredients to make punch. A woman in our church who bakes for a living donated a her very yummy gourmet cookies.

Decorations: We used brown and gold paper to make treasure chests filled with gold hearts and embellished them with shiny gold craft paint. We also made large flat hearts for the doors and walls, and small three dimensional ones for each table. We rented a real treasure chest with faux jewels and coins from a local novelty store. They charged us $20 for the chest and then donated 100 faux crowns for us to give away.

Program: We began at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon. It all started by dividing the group into teams. Each woman received a crown to wear during the treasure hunt. Each team leader drove a van with her ladies. All teams were to report back to the church by 5:00 p.m.

The treasure hunt was a Bigger and Better” hunt. We gave each team a matchstick and they had to go to homes and businesses trying to trade for something bigger and better. For example, one team traded their match for a towel. They traded their towel for a 6' ficus tree! They then traded their tree for a painting, etc. They ended up with beautiful custom painted ceramic pitcher. We saved all the nice items to use as door prizes at our upcoming retreat.

When the teams arrived back at the church, we prayed, ate and visited. One of our team leaders is a born comedienne, and we asked her to do a funny skit about some of the things the women had collected. (Even if your church is small, you probably have someone with a personality like this... ask her to do it! How do you think Chonda Pierce got started?!) Our Senior Pastor's wife shared about how she learned (and was still learning) her “Matthew 6” life lesson.

We wrapped everything up around 6:00 and had to chase the women out of the building. This was definitely a blast!