A nursing career was the focus for Macon Davis as she matriculated through Delta State University. But the late Reverend Veronica Pritchard showed the Leflore County native a different way to nurse folks – through ministry. With her nursing degree in hand, Davis joined up with Delta Grace mission in Sunflower working for Pritchard and the Delta Grace board and started soaking up everything she could from her mentor to add to her nursing skills.
“I'm actually a registered nurse right now,” Davis said. “I graduated from nursing in December of 2022 and I started with Delta Grace in January of 2023. Focused on spiritual health rather than physical health.”
She first came to Delta Grace as a spring break missionary. But after meeting Pritchard, she knew Jesus was calling her to be a different kind of nurse.
“It was definitely the Lord. I felt a call towards mission. I came on my first spring break Wesley Foundation retreat in 2019 and I have served every single year on and off since. Then in the fall of 2022, Veronica came to me and she said, ‘I'm looking to hire somebody to deal with college students and to deal with the mission teams and the youth students. Would you be interested?’ And I wasn't at first. I told my husband, ‘No, that's not what I want to do. I want to do nursing.’ But eventually, after praying about it and thinking about it, I felt like that was exactly where I needed to be. And over the past year and a half, I have learned that this is exactly where I need to be and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.”
Davis came to the Sunflower-based mission and hasn’t looked back. With the recent passing of Pritchard, Delta Grace’s founder, Davis has been named the executive director and will continue the dream that Pritchard planted, toiled over and harvested.
“For now, it's going to be the same. I think Veronica did it super well for the past 10 years,” Davis said. “It's now a well-oiled machine and can function in the way that it has. So, there's no changes that we're looking at in the future as of right now. My husband, Darron, and I have taken over and he has a full-time job during the school year as the associate Wesley director at Delta State. We won't have as many teams in the fall and spring, but we will still have some.”
The mission teams come to the Sunflower campus and go out to work on homes in and around the Delta – homes of those who are struggling with poverty, those who need a hand up, those who need a smile, a little work on their home, and someone to care about them inside and out.
“We need more teams. Our application list keeps growing,” she explained. “We have worked on approximately 255 homes, and we have received over 650 applications. So, we have an extensive wait list. We're working on homes right now from 2017, ‘18, and ‘19 and there are homes that are still sending in applications. I got one in the mail yesterday, so we need volunteers, we need prayers and ultimately we do need finances as well.”
The Greenwood native and now Itta Bena resident notes the 501(c)(3) nonprofit can only do its mission work with the funds that are raised.
“Most of our teams come in in our eight-week summer program, or in March. We have a good many teams that come in March for spring break. We do have other teams scattered around throughout this whole entire year.
The eight-week program started on May 26th and Delta Grace is working with their third team right now.
“They come in for a week and do pretty well. Yes, so we have different options to fit their schedule. We have four day trips, five day trips and six day trips. They come in on a Sunday, they work Monday, Tuesday, or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then they leave the day after they finish working.”
Davis noted that Pritchard had put in place a system for donors to become monthly givers through an automatic bank draft. The consistent timely funds help with more efficient planning and continues nursing those with construction problems across the Delta.
“Our biggest thing right now is money. And one of the things that Veronica was working on, a fundraiser that she started back in end of April, beginning of May, was getting people signed up on monthly draft donations. We have teams that bring in the money but with the rising cost of materials, most of that money gets used for materials and then there's not much left for administrative or utilities or things like that. We are looking for some type of reliable income monthly that we can use and can rely on and count on and know that this much is coming in and we'll have this much at the end of the month, even if we use all of the money that our teams bring in on materials and not administrative or bills. Veronica put a link on our homepage of our website entitled Loaves and Fishes.”
The multi-non-denominational ministry relies on churches from across the spectrum.
“Our organization is multi-denominational faith based. We're not a Methodist. We're not Global Methodist, United Methodist. We are housed in a Global Methodist church, but we have Baptists on our board, Presbyterians on our board, Methodists on our board. We are multi-denominational and we don't house just church mission teams either. We house family mission teams, fraternity mission teams, and it's just whoever wants to come and can bring that money, they are more than welcome to come.”
Her husband, Darron Davis, saw the life-changing work the mission was doing as something really special. He was hooked after interning at Delta Grace.
“You can't shake this Delta Grace bug either. It's got a way. Our missioners say this too; there's something about it that hooks you. Like you can come and you see what God is doing and you really, like I said, see the power of us all getting together.
There's something about that, that if it hits, that's hard to scratch. And Delta Grace scratches. It makes that, it gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling of doing something.”
Davis and the crews reach out to the folks in need and do more than fix a roof or leaky bathroom.
“I think really at the heart of what we do is to create life-changing experiences for homeowners to come in and show them that they're cared for,” he said. “Especially the demographic we work for in the Delta often feels like they've gotten the short end of the stick. Whether that's the elderly women, the widowed women, the elderly homeowners that just can't do anything for themselves. To create a life-changing experience for them by giving them a better place to live. To create a life-changing experience for missioners to come in and show them what good God can really do through their willingness to be used. Our prayer, really, is for them to see that they can do similar things wherever they are. They can take gifts that they have and use those to meet other people's needs. And then also for people who support financially, even though their giving to create an experience that changes the way that they see money. God can use it to do big and incredible things. And people who can get behind a cause and do something together, whether they give a little or give a lot, they can be a part of something really big that God wants to do. I would think year-round for all peoples and parties involved, one of our biggest goals is to create an experience for them that shows them the power of us all getting together for a common good or a common goal that we can share to make somebody else's life better.”
Delta Grace continues to shine across the Delta to help those in need – now with the head nurse, Macon Davis, in charge.
