WS Chronicle

On Saturday, Dec. 8, Mayor Allen Joines and the City of Winston-Salem, in collaboration with Diggs Memorial United Holiness Church, will host an appreciation banquet for Rev. Dr. Lamonte Williams at the Greater Church Family Life Center at 4 p.m.

The banquet is in honor of Williams’ time as president of the Ministers’ Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity, to recognize his outstanding leadership, according to organizers. The Mistress of Ceremony for the event will be Judge Denise Hartsfield and the keynote speaker will be Bishop James C. Hash Sr.

“What the event will focus on is my leadership, locally as a pastor, but more specifically, my leadership across the city,” said Williams. “I have been in the city for nine years and there have been a lot of community events that Diggs Memorial has pushed, through my leadership.”

“The mayor is involved because of the level of community collaborations that have been brought to the table by the leadership of myself,” he continued. “One of my strengths is collaboration and networking.”

According to Williams, a key point of emphasis throughout the banquet will be his work with disaster relief. 

“The goal is for it to seem effortless and seamless, but behind that effort is a lot of attention to detail and that represents the level of leadership that someone has to rise to the occasion and put all of those logistics together,” he said about his disaster relief efforts. “So, what that does is speaks to the level of leadership that I have been blessed to be a steward of these last two years.”

Several pastors from the eastern part of the state that collaborated with Williams for relief efforts following Hurricane Florence will be in attendance as well, he said. Their purpose is to speak to the seamless process from their perspective, Williams said.

Williams said the same model used for Hurricane Florence was used for the relief efforts in Texas for Hurricane Harvey and in Goldsboro for Hurricane Matthew. He said the disaster relief model he has implemented is one that will stand the test of time.

“What I also wanted to use the banquet for, is to highlight partnerships, which I think have been critical to the success of me as a leader in the city,” he said. “I speak of not only partnerships for disaster relief, but also with other faith leaders.

“For me it is a bittersweet moment, because it allows you to say, ‘you’ve been working hard for two years, but now it’s time to celebrate,” Williams said. “I look back as a person and I was handed the Ministers’ Conference and my goal was to hand it off better than it was.”

Williams says he expects the new office of the conference to continue with the progression the organization has made over the years.

“I would just say that I hope the conference is more visible now than when I took office and two years from now, I hope that history and the community would say that it’s even more visible,” he said.  “Not only more visible, but I hope the conference continues to evolve as well.”