Sitting at a table adorned with a red and white checked tablecloth in the Empire United Methodist Church Saturday, Hayden Halshouser of Northville only wanted one thing.

Strawberries. No vanilla ice cream, no shortcake, no chili dogs. Just the red, juicy fruit the church community was celebrating as part of the 16th annual Strawberry Festival.

Hayden, his mother Ronda Halshouser, and grandparents Roy and Vicki Neiman of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., were delighted to get their share of the strawberries served up by volunteers.

"This is fun. We are staying at The Homestead this weekend and saw the advertisements for the festival," Ronda Halshouser said.

It didn't hurt that the festival was being held in a United Methodist Church. "We all attend Methodist churches back home" Roy Nieman said.

Having families like the Neimans/Halshousers walk in is just the kind of activity that church members who organize the festival each year count on.

Church administrator Sandy Mallory said a little more than 200 people were served, which is up from last year.

"We did some advertising this year. We posted the event on the county's website and on our church website as well," she said.

This event would not be possible without the help of plenty of people. On Saturday morning, Jean Plowman was one of a dozen volunteers working in and around the church's kitchen and she the enviable task of preparing the strawberry desserts. While the shortcake served is not homemade (the festival received the cakes from a supplier), all the soups were made from scratch, as was the chili sauce used for the chili dogs.

"I make the corn chowder myself," Plowman said. When asked for a recipe, one of her co-workers chimed in it's available in the church¹s cookbook, a copy of which may be purchased.

Plowman and many of the volunteers have been part of the strawberry social since it began. "Mr. Beck used to supply us with all the strawberries we ever needed. But, since then the social has gotten bigger and bigger," she said. This year's strawberries were purchased from the Leelanau Fruit Company. "Every year this gets a little bit bigger," Plowman said.

The volunteers gathered in the church kitchen Friday morning around 9 a.m. and began cutting up strawberries. "We got done around 4 in the afternoon, with just about everything ready to go," she said.

As to soup, Plowman said she made the corn chowder on Thursday and most of it was consumed by the time serving wrapped up at 2 p.m. on Saturday.

"That's the way we like it, everything gone, nothing to wrap up," Plowman said.

The church's Strawberry Festival is generally held the second to last Saturday in June.