Pastor Charlie Grant – A man for all seasons

Pastor Charlie Grant left this world to be with Our Father in Heaven on Wednesday December 6, 2023. Pastor Grant was someone whose conscience and moral strength never bent with the trends of the times and he remained true to his principles throughout his entire life.

Pastor Grant became fully engaged with the community after relocating to Sterling in December of 1969 — and Loudoun County has truly benefitted from it. Grant has been among the most influential men Loudoun County has seen in the last 50 years. He was someone who served the community in multiple capacities and he touched many, many lives.

One of his proudest achievements is the founding and success with the Good Shepherd of Northern Virginia, a Christian-based emergency housing program.

The Good Shepherd of Northern Virginia came into existence when Pastor Grant began taking homeless people into his own Sterling home over forty years ago. At the time, Pastor Grant was Chaplain to the Sheriff’s Department. With no youth shelters in Loudoun County, Sheriff’s Deputies would call Pastor Grant and ask him to pick up homeless youth. During the winter of 1983, Pastor Grant took in fourteen homeless people and began his trademark pursuit of organizing the community to establish the first organized homeless shelter called Loudoun County Emergency Housing Alliance (LCEHA). This predecessor to Good Shepherd began soliciting funds and the homeless were housed for a short time at the Sterling Motel on Route 7 (Leesburg Pike).

Pastor Grant persuaded area developers to allow LCEHA use of vacant residences to house the homeless. He approached developers, whose own workers often counted among the homeless, and worked with them in the spirit of mutual responsibility to address this problem. They came up with a proposal to help other homeless in the county, namely, to use as shelters those homes that were on the land slated for development, but that usually lay unoccupied for two to five years before new building began. The first houses were near the intersection of Route 28 and the W&OD bike trail. When those homes were removed for a new housing development, another house was provided near the Potomac Baptist Church. Later still, the homeless were housed near Cascades Parkway and then for two years in Leesburg. Homeless persons capable of responsibility were assigned positions as house monitors supervising the residents and property. The Good Shepherd has expanded its dynamic programs, services and thrift stores to make a goal-oriented, intensive case management approach to self-sufficiency and it all began with Pastor Grant’s vision.

Pastor Grant was one of the founders of the LINK Food Pantry. LINK was originally established in 1972 to support the Sterling and eastern Loudoun communities. Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Brethren, and non-denominational churches all began working in unison to provide needy families with food and money to pay utility bills and other essentials. In the beginning, the donated food was stored in basements or garages of LINK volunteers when there were a small number of people qualifying for assistance. Later, Pastor Grant and the Good Shepherd of Northern Virginia allowed LINK to utilize space in a small building near Waxpool Road in Sterling. As the organization grew, Pastor Grant coordinated food storage relocation to a room in Potomac Baptist Church on Route 7 (Leesburg Pike) in Sterling. LINK has become one of the finest “all volunteer” emergency support organizations in Northern Virginia. LINK is now comprised of fourteen churches providing emergency food assistance by request daily and distributes holiday food baskets for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In 1979, when Loudoun County had a population of 57,000, Pastor Charlie Grant was asked to join the newly elected sheriff, Don Lacy, as the department chaplain. For about the first decade of Loudoun’s chaplaincy program, Grant was the only chaplain. He managed his role as the county's sole chaplain along with being a pastor at Grace Baptist Church, establishing Grace Christian Academy, opening a family (GAM) printing company and bookstore, handling calls as an EMT, and running and winning election to the Board of Supervisors in 1991.

In 1980, he became company chaplain at both the Sterling Volunteer Fire Department and Sterling Volunteer Rescue Squad. Pastor Grant founded the Loudoun County Fire and Rescue chaplain program, which now includes 24 active- response and station chaplains. He also served as police and fire chaplain at both Washington Dulles and Ronald Reagan airports from 1996 to 2017.

Pastor Charlie Grant did many other wonderful deeds as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even a book would not be enough to capture all of Grant’s accomplishments and good works. God bless him and his family.