Feeding Hungry Children Through Church Planting
Posted by Doug Foltz on Sep 27, 2010 in Community Engagement, Missional | 0 commentsI ask all my church planters, “What is good new to your community?” It’s a questioned aimed at determining how to be the gospel within a community. Church planting is more than just gathering Christians, it’s planting the gospel in a community to reveal Christ to that community. Chad Simpkins, lead pastor of Varsity Church in Chapel Hill, NC, determined that one of the best ways that the church could serve was by feeding the hungry. Here is a post from Chad with details.
Feed 5ifty Event
by Chad Simpkins
by Chad Simpkins
Our Plan
One of our main focuses for our local mission work is with children. We believe children are born into situations they can not control and so we want to focus on serving them. We decided to feed 50 families at one time. We purchased meal boxes from Angel Food Ministries. Each box feeds a family of 4 for about 1 week. In the end, we served close to 200 people through this event. The event cost us $1500.
Here is a breakdown of what we did…
Found a Need
One of the greatest needs we find in many communities is that of under resourced families who have young kids but very little in their homes to eat. The downturn in the economy has made these numbers greater. In our community, we found that close to 1 in 4 children are food insecure. This means they do not know where their next meal will come from. Many of them get their only meal of the day through going to school (free lunches). Nationally, the number of food insecure children is 15 MILLION. These numbers made us want to serve the community by purchasing food for families.
Find the People
When you move to a new place to start a church, it is always important to meet the community leaders. Two things you will find as you meet leaders. One, you will begin to hear the same names over and over again who are making a difference in the community. Those are the people you want to connect with. Two, you will begin to hear of common needs. This is how we found about the food insecurity issues in our area.
Our main connection for this service project was the head of our town’s Housing Authority. We sent her an email and asked who we needed to talk to about feeding 50 local families. She said she was the contact person even though she had changed departments. This made our work EASY.
We asked her if we could do this project and if so would she help us get names. We gave her the criteria – a housing project not served by any other organization and each house needed to have children as residents. Simple. Within a day she sent us a list of 44 families to serve (no names attached of course, only housing numbers).
Buy the Food
Once you have the location(s) and the families, your best bet (at least for us) was to work through an already established organization. We used Angel Food Ministries. Here is how to use them…
- Go to this page on their site where you will put in your zip code. It will tell you of the local drop off spot for Angel Food.
- Contact the person whose name who is listed at that site and tell them what you are wanting to do. (IE, “We want to order 50 boxes of food to feed 50 local families with children for 1 week.” They will probably be happy to have you work through them and the mission you are on.
- Angel Food does deliveries once a month. Make sure you know that date for the month you are planning. You usually have to order and pay for the food AT LEAST 1 week prior.
- Pick the type of box you want to purchase for the families. Angel Food has different types you can buy. The Signature Box is usually the best for feeding families.
- Send in a payment to the local Angel Food pick up spot. This is usually a local church.
Grab Boxes
Make sure to get boxes to put the food into! Go to your local grocery store and ask them for empty boxes. Banana and apple boxes are GREAT! They are very sturdy and usually have handles for easy carrying.
Set up your boxing/pick up site
The site we picked up our food was GREAT at helping us box the food. We worked with the same people we had talked to about our project and bought the food from. They set up tables and had people there who helped our team put the food into the boxes.
The site also allowed us to come BEFORE the normal pick up time for local residents. This made it easy for us to show up, box the food, pack it up and head out before their regular crowd showed up.
In terms of helping out, be prepared that what we experienced may not happen. The food isn’t in huge bags or bundles but you may have to handle the boxing on your own.
Transporting Food
We used 2 small pick up trucks and a minivan. We could have easily put 25-30 boxes of food inside a minivan minus the seats. You could transport 50 boxes of food in 2 minivans.
Deliver your Food
We had 2 delivery sites so we broke our team into two.
I printed out sheets for both teams detailing info about the locations and the house numbers we were serving. Remember, our goal was serving children so singles or couples did not receive food from us. Here is a sample of what I gave our teams.
We also inserted this sheet into the boxes for the families we served. It told who had helped getting food to them. We also allowed Angel Food to put their info into the boxes too.
Take the boxes and deliver them. We recommend 2 people per house for safety sake.
After you hand them the boxes, ask what other needs they may have. This could open doors to doing more good in the community.
Other Stuff…
Find donors
- Ask local organizations to give free items to put inside the boxes. Our local Chic Fil A gave us free sandwich coupons for this group. You may have other connections.
- Ask your local grocery store for boxes. We hit up Trader Joe’s who was more than willing to help.
- Ask people to give. For us the cost was $1500. We raised about $500 to help pay for the food. This helped us financially and allowed others to support what we were doing who were outside of our community.
Take Pictures
- Have someone take pictures. One thing to remember though is most of the people you serve will not want their pictures taken. Take pictures of the boxing and your teams.
- Send the pictures to the grocery store who helped you and the vendors who gave free stuff.
- This also gives you something to send to newspapers for your next event.
Food Stamps
- We are not trying to be something the people we are helping count on. We are hoping to use this to have them help themselves. Remind them they can buy the food through Angel Food with food stamps. This recently was added to Angel Food.
Ask for help
- We put ads on craiglist, in the local newspaper and sent out news releases asking for help. We had one person who came out to help who we had never met before but wanted to help. Yep, she is on our list of people to contact as we start our church.
- We contacted a couple of other church plants and asked them if they wanted to help. One sent over 6 people. It was a great chance to work alongside people experiencing the same things we are in planting a church.
