Janice Healy doesn't particularly like tuna fish. The fact that the church secretary and food pantry volunteer has sorted through thousands of cans of it during her 20-year tenure at Faith Baptist Church in Warwick, N.H., hasn't helped her acquire a taste for the stuff. But it has increased her empathy for the low-income people she sees each week who come to the 300-member church for help.
"The biggest staple on any food pantry shelf is tuna fish," said Healy. "I really don't like tuna fish, so every time I put that into someone's basket I just pray, ‘Lord, please let them like tuna fish.'"
For the third year in a row the number of Americans living in poverty has increased to now more than 35 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some 12.9 million of those are children.
According to the Bread for the World Institute, in one in ten American households people are skipping meals or eating less to make ends meet. Many are turning to churches for help.
If it has to be tuna fish it is better than nothing, Healy said. Feeding the hungry is a biblical directive. "The Bible has taught us the needy will always be around us and Christ said we need to be helping them," she said. But she said what most people who donate to the pantry don't understand is that someone actually has to eat what they drop off.
"The better stocked a pantry is, the better they can help people to have a normal life," she said. The church Web site provides guidelines for donations: "Please look for items that are not dented or old looking," it reads. "The people receiving the food, need to know we care about them, not that we're giving them our "leftovers!""
For Thanksgiving the church gives out 50 holiday baskets with a week's worth of food and a turkey. They give out 50 more baskets at Christmas.
Healy is also concerned that obtaining the food is easy. So for the last few years Faith Baptist has partnered with the city of Warwick and the Religious Organization for People in Emergency Situations (ROPES) group in the community. The collaborative effort helps Faith with storage issues and offers a better variety for the working poor that frequent the pantries.
Cooperation
Cooperation is the most effective way to minister with food, according to Marian Blanchard, executive director of God's Pantry, a non-profit food bank serving central and eastern Kentucky.
"We strongly encourage churches to work together," said Blanchard. "We've seen strong ministries developed out of ministerial associations." Not only does cooperation allow churches to spend their monetary and human resources on food rather than space or transportation, Blanchard said it eliminates duplication of services and provides better locations for food distribution.
"As a food bank we routinely provide product to 350 member agencies and non-profits. Some 77 percent of those are affiliated with churches," Blanchard said.
In cooperation with other groups, First Baptist feeds more than the few families who trickle in to the church's food pantry. The church helps reach out to community, state, even national organizations. God's Pantry delivered 10.5 million pounds of food last year in Kentucky. The organization also cooperates with America's Second Harvest, a nationwide network that includes more than 200 food banks and food-rescue organizations. The large organization helps solicit and coordinate large corporate and private donations of money and food to create a powerhouse against hunger.
America's Second Harvest reports that 23.3 million people turned to the agencies they serve in 2001, an increase of over 2 million since 1997. Forty percent were from working families.
Churches, too, have shown themselves capable of waging calculated and all-encompassing war on hunger. Mega churches or even giga-churches, bodies of 10,000 or more, have made significant dents in canned-goods collection in their communities.
Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., recently launched a drive to collect food for the 35,000 homeless people in Orange County. Volunteers from the 20,000-member church gave out red bags to local grocery store customers to shop for the homeless, then collect and transport the food to partnering agencies: the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County and the Orange County Rescue Mission. Reportedly, the church has collected 1.1 million pounds of food during a project that will last the purpose-driven church's requisite 40 days.
But even those mammoth amounts of groceries, even from gigantic drives from large churches or well-organized networks of non-profits, have not succeeded in filling the bellies of America's hungry. Hunger and homelessness continued to rise last year in major American cities, according to the new U.S. Conference of Mayors-Sodexho Hunger and Homelessness Survey, a study cited on the Second Harvest Web site.
Blanchard said the hungry she sees in her work with God's Pantry are typically low-wage earners who run out of money when an unexpected bill takes the last of their cash for a month. According to Hungersolutions.org, "the working poor are the fastest-growing group of food shelf clients."
In addition, the hunger problem is forgotten most of the year as a large number of drives are organized during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season.
"People tend to think about sharing with low-income people during the holidays," Blanchard said, "but really, we have a significant need for food year round."
Physical hunger and spiritual hunger
At Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Fla., food outreach is ongoing in the Road to Recovery ministry. Church volunteers serve lunch every Saturday to 70-80 people at a shelter; and Sunday they bus the homeless and indigent to the church, "where they are fed with the Word and with the food," said Gloria Henry, a volunteer with the ministry for the past two years.
Without Walls feeds an additional 7,000 families for Thanksgiving and transports homeless people to five-star restaurants for lunch served on white linen tablecloths.
In addition, Road to Recovery stocks a 730,000 square foot warehouse with food for the 500 families a week that benefit from assistance at Without Walls with food or economic assistance year round. Still the church wants to serve more.
Rev. Robert Fruster, who has worked with Road to Recovery for 10 years, said the 17,000-member church partners with community organizations and accepts corporate help in providing for the poor, in order to help more people.
"I believe strongly in partnering if it can be used as a vehicle to spread the Gospel," Fruster said. "I think if we stay within our four walls we miss some of the people who can be ministered to. There are so many families that are just like you and I that say they are one check away from destruction."
In addition, Fruster views food outreach as "just a vehicle for the Gospel plan." Most giveaway events at Without Walls include preaching, worship, prayer and volunteers disseminating information about the church. "It's continual reiteration of the Gospel. We want to make sure people know the reason we're doing it is for Jesus Christ."
Emergent outreach
Solomon's Porch in south Minneapolis has the same idea. But the emergent church executes evangelism through food outreach the same way it does church  a little differently.
The 5-year-old church meets in a converted warehouse it shares with a metal recycling plant and other businesses. Most of the members live elsewhere but agreed to relocate the church to a low-income neighborhood so they could better serve others.
"It seemed like a good place to put a church," said volunteer Jenie Madvig, 26. "A place we'd have opportunities to outreach. We need to be reaching out to the people around us." Madvig said the outward focus was what drew her to Solomon's Porch.
"We help each other, the community, overseas. Nobody's outside the scope of who's your neighbor," she said. The church hosts weekly dinners as one of many free services to the low-income community in which they recently located.
Last Thanksgiving the church partnered with other community, church and corporate groups to give out "Boxes of Love." While some churches used the giveaway as a platform to present the four spiritual laws, Tom Carki, administrator at Solomon's, said he views evangelism differently.
He said the everyday outreach at Solomon's is more effective for evangelism in his view. There are no Gospel presentations to people who come to the food pantry that began at the church in January. The food itself is a Gospel message.
"It's hard for me to make an honest Christian connection with somebody in a 5-minute presentation," Carki said. "I'd rather be a good neighbor and get to know them."
Healy communicates the same philosophy for food ministry at Faith Baptist in Warwick. "I feel like they're friends," she said of the people who frequent the church pantry. She said she prays for them and develops relationships.
"We've had a few families come [to worship at the church] because of the food pantry directly." But she said, "The main focus is taking care of the physical needs. People are not really open to just the spiritual needs if they're going hungry."
