Food Pantry Blog: The Church in the Basement
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” – Matthew 25:35
Every week the pantry attracted several hundred people to the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. People experienced community, gratitude, healing and shared food. The isolation often felt by the hungry and homeless was diminished somewhat in the pantry. In fact, the pantry changed all of us for the better. For me, that was church. It was the best attended service in that building each week. In the basement, no less.
This basement pantry opened every Tuesday morning as we prepared and delivered the take outs, and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons when we served groceries to shoppers lined up in the hallway and outside the building. We found ceremony hidden in the way we processed the shoppers through the rooms.
An Episcopalian Priest once told me that the only thing we really know about Jesus was that He fed the hungry. He fed the hungry and then He said to those around him “Now you feed them.”
And, to my mind, that’s what communion is all about: serving everyone who comes.
And, of course, that brings up a whole other issue. As people go down the path to the pantry, they begin to lose things. Life becomes less complicated. One of the downsides of this newfound simplicity is that people become isolated and somewhat cutoff from their communities. As the money goes, many activities go also, one of them being the weekly visit to a church or synagogue. Church/synagogue becomes too expensive, not only for the tithing but also for the other things needed: clothes to wear to the services and other activities, money for the collection plate, things to donate to projects, fellowship activities.
Circumstances encourage congregations to discourage families and individual members at the moment they need it the most. As people no longer fit in, their presence is discouraged. It appears the congregations don’t want anyone to disrupt the ceremony and spiritual solitude in any way.
The closest many shoppers ever got to a church or synagogue service was the pantry line in the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. There was a very definite hunger for spiritual connection.
A food pantry is another way of having a religious service. The sharing of the food is the prayer. The distribution of food in the pantry was a spiritual transaction.
Each week I opened the pantry when I unlocked the outside door with a key. The building, housing a beautiful, empty sanctuary was kept locked. The sanctuary was kept locked also. As a pantry volunteer, we were allowed only in the part of the hallway where the pantry and storeroom were located.
In this part of the hallway, shoppers waited for over an hour sometimes in a cramped space to sign their name so they could enter into an even more crowded room to select a 3-day supply of food which they had to make last 7 days.
More than once I heard people ask if they could sit in the sanctuary for a moment. “Sorry. The sanctuary is locked.” I always replied.
Sadly, more than once I heard people in the hallway discussing the beautiful sanctuary, the historical church building. When this happened I always heard the comment: “I hear very few people come to this church anymore.”
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
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