Going deeper

Outreach at St. Timothy's feeds hungry in Iola, Kansas

By Melodie Woerman, September 15, 2008 [Episcopal Life] St. Timothy's Church in Iola, Kansas, might be small, but it's really cooking up a storm.

Parishioners' efforts to provide food -- and lots of it -- for people in their southeast Kansas town have earned them a nickname.

"We're known as the church that feeds people," said the Rev. Jan Chubb, vicar.

The church, with 40 baptized members and an average Sunday attendance of about 26, for four years has used monthly community dinners to raise money for outreach. Its chicken-and-noodle dinner is so well attended, the church had to offer "noodle school" to teach parishioners to make the homemade pasta needed.

Floods in the summer of 2007 that devastated the area brought a new urgency to the need for food in Iola. With houses and jobs gone, many turned for help to the local food bank.

But for those living in motels, a package of spaghetti and a jar of sauce don't do much good without a place to cook it.

Fellowship of the kitchen
That's when Donna Sifers and Sue O'Connor created the "Fellowship of the Kitchen." Along with other St. Timothy's volunteers, they cook hot meals that are packaged and frozen and delivered to the food pantry. Since September, they have cooked more than 1,200 individual servings in easy-to-reheat packages.

"The meals fly out the door within a week," O'Connor said, "which inspires the group to increase the cooking effort each month."

They provide stick-to-the-ribs fare like spaghetti and meat sauce, chicken tetrazzini and turkey and dressing. The cooks have started supplementing the packaged meals with quarts of hearty soups and stews.

Now, Chubb said, she counts the program's expansion by the number of electric roasters on hand. They need nine large cookers because the small kitchen in the parish hall only has a home-style stove, she said. A third of the proceeds from the monthly dinners go toward supplies for "pantry cook days."

Another third buys food for the local food pantry, and a third goes toward direct family assistance.

Meeting a need
The reason for all this outreach is simple, Chubb said. "I have people who just refuse to let people go to bed hungry. There's a need, and it's something they can do. People like to cook, so it's not even like work."

The effort's success hasn't been lost on the parish. "It makes people realize you don't have to be a mega-church to really make a difference in people's lives," Chubb said. "We don't have a lot of people, but we can take this on." Small churches, she said, often exhibit a "we-can't-do-something" attitude.

"There's none of that here," she said. "They know they can do these things."

The parish continues to expand its work. Members have volunteered to staff the food pantry so it can be open on Sunday afternoons as well as its usual two mornings a week. "With the increase in working families unable to make ends meet, we thought that would enable us to reach out to additional families that might need assistance," O'Connor said.

All the extra cooking has become something more than outreach for St. Timothy's, Chubb said. Now it's a mission, but one that belongs to the people there.

"They do it," she said. "I help cook when I can, but it's really their ministry. I just get to be the cheerleader."

-- Melodie Woerman is editor of The Harvest, newspaper of the Diocese of Kansas, where she is director of communication. She is also a member of the Episcopal Life Media Board of Governors.

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