There Really Isn't That Much Soup

I have meant to post here more than I have been, there has been plenty going on, but I just haven’t had the time. It takes enough hours to actually run the soup kitchen, let alone share anecdotes about it! But sometimes I’ve just got to vent. 

We had another church council meeting tonight. Since the last one, we’ve had two mission board meetings (I get to be on mission board because I run a mission ministry), and at the last one we got the discouraging news that our already small budget would be cut by 1/3 from last year. Several people had come forwards with new possibilities for ministries to support or missions to get involved in, but now we were faced with how to make our money go around with the missions we already had. That was depressing, but we persevered, and decided to ask the finance committee if they could shake anything else loose for our important work. 

At the church council meeting tonight, we got a new budget for approval. Apparently the numbers had changed considerably since our last meeting, due to the lapsing of quite a large recurring gift to the church, and many things had needed to be cut back. When I flipped to the missions budget, it took me a minute to understand what had happened, because there wasn’t one. 

They zeroed us out. 

Tomorrow is Week One soup kitchen again, so tonight I am busying myself with making up 15 pounds of beef sloppy joes (back in Illinois we called it barbecue, but people get really confused when I do that here in the south!) and prepping for the bread donation. While I’m waiting for the beef to cool, I’ve been reading on Facebook about the Cadbury Easter controversy. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost a couple IQ points as a result, but I really should know better by now. 

I have been a Christian since before I could read or have any constructive understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Lifelong membership, got the old Awana vests to prove it and everything. I still do not understand the obsession people have with making sure that things are labeled for Christians. Why do Cadbury eggs have to be “Easter” eggs? Why are they “Christmas” trees and no other arboreal decoration will do? Didn’t we used to be pissed that people were cluttering up our religious holidays with candy eggs and pretty trees? How are they all of a sudden our sacred symbols? Does it honor God for Christians to buy peanut butter cups in a fit of pique? 

We do not proseletyze at the soup kitchen. There is a blessing before the meal, because we have one for every church meal, including the one we share with our soup kitchen visitors, but that’s pretty much it. I mean, the soup kitchen is right in the fellowship hall of the Methodist Church, nobody’s gonna miss the fact that this is a religious endeavor, but the last thing we want to do is shove Christianity down people’s throats. If you’re doing it right, you don’t need to shove it down anybody’s throat. God didn’t say “And by this everyone will know that you are my disciples: that you boycott coffee chains and candy companies for insufficient religious iconography.” At its best, when it’s working right, the soup kitchen is an act of pure love, feeding people because they are hungry and we have food. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing, being the hands of God on earth for people who may not know who God is. Throwing a lot of extra religion onto that is extraneous at best, harmful at worst. 

The Boy Scouts have Week Four in our monthly rotation, and they do a great job. When we had our leaders meeting last month, the husband and wife who run the troop joked that the only proseletyzing they do is recruiting for the Boy Scouts. But you know, they don’t have to work too hard at it. When they’ve got their troop working at the serving tables, working together, taking care of people, having a good time with each other, it is easy for a boy who is coming in just to eat to look at that and feel interested. Ten minutes of watching real Boy Scouts do Boy Scout things is far more effective than an hour lecture from one of the leaders on the history and philosophy of Scouting. It is infinitely more effective than if the Boy Scouts were to begin a public relations campaign where most of their identity is framed in terms of people they will not associate with and things that are not Boy Scout enough for them. Is this a heavy-handed metaphor for something? Maaaaaaaaaaaaybe....

Things are proceeding apace in soup-kitchen-land, I have drawn up my food safety documents and sent them off to be laminated, and we have a brand spanking new OSHA-certified first aid kit in the kitchen! Sweet! I brought it up today to my friend who runs the children’s ministries and she was a little bit grumpy because she’d ordered one of those too, but it accidentally got sent over to the little kitchen in the new building instead of put in the children’s wing. Unfortunate, but there are enough bandaids and such to go around for now, and the children’s ministry really does have a lot less knives and open flames and stuff. I hope, anyway! I got over to the mission board meeting and learned more about how to spend my budget (sort of, parts of it were kind of confusing, but I got the basics), so now I just need to get all the new supplies picked out. And it looks like we’re going to be doing Cajun food theme for my actual cooking week in the kitchen, so I need to find a good recipe for really, really large amounts of gumbo. 

This time of year, the Lenten season, is also the time when commitment sheets go out to the church and we try to get people signed up for stuff. It’s the tithing commitment, how much money everybody plans to give to the church for the next year, but it’s also for the prayer chain, the children’s ministry, the hospitality team, and this year, the soup kitchen too! That’s right, we got nearly top-level billing as a major ministry of the church. Which is awesome, because it really is an important ministry and I’m very proud of it, but I’m kind of concerned that it might lead to a bunch of volunteers. 

I know, counterintuitive, right? In most church ministries, getting volunteers is like panning for gold, and there’s never enough good people to go around. But I’ve been very lucky so far, and I inherited four strong teams for my four weeks every month. Two of the teams are already quite large, we’re talking sometimes upwards of fifteen volunteers on a Saturday morning. These are the teams that routinely take new people in. The other two groups are basically Sunday School classes who do soup kitchen as a ministry opportunity. They are much smaller teams, but they’ve been doing it forever and they have it down to a science. They do almost the same thing every month, but they do it well and everybody gets fed. Maybe it would be nice to see them open up to some new people, maybe it would be nice to get more variety in the menu, but I am loathe to mess with systems that are working, at least not right away when I know I’ve only got half a clue. The other two weeks are much more creative with the menus, so it’s not like it’s the same meal every week or anything. But the bottom line is, when I asked at the leaders’ meeting if anybody needed more volunteers, nobody raised their hands. 

So.... that’s a bit of a problem. The number one absolute cardinal sin of organizing volunteers, in my book anyway, is sending out a call for assistance and then not following up. You do not want to get people to sign up to help you out, or to show up to help you out, for that matter, and then not give them anything to do. It’s the same philosophy whether you’re organizing one week of the soup kitchen, when sometimes I’ve been absolutely scrambling to find useful work for our newer volunteers during the slower times, or when you’re organizing the whole shebang. Because of the team structure of the soup kitchen, there will be times, every once in awhile, when an entire team will retire or just dissolve, and then you need a lot of volunteers quickly. But in the normal course of things, just not so much. A big influx of volunteers could be extremely disruptive. And I may just be borrowing trouble here, anticipating that a bunch of people will sign up for soup kitchen who aren’t already helping, but honestly, we’re Methodists. Food is a big thing! And in a church with several hundred members, it’s certainly not impossible that we could see eight or ten interested people, and I could be standing there with my mouth hanging open and at a loss for what to do. That’s not a good feeling. 

So I took the question up with my pastor after he sent me a midnight email asking for a one-paragraph description of volunteering in the soup kitchen for the newsletter. I am always up at midnight anyway, but I think he was surprised at the speed with which I shot back a fairly detailed missive about my worries and some possible solutions. He mentioned that I was obviously a fast typist in his reply, which made me laugh, though I decided not to admit that I jumped on the opportunity to procrastinate in finishing the fanfic chapter I was working on. (It is still not finished.) Right now we are just hanging back to see how the volunteer situation actually plays out and whether there are any or many new volunteers. Depending on how many there are, we could do a couple of things. Some people could be routed to the community dinner team, the folks who get together every other month to put together the big all-church dinner. They always need more help, and it’s a similar skillset to soup kitchen, at least. Some people could help out with hospitality on Sunday mornings, helping people feel welcome and get coffee and stuff before church or Sunday school. Not very much the same, but in the same hospitality-and-helping vein. 

If we were to somehow get lots and lots of volunteers, it’s possible that we might take a stab at expanding the mission. That’s always the most dangerous and exciting time for any ministry. Right now, our town has soup kitchens six days a week, every day a different church. There used to be soup kitchens every day, but the Sunday one closed down awhile ago and has not been replaced. I worry about that quite a bit, especially since it’s a day when the kids aren’t getting fed at school either. Right now we’ve been sort of obliquely dealing with it by providing to-go meals whenever we have extra food available, and Panera Bread is a godsend with their donations of day-old products that we make available for visitors to take home. I know a lot of people are getting their Sunday breakfasts and maybe more from their donated breads and bagels. But if we had enough volunteers to stretch to one or two more teams, maybe we could do at least one or two Sunday meals a month. Maybe we could even partner with another church to get Sunday meals up and running again. Wouldn’t that be great, a place available every day of the week? I don’t know if it’s feasible, I don’t know if we can make it happen soon or ever, but man, I would really like to. April 2 is the big day for turning in commitment cards, so we shall see! 

In summary, I was going to end this entry with a cartoon about volunteering or soup kitchens because Tumblr, but all the ones I found were incredibly treacly or political commentary from five or ten or twenty years ago. So here’s Gordon Ramsay instead. 

After a couple weeks of planning, I finally got all my team leaders together for a meeting, very exciting. I brought doughnuts because who doesn’t love doughnuts, and also cookies because my social anxiety leads me to overcompensate for things. Being in charge is kind of stressful. Anyway, I finally got them all in one place to sit down and talk, and it was good! It took an extra ten minutes to get the meeting started because nobody really listened to me when I suggested we start the meeting, but yeah. There is a fine line between being overbearing, assertive, and timid, still working on that one. 

Once the meeting got started though, things were good. Three of my week leaders are guys, the fourth is a husband-and-wife team, but I didn’t have the same problems with these guys about not being listened to. We all talked, and I got some really good input on how things are going and stuff we could use for the kitchen. Common consensus is that our current pots and pans suck real bad and we need to replace them. I also learned what a rondeau pot is, and now that I know, I feel that we not only need one for the church, I need one (a smaller one) in my home. They look like this: 

When I was talking about the church meeting, I mentioned at the end that I got pulled aside by the new head of the mission board, the guy who’s basically my mini-boss in this slightly convoluted hierarchy. The first thing he told me was “I’m your boss, but I’m not really your boss, I’m behind you 100% and you get to run this thing, I’m just going to be offering up advice and suggestions to you, but I’m not really your boss.” History has taught me that if somebody tells you this once, it is probably accurate, but when they repeat it three or four times, you should start to worry. This conversation fell into the latter column. Bear in mind that I have been a member of the church for about a year and a half, but I don’t know a huge number of people if they don’t have kids or knit or attend my week of soup kitchen or my Sunday school class. So this is a guy I may have been introduced to once, but I had no idea who he is until one of my week leaders snagged me by the elbow while I was trying to arrange transport of ten gallons of warm cassoulet and introduced me. 

It wasn’t a bad conversation. It was, in general, a nice conversation, where he said he’s glad I’ve come on board, and he wants to help, and he wants to have a meeting with me and one of the other week leaders just to talk about how things are going and items of general concern. The thing is, he talked over me the entire time.Every time I tried to open my mouth and say something, he just kept going. And I mean I literally opened my mouth and tried to speak, but he didn’t care, he was going to talk and talk until he was done. The things I had to say did not really mean that much to him, certainly not as much as what he had to say. The fact that I had to move ten gallons of cassoulet for the soup kitchen also didn’t mean too much when I managed to sneak that in. So I didn’t know this guy, but I knew him, if you catch my drift. An older man with power and history in the church, who has excellent intentions and probably a kind heart, who will look at a woman half his age and immediately (most likely unconsciously) view her intellectual contributions as of lesser worth. I’ve known fifty just like him, and when I was growing up, it was just the norm. In the Evangelical Free Church, women cannot be leaders, so we’re stuck with a lifetime of back-benching and trying to get ideas up the ladder to the men who can make the decisions. Maybe that’s why I’m more sensitive to it now, because it figured so heavily in my decision to leave the church of my upbringing. 

Anyway, the gist of things I got from him is that some of the people doing soup kitchen right now are unhappy because it costs them too much money, which is valid. Our soup kitchen has a weird structure where the volunteers are responsible for providing the food for their week as well, with everybody either chipping in money or bringing in food. I do not like this system at all because it’s onerous to people who are already doing the work and discourages volunteerism from people who may have way more time and enthusiasm than money. I’ve got some ideas to change that, but I couldn’t fit them in edgewise, so we’ll see if I get to talk about them at some future meeting. The soup kitchen here’s been running for like ten years now, so a lot of its institutions are pretty well fixed as they are. I don’t want to upset the applecart with too much new all the time. 

The other thing he said was that people, including himself, were disturbed by the fact that the soup kitchen seemed to be serving the entire community and not just the most needy. This seemed to be connected to the idea that people were spending too much money, so I’m assuming he meant something like “maybe not all the people using the soup kitchen are poor enough.” That idea is just completely alien to me. I mean, does he think people are coming to the soup kitchen for fun, as an alternative to a light Saturday brunch at the Olive Garden? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m damn proud of the work we do in the soup kitchen, especially my own week. I would serve any of the food I’ve prepared at a family holiday, and in fact that’s where i get most of my recipes. But it’s still a soup kitchen, with all the small indignities that come along with that. If you come to eat a meal at the soup kitchen, it’s because you have a need. And maybe it’s not financial. Maybe you have enough money for food, but you never get to eat anything different. Maybe you are hoping that the Panera donation this week has some good stuff that you could never afford otherwise, even though you aren’t going hungry. Maybe you need to be around people and it’s hard to find a place that will just let you sit and be for awhile. Maybe you need to see people who will smile at you and give you something and not demand anything in return, just once a week. Maybe you need to feel love, even the general agape-style love of getting a home-cooked meal served hot. 

This week was the bimonthly congregational meeting which, because we are Methodists, is just one more excuse to get together and eat food. I came up in the Evangelical Free church, which I escaped in college for many, many reasons, but one that I didn’t even know about at the time was that they just do not take food seriously. Hot dogs and spaghetti dinners were the usual high points of food-eating time at my childhood church, and even those were few and far between. Then I found the United Methodist Church. Wow. 

My first United Methodist church (it was not a First United Methodist Church, although I have been to those as well, ha-ha) was a very small congregation indeed, about fifty people knocking around one of those beautiful old historic churches. But even with such a small group, the food was always A++. Monthly potluck just so everybody could get together and eat, plus Sunday morning snacks. It was great! I picked up some good good recipes there. Also, we were super-duper poor at that point in our lives, and people were incredibly nice about slipping us leftovers. Food is a love language, and it’s definitely one of mine. I honestly grieved for two years after we moved away because I missed that church so much. But it’s a happy story too, they’ve got 150 people now and are doing very well, so hey! 

In any case, you can’t have a church council meeting or a charge conference without dinner, that would be an abomination. My friend Aaron (I am changing peoples’ names here for privacy, btw) runs Week 1 of the Soup Kitchen and he’s also in charge of cooking for these meetings. He is really good at bulk cooking. The meal was gallons and gallons of chicken cassoulet, a big green salad, and these amazing rolls. So good. Typically after the dinner I go and help with childcare, my other ministry thing, but this time I had to stick around and get voted in. I then ended up almost missing it anyway because Aaron and Ross who runs Week 2 and I were trying to figure out how to move all the leftovers across the street to the soup kitchen. There was enough left that it could be the main dish for soup kitchen this week, saving everyone some money and time. 

Eventually we decided to do it after the meeting and I got back in there in time to become Officially In Charge Of The Thing. It took me almost the entire meeting and reading all the paperwork to figure out what my position actually is and when I need to get voted on again. Back in my little church, I was on the church council as well, but that also meant being part of the board of trustees and any other board need that happened to come up, because there were so few of us. I once became Vice President of the Board of Trustees because somebody volunteered me when I was out of the room. This church is a little bit more formalized than that, but I think I’ve got it figured out now. 

The pastor then preached a sermon, which was unusual but I totally rolled with it because it was super good. As any among you who are Methodists probably know, the church is currently losing its collective shit over the issue of whether gay people are worth giving equal rights to, and the current political atmosphere is doing nothing to heal that growing schism. He couldn’t tell us much more than that we have to wait, and that anybody who tells you this is a settled question or that they have the weight of the church behind their answer is lying, which is a useful message right now. But then he went on to talk about how to separate bad theology from good theology, and I wound up taking notes on a sermon for the first time in like a decade. 

Our theology is a message of love, mercy, and grace. Bad theology says God calls you to come to him where he is, and you have to somehow get there from where you are. Love says that God goes to you where you are, wherever you are. Bad theology says God helps those who help themselves. Mercy says that God helps, period. Bad theology says that God has a reason why he makes bad things happen to us. Grace says that God doesn’t make those things happen, but he can create reason and new purpose through the chaos and wreckage. It was a powerful message in a week when people were working hard to co-opt the message of the church with some very bad theology. (Wesleyan Covenant Association,yes that does mean you, and what the hell are you doing on Tumblr anyway?) 

Soup kitchen coordinator is also obliged to work one weekend per month at the soup kitchen. (Work at our soup kitchen is divided into teams, with one team for first Saturday, second Saturday, etc.) I’ve been attached to the First Saturday team for the past year, so that’s easy enough. Here’s some of our entrees for this month’s Taco Day! Our week has fifteen volunteers but only like three of us are comfortable bulk cooking, so I usually get people to help subsidize the ingredients and then do the cooking. Here’s 20 pounds of chicken taco meat and a massive pot of bean-and-rice burrito filling. 

If you ever get called upon to make 20 pounds of chicken taco meat, do not fear! Just buy a bulk-size bottle of taco seasoning and one bottle of mild salsa for every four pounds of boneless-skinless chicken breast. Put four pounds of chicken into a 6qt slow cooker, liberally season with taco seasoning, then dump a whole bottle of salsa over it. Cook it till it shreds easily with a fork, usually 4-5 hours. It’s delicious and tangy but not spicy, so even visitors with delicate stomachs can enjoy. We provided extra salsa for people who wanted to kick it up a bit more. 

There is something cool and special about having the keys to a place, even if it’s the sort of place that has a hundred keyholders already. The most obvious is that it makes your life a lot easier. This is my second Methodist church home, and in both cases the architecture has been such that I’m pretty sure the denominational motto was originally “Open hearts, open minds, lots of doors.” (That’s a little Methodist humor for you right there.) It is pretty much inevitable that at any time besides Sunday morning, there will be at least one locked door between you and any place you want to be. This goes from being a hassle without keys to being an opportunity to exercise your tiny superpower. On a more mundane note, it lets me do things like get into the kitchen and the custodial supply room for the inevitable half-dozen runs to collect plates, napkins, and whatever else we’ve run out of. 

The custodial supply closet is a trip, I tell you what. It’s not too far from the kitchen, but to get there you go down a dark hallway and up a ramp, then hook a sharp turn through an old Sunday School classroom that has since been repurposed into a half-dozen things, around a corner into a storage area, past our horrible excuse for a restroom that is perhaps the most embarrassing of the problems I have inherited with this job, till finally you arrive at a wooden door that says “Employees Only.” It uses the same key as every other one of the 2,475,381 doors in the church, but you really have to want it. It’s like picking a lock except with a key, and then when you open it, it’s like forcing your way into a wind tunnel because it’s also the HVAC closet. Almost pops your ears just walking in. You collect your plates or paper towels or whatever you came in for, contemplate what exactly that one old crockpot did to find itself consigned to purgatory amongst the paper goods, and head back out, where you’d better have left one arm free for the wrestling match with the door. Having opened once, it is now absolutely _loathe_ to close again, and must be fought into submission. This is especially good when there’s a little crowd of soup kitchen visitors standing around and waiting to use the restroom, because at least you’re providing some entertainment. 

So I just got tapped to run the soup kitchen program at my church, after a casual friend of mine had to step down from the position. My first reaction when I was asked to take over was “hell no,” because I like helping and loathe being in charge of things. Also this is a little Southern Methodist church where everyone is immensely friendly and welcoming but you’re still a newcomer if you don’t remember the big fight in aught-two over building the new worship space. I’ve been there about two years, if you generously include the little vacation I took from church after the election when I couldn’t look at my largely conservative co-parishoners without yelling at them that they needed way more Jesus, so I’m still very much a newbie. It’s hard to say whether anybody’s even going to take me seriously. The job also involves calling people on the phone and being able to organize things, which has my social anxiety and moderate executive dyfunction chiming in on the “hell, no!” thing. 

 But the soup kitchen is really important work and it’s a big part of why I chose to join this church in the first place (along with the benevolence fund and the food pantry. I’ve been food-insecure in the past, and I won’t belong to a church that wouldn’t care), so it deserves my support. I have ideas about ways to make it better, some of which will undoubtedly be terrible, some of which will be resisted with great force, and hopefully some of which can be implemented. I have some spare time, since right now my full-time occupation is spending four or five hours a day trying to persuade my young son that while the virtual school curriculum may be unexciting and learning to write proper letters is tedious, once it is done we can go ride bikes. I have foodservice experience, which is why my first round of suggestions for improvement is heavy on things like “let’s buy some foodservice-grade sanitizer for the counters” and “hairnets are super-good in the kitchen.” And most tantalizingly, the position comes with a seat on the mission board, which means becoming part of the church council. It means getting a voice, albeit a quiet one, into how things happen. Given my gleefully argumentative Sunday school classes and my collection of progressive bumper stickers, it’s probably a chance that’d be unlikely to roll around again soon.