Food begets community. Just ask the churches across the Diocese of Southern Ohio that grow it, harvest it, process it, sell it, prepare it, serve it and distribute it. Whether they feed the hungry or cultivate the soil, congregations that sponsor food ministries are finding plentiful opportunities to share God’s love— and God’s bounty—with neighbors and strangers alike.
Church of the Advent on the near east side of Cincinnati has long understood the power of food to create community. The church’s expansive food ministry is part of its Open Door program, which began almost fifty years ago and has evolved to meet the needs of its Walnut Hill neighborhood. Today it seeks to respond to physical needs, especially the food insecurity experienced by many of its neighbors, and to the emotional and spiritual needs of loneliness and isolation.
Each Wednesday morning, the parish offers a food pantry and café that provides fresh produce, meat, dairy, canned goods, and pantry staples, as well as hot coffee and warm conversation, while observing COVID-mitigating protocols when local health data dictates. Through these conversations, the Open Door team learned that many of the church’s neighbors could not make it to the church on Wednesday morning, and so other initiatives were born. The Just Food Project began in 2021, and now includes a garden, an orchard and frequent community meals. A Free Fridge has also recently opened.
“The question seems to be, ‘What can we do uniquely?’” said Matt Latchaw, minister for community engagement at Church of the Advent, who joined the staff early in the pandemic. “Can we return to making space for people to sit and be with one another again? Could we, as a congregation, meet Christ in our neighbors? How can we begin to see where God is already at work rather than being a provider of goods?” The Good News Garden, located a few blocks from the church, is at the heart of the project. The garden came under Advent’s care in 2021, and the church hired Lyric Morris-Latchaw, who is married to Latchaw, as its custodian. The garden hosts volunteer days on Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings and donates its harvest to the congregation’s own food pantry and to other neighborhood pantries and
meal programs.
Its produce includes annual and perennial vegetables and fruits, and gardeners try to accommodate requests from clients of the food pantry. Tomatoes, green tomatoes, collard greens, okra, and peppers have been popular this year. The garden also grows flowers that are distributed at the pantry and donated to a local pollinator habitat.
“The garden has provided a connection to memories and family histories for clients, volunteers from the congregation and those from the neighborhood,” Latchaw said. “Recalling foods served by parents and grandparents and re-creating those remembered family recipes has been a source of delight for many who have come to us in this space.”
In addition to the garden, the parish has worked with Cincinnati’s Common Orchard Project to plant a cherry tree and two varieties each of apple, pear, and peach trees on church grounds. The young trees will produce only a small yield next year, but the harvest will increase as the trees grow.
The earliest Christian communities gathered around a meal, and the power of table fellowship is not lost on the leaders of Church of the Advent. In 2021, they initiated the Holy Family Service at 5 p. m. on Saturday evenings, conceiving it—in the words of the parish’s website—as “a new Episcopal community of faith and practice exploring creative ways to gather around food, hospitality, the arts, and the life of the neighborhood.”
The Rev. Jason Oden, who served as Advent’s priest-in-charge until he became the diocese’s canon for formation and new Episcopal communities, believes the service “emphasizes the relationship between liturgy and mission.”
“Outreach is a result of a vibrant congregation,” he said. Parish leaders have designed the service, which concludes with a meal, in the hopes of reaching people who may have become disconnected from the faith of their childhood or who are seeking new ways to express their faith.
Latchaw sees all of Advent’s ministries as part of a larger whole. “We want to work with our neighbors and with other groups to advocate for our neighborhood and its needs,” he said. “Can we provide a space for health care or work with the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation toward ending the local food desert? There has been no grocery store here for five years.”
Seventy-five miles northeast of Walnut Hills, All Saints, Washington Court House also grows crops to complement its traditional food ministry. The Come Grow with Us program began in 2011 when parishioner Bob Rea donated the use of 22 acres on which crops— corn that first year—could be raised and sold to subsidize the congregation’s outreach ministries.
“I stole the idea and modified it,” Rea said, explaining that he was inspired by Warren Buffett’s son Howard, a commercial farmer, who donates to local food banks through family farms in Illinois and Nebraska.
Over the years, other parishioners and neighbors have joined the effort, offering land for planting, and donating seeds, fertilizer and labor for planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crop. The program has continued, using land on several farms—most owned by members of the All Saints congregation—to grow soybeans or corn.
The program’s success lies in “being connected and knowing who to call,” Rea said. “When folks have hundreds of acres of farmland, asking that 20 acres be set aside is a deeply appreciated but small commitment of their land.”
Local businesses, particularly Cargill, a multi-national corporation that operates grain elevators in nearby Bloomingburg, also have chipped in. “Agribusinesses often have marketing budgets, money that they may have a hard time placing in small communities,” Rea said. “Cargill has been a willing partner for us along the way.”
This year, the program had 31 acres under cultivation and raised $14,500 for All Saints’s outreach programs. In its 11 years of operation, Come Grow with Us has raised between $10,000 and $20,000 each year, and all of the money has been donated to area ministries through All Saints and its parish leadership team. The St. Vincent DePaul Society of St. Colman of Cloyne Catholic Church is a regular beneficiary, as are the local food bank, Second Chance Center of Hope, and an area pregnancy center.
Rea said an invitation he issued through the diocese to other rural parishes to develop similar programs to fund their outreach ministries remains open. The parish has also collaborated with Cargill to start the Harvest Express Program, which allows farmers to donate a portion of their grain to help fund community programs. That initiative was the feature of a video presentation at diocesan convention in 2013 and may be found on the diocesan YouTube channel.
“We’re a small parish and don’t have the manpower to accomplish all these ministries on our own,” said the Rev. Warren Huestis, the priest at All Saints, a Lutheran-Episcopal congregation formed in 2018. “Funding programs in the larger community allows us to participate even if we’re not always ‘hands on.’”
Along the Ohio River, on the diocese’s southern border, the Rev. Joshua Nelson also knows what it is like to minister in communities where poverty is common. He serves Grace Church in Pomeroy and St. Peter’s Church in Gallipolis, two small, 180-year-old parishes with outreach ministries that are essential to their communities.
St. Peter’s has hosted a meals program, called Loaves and Fishes, for more than 30 years. The ministry, which is supported by a grant from Episcopal Community Ministries, provides a hot noon meal one Sunday a month, said Nelson, who grew up in nearby Circleville and began his ministry with the two churches in February 2021.
During the pandemic, the ministry switched from a plated meal to carryout boxes, which kept
people fed but resulted in what Nelson called a loss of “the community that was so important to its ministerial identity.” In recent months, they have resumed indoor dining, and are seeing a return of members of the community, “not necessarily in need of food, but looking for fellowship and community,” Nelson said. The congregation recently purchased a grill, and that provides what Nelson describes as “olfactory advertising.”
St. Peter’s and the churches with which it collaborates in Loaves and Fishes also make items such as used clothing and shoes, toiletries, diapers and feminine hygiene products available to their guests on the Sundays they serve meals. The program “is not a feeding ministry per se, but another way to build a different kind of community,” Nelson said.
The church’s location in downtown Gallipolis makes its front yard an ideal spot for the town’s Tiny Pantry box. Nelson said the church tries to pay special attention to the unhoused people in Gallipolis, making sure easy-to-eat items like fruit cups and canned Vienna sausages are available.
“At least every day somebody comes by and gets something from there,” he said. “It’s another kind of extended community.”
Read this story in the Winter 2022 edition of Connections Magazine.
