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Community
Soup kitchen offers free lunch, focus on fellowship
Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by DARWIN WEIGEL
Ashyia Higgins, 3, left, Roschell Gantt of
Lexington Park and Ricky Williams III, 1, eat homemade chicken noodle soup and hotdogs and beans.
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Renee Gross of Lusby had always dreamed of opening her own restaurant. Today she operates a soup kitchen, but to Gross it's almost more rewarding.
"We do it because we're not worried about the profits; we just love the cooking, the friends and the fellowship," Gross said of the soup kitchen that she and Francine Clark have started through St. John United Methodist Church in Lusby.
The soup kitchen is held in the East-John Youth Center, also in Lusby, and runs every Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Clark, a Dowell resident and the administrative council chair of the congregation, said the soup kitchen has run for four consecutive Fridays and is "aimed at the community as a whole."
"We're just trying to get a feel for what the need is," Clark said, adding she's hoping enough word of mouth will expand the initiative to the point where it could happen more than once a week.
"We want to see this place packed. If there's a need, we really want to give that service to the community," she said.
Clark said she believes the current recession is "definitely" a factor in increasing the need for a soup kitchen and explained that the initiative was first started several years ago by a former St. John pastor, the Rev. Irvin Beverly. She said the soup kitchen diminished following Beverly's move to a St. Mary's County parish.
Nevertheless, Clark said that after an outdated advertisement for Beverly's program was accidently published and someone showed up at the previous venue, she realized a soup kitchen could be a valuable asset to the community.
"We were like, ‘we have to open this back up,' because if someone came, then there's a need for it," she said.
Because the soup kitchen is based out of the youth center, which is a United Way agency and an affiliate of the Tobacco Coalition, the program is also being used to promote health and wellness.
"We're going to use this as a captive audience to get health issues into the community," said Nancy Smith, who is a program director at East-John Youth Center.
"You're able to get into the community that wouldn't normally have access to this info," said Smith, who cited health topics promoted at the soup kitchen as including prostate and colon cancer.
The idea of community itself was one of the leading factors drawing people — some of whom said they were already retired and had not been severely affected by the economy — into the soup kitchen.
One of these individuals was Constance Johnson of Dowell who said it was her second week attending.
"I knew it was soup today and I thought it would be nice to come out; it's fellowship," Johnson said.
Others, including Anna Gross of Lusby, came out to support their church.
"It's part of our church and [East-John Youth Center] is a beautiful place too," she said, adding that supporting the soup kitchen was "what our pastor would want us to do."
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