Jann Yates still had three plates of Thanksgiving dinner left when she got done with her deliveries, and as she headed back to First Baptist Church, Glencoe, she asked God to show her who needed them.
After a few minutes as she was passing a laundromat, she saw a woman sitting inside and felt compelled to go talk with her. The minute Yates offered her the food, the woman burst into tears. She and her son and daughter hadn’t been able to afford a Thanksgiving dinner this year.
It’s for people like her that First, Glencoe, decided to attempt a God-sized project this year — to provide the community with a Thanksgiving dinner, said church member Beth Webster.
“Normally Gadsden has a community meal,” she said. “But this year with COVID-19, they decided not to do it.”
So missions volunteers at Webster’s church started considering at least providing the Glencoe community with a meal.
‘Take them Jesus’
“We thought, ‘We have outside doors to our kitchen; we think we could have a drive-through and keep it safe,’” she said.
Then they added someone to their team — Kagan Brown, who had previously worked on the Gadsden community meal committee — and the ball really started rolling. As word of the meal got out, they started adding other area churches and businesses as partners, and the meal count started going up.
They had a list of recipients ranging from residents of low-income housing and senior living facilities to dialysis patients.
“Our church secretary took a lot of the calls of people who wanted deliveries, and it was getting to her, hearing people’s stories,” Webster said.
Many who called said their children weren’t going to be able to come this year because of COVID-19, and they were going to be all by themselves, so they weren’t cooking.
The church’s plan had started at 250 plates, and by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, they had prepared for 1,500.
“Our motivation was that people are still so isolated and so depressed and discouraged by COVID-19, we need to take Jesus to them,” Webster said. “We’ve got to do something to let them know He cares about them, that He sees their situation.”
So volunteers from First, Glencoe — along with North Glencoe Baptist Church; College Heights Baptist Church; Cross Creek Baptist Church, Hokes Bluff; Faith Worship Center, a Church of God congregation; and East Gadsden Church of the Nazarene — were up at 4:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day smoking and frying turkeys and preparing all the side items.
‘Plan of salvation’
They added a card to every meal with the message of Jesus, and they also had a team of volunteers talking with people as they waited in line and offering Bibles and prayer.
“We wanted to share the plan of salvation with some food and offer mental and emotional support,” Webster said. “We were looking for open doors and opportunities to share God’s love.”
Donny Yarbrough, pastor of First, Glencoe, said they wanted to “meet tangible needs and spiritual needs and show love to our community.”
“It was certainly a team effort,” he said. “We set out from the beginning just to trust the Lord in that process, and we were very, very blessed.”
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