For four years, Jeremy Lynch has been behind the wheel of the Rolling Food Pantry, a bus designed to provide fresh food to people in the River Region, an area considered a critical food desert.
“In March 2020, we began partnering with churches to host gospel food distributions in order to share the gospel, get the church outside the walls of the church and feed hungry people in our community,” said Lynch, who serves as director of Love Loud River Region, the Montgomery Baptist Association ministry that runs the Rolling Food Pantry.
It was a joint effort to get it going, he said — in 2019, MBA received a grant from United Way to buy the bus and remodel the interior to serve as a food pantry.
And now the ministry has gotten another upgrade — a grant from Feeding America Donors and The Walmart Foundation in partnership through the Heart of Alabama Food Bank has helped purchase a trailer that can serve as a refrigerator and freezer.
‘Ever-faithful’ team
Neal Hughes, MBA director of missions for Montgomery Association, said for a long time, the Love Loud River Region team has had to transport perishables packed in ice.
“Now they can deliver the produce and meats dry, keep them from being spoiled and deliver the food to the ‘least of these’ in the River Region,” Hughes said. “A big thanks goes out to the ever-faithful team leader Jeremy Lynch and his band of merry missionaries.”
The trailer has been on the road with the bus since January, and Lynch said he can already tell it’s making a difference.
He said he’s grateful for local churches who have let the ministry use their freezer and fridge space in the past at no charge, but now he and others don’t have to spend time going back and forth transporting perishable items from donors to the refrigerator space.
The trailer “will truly allow us to become more mobile in receiving and picking up and refrigerating and or freezing food for our rural churches or those that don’t have large enough storage space,” he said.
This year, the Rolling Food Pantry has already distributed more than 130,000 pounds of food through 12 churches in the River Region.
“A huge thanks to the Father for us continuing to be mobile and use the resources of the local church to host these mass food distributions,” Lynch said. “And also our churches are able to receive funding through the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions Hunger Funds to continue to multiply their efforts in purchasing food and mobilizing it every month.”
For more information, visit mgmbaptists.org/initiatives/mbacm/love-loud-river-region.
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