We prayed about it, talked about it and accepted the offer. When I asked her why she chose us she said, "because of your faithfulness". That was quite a complement and also significant to our own ministry. For years we've been telling people that we're not qualified to do the things we do, God empowers us simply because we are faithful.
At first they only gave us one store and we only got to pick up every other Saturday. We didn't think that was enough to build a distribution system so at first we just gave to the people in our complex. We usually got about a half a van load so getting the food distributed wasn't much of a problem. After a month or so of faithfully picking up, they gave us another store to pick up and let us pickup at the original store every Saturday. Now we had a little too much to distribute in our parking lot.
I talked to my sister who was attending North Village Baptist Church at the time. The pastor allowed her to use their fellowship hall and now the food ministry had a home. The church is situated in a depressed area of Phoenix (Sunnylope) so getting the word out was a little time consuming. The church listed us as one of their ministries but their membership was not large. Most of the members didn't need the help and were from locations outside of the neighborhood.
We set up the fellowship hall as best we could, at this point the church was not involved at all other than providing the space. (which we really appreciated) We were for the most part autonomous. During the first few months we had only a handful of people from the neighborhood. My sister worked with another person who did a food ministry at her church, she would always take the excess so there was little or no waste. Then another volunteer started delivering some of the excess food to members of her church.
Before too long, the word got out in the neighborhood and we no longer had too much of an excess to worry about. Somewhere about that time we got a 3rd store and the food ministry was well on it's way. The third store required a daily commitment. The church allowed us to use their refrigerators and freezers. We would store the food from each day so we had enough on Saturdays. We worked that way for a long time.
The ministry grew, we regularly had anywhere from 30-60 people who would come to get food. It's neat to watch God work. When we have a lot of food we have a lot of people, when we don't get much food it seems that not that many people show up. Usually at least once I'll hear someone say, "That's my favorite" or "I haven't had that in years". God is so good to us, everyone seems to get something they really enjoy once in a while.
After the ministry had grown and become pretty established as a neighborhood staple, the church allowed another ministry to partner with them and also use the facility on Saturday mornings. At first we were overjoyed to have involvement from the church. We didn't realize it for a while, but the new ministry was overstepping their bounds. They brought in their own people to run our ministry. We tried to work with them, but finally Saturday morning bore no resemblance to our ministry and most of our regulars had stopped coming.
Reluctantly we left the church. One of our volunteers just started distributing from their own home. God birthed another ministry! Because of their faithfulness, they got more contacts and sometimes they get more food that we do. We distributed our food like that for several months, we lost one volunteer during that time, but the rest stayed on with us. They let us know that they were behind us in whatever we decided to do. That was such a nice feeling for us as ministry leaders.
Eventually the church discovered what the other ministry was doing and asked them to leave. The same week pastor Phil invited us back. We prayed about it and accepted the offer. It was truly surprising our first Saturday back, we had about 40 or so people and most of them were our old regulars!
We really believe that this is what God intends for us to do, and where we're supposed to be. We now have an official liaison to the church in the form of Tree of Life Ministry Which was started by members of North Village.
You can always keep up with the food ministry on the Cross Roads forum.
Any changes or announcements will probably show up there first. If you're a volunteer we urge you to come and join us on the Cross Roads, we really do want your input!
