#the amount of ancient fake flower arrangements one church can accumulate is truly staggering

[inthenightsoupkitchen]

The Church Meeting

This week was the bimonthly congregational meeting which, because we are Methodists, is just one more excuse to get together and eat food. I came up in the Evangelical Free church, which I escaped in college for many, many reasons, but one that I didn’t even know about at the time was that they just do not take food seriously. Hot dogs and spaghetti dinners were the usual high points of food-eating time at my childhood church, and even those were few and far between. Then I found the United Methodist Church. Wow. 

My first United Methodist church (it was not a First United Methodist Church, although I have been to those as well, ha-ha) was a very small congregation indeed, about fifty people knocking around one of those beautiful old historic churches. But even with such a small group, the food was always A++. Monthly potluck just so everybody could get together and eat, plus Sunday morning snacks. It was great! I picked up some good good recipes there. Also, we were super-duper poor at that point in our lives, and people were incredibly nice about slipping us leftovers. Food is a love language, and it’s definitely one of mine. I honestly grieved for two years after we moved away because I missed that church so much. But it’s a happy story too, they’ve got 150 people now and are doing very well, so hey! 

In any case, you can’t have a church council meeting or a charge conference without dinner, that would be an abomination. My friend Aaron (I am changing peoples’ names here for privacy, btw) runs Week 1 of the Soup Kitchen and he’s also in charge of cooking for these meetings. He is really good at bulk cooking. The meal was gallons and gallons of chicken cassoulet, a big green salad, and these amazing rolls. So good. Typically after the dinner I go and help with childcare, my other ministry thing, but this time I had to stick around and get voted in. I then ended up almost missing it anyway because Aaron and Ross who runs Week 2 and I were trying to figure out how to move all the leftovers across the street to the soup kitchen. There was enough left that it could be the main dish for soup kitchen this week, saving everyone some money and time. 

Eventually we decided to do it after the meeting and I got back in there in time to become Officially In Charge Of The Thing. It took me almost the entire meeting and reading all the paperwork to figure out what my position actually is and when I need to get voted on again. Back in my little church, I was on the church council as well, but that also meant being part of the board of trustees and any other board need that happened to come up, because there were so few of us. I once became Vice President of the Board of Trustees because somebody volunteered me when I was out of the room. This church is a little bit more formalized than that, but I think I’ve got it figured out now. 

The pastor then preached a sermon, which was unusual but I totally rolled with it because it was super good. As any among you who are Methodists probably know, the church is currently losing its collective shit over the issue of whether gay people are worth giving equal rights to, and the current political atmosphere is doing nothing to heal that growing schism. He couldn’t tell us much more than that we have to wait, and that anybody who tells you this is a settled question or that they have the weight of the church behind their answer is lying, which is a useful message right now. But then he went on to talk about how to separate bad theology from good theology, and I wound up taking notes on a sermon for the first time in like a decade. 

Our theology is a message of love, mercy, and grace. Bad theology says God calls you to come to him where he is, and you have to somehow get there from where you are. Love says that God goes to you where you are, wherever you are. Bad theology says God helps those who help themselves. Mercy says that God helps, period. Bad theology says that God has a reason why he makes bad things happen to us. Grace says that God doesn’t make those things happen, but he can create reason and new purpose through the chaos and wreckage. It was a powerful message in a week when people were working hard to co-opt the message of the church with some very bad theology. (Wesleyan Covenant Association,yes that does mean you, and what the hell are you doing on Tumblr anyway?) 

Anyway, after the meeting wrapped up, it was time to move food. I got trapped into a meeting with the new mission board director, my new boss (I will discuss this meeting later), and by the time I finally managed to get to my cassoulet-moving, Aaron and Ross were both gone. Argh. So I got myself a little handcart and I pulled my little car up to the door, and I moved myself ten gallons of cassoulet and seven gallon bags of salad (lot of leftovers that night!) into my trunk and eventually across the street and into the kitchen at the other building. It was dark and spooky over there (this was almost 9pm by now), so I started singing hymns as I flipped on the lights to look for ghosts and murderers who might want to steal my cassoulet. Neither showed up, but one other church member did, and he was incredibly nice and helped me get everything labeled and washed and packed away for soup kitchen on Saturday. With his help, it didn’t take more than twenty minutes or so, and I didn’t have to sing the whole time, so extra bonus! But food is very important to us, we don’t want it to go to waste.