Stop Hunger Now

Last year at Annual Conference in Lakeland, we had the privilege of packing meals for a great mission organization called Stop Hunger Now. Our Bishop's wife, the Rev. Pam Carter, issued a challenge to all churches in the conference - pack a million meals in the coming year. The youth group at BUMC raised money last year and packed meals while we were in China. Druid Hills UMC raised $2,500 in their Advent Mission Offering to package meals. Another local church, Wesley Chapel UMC, added some more funds and volunteers and today was the food packaging event. Stop Hunger Now provides everything you need to package meals on site. Sixty nine people total showed up to help - ranging in age from 3-91. From setup to cleanup, we were there for four hours and packaged 13,422 meals!!!!

  

Getting setup and transforming the Fellowship Hall 

 

 

 

Tracy from Stop Hunger Now giving us our instructions for the day 

 

 

Daryl praying before we started in on the meal packaging

 

Parker weighed the food bags and Wesley ran one of the heat sealer machines for part of the time, before moving over to the packaging table and also helping shuttle the boxed up meals to the truck.

 

Every 1,000 meals someone got to ring the gong. All four of my guys got their chance!

 

 

 

At the very end, we got to sample one of the food packages that Daryl had cooked in the kitchen - rice, vegetables, vitamin packet and soy protein. Davis really loved digging in and ate several of the little tester cups.

 

It was a really wonderful day of volunteering and having fun together. Stop Hunger Now will let us know in a few weeks where the meals we packaged together are being shipped. The best news is that the churches of the conference have really embraced the call to a million meals and we are far over that total with another five weeks until Annual Conference this year. We are excited to hear the final total then!