By Pastor Keith Kannenburg
For The Salisbury Post
KANNAPOLIS ó Times are tough. There is no doubt about that. Perhaps no one knows that better around here than Junior Browning of Blackwelder Park Baptist Church in Kannapolis. Browning runs the local food pantry at the church and has spent most of the past year riding back and forth between grocery store and church carrying food to stock the shelves for the next day of ministry.
“It’s bad out there,” says Browning. “A lot of folks are out of work, and the church needs to help them as best we can.”
Money is tight and groceries are expensive; so expensive that Browning has had difficulty in recent months keeping up with the demand.
“We get a lot of food from Second Harvest Food Bank, but things are so bad that they are even running low,” he says. “They do all they can, but there is a limit as to how much food we can get from them.”
Browning is grateful that Blackwelder Park Baptist Church has a heart for the needs of the community, and gladly puts the budgeted funds to work to purchase food, but even that resource is quickly depleted.
Browning expresses great appreciation for those individuals that step up to the plate and donate their personal resources to meet the needs of the community.
“Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t come up to me and hand me money to purchase groceries with,” Browning says. “The people around here have a heart for those in need. I think its because a lot of the folks at the church know what it is like to walk in those shoes.”
Stocking the shelves became more and more difficult until another person at the church caught the same vision that Browning had for the less fortunate in her community. A close friend of Browning’s, Meredith Bare, a young woman at Blackwelder Park, or “The Park” as she likes to call it, saw the need and decided to do something about it.
Bare challenged Browning and the people of the church 50 and older to a competition to see who could raise the most food for the pantry.
It was the old against the young.
For one month, the church was challenged to bring as much food to the pantry as possible. On one side of the gymnasium was an ever-growing pile of food with a sign hanging over it saying “50 and up,” and on the other side was an equally growing pile of food with a sign reading “50 and under.”
The prize?
If the older folks won, the church would sing only hymns for a month. If the younger folks won the church would sing only praise choruses for the same month.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster. But throwing caution to the wind, they let the games begin.
“It started out first with a grocery bag here and a grocery bag there,” said Pastor Keith Kannenberg. “Then it escalated. The next thing I knew, food was coming in by the van and truck load. I mean, these folks took the challenge to heart. It started getting a little scary around here.”
When the last bag of pintos was weighed the grand total came to 6,595 pounds of food!
“That is simply amazing!” Browning says. “Entire schools don’t raise half that much when they have food drives. This little church got crazy.”
When asked, “Who won?” the only reply Browning and Bare offer is “The poor.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s what Jesus would say.
Maybe the church got it right for a change.
Pastor Keith Kannenburg is senior pastor of Blackwelder Park Baptist Church.