Lenexa United Methodist Church has long-served meals to the community on Wednesday nights.
But the service took off the during the pandemic when the event’s format was modified to be curbside pickup instead of an in-person meal inside the church.
In the nearly three years since launching the free to-go meals service, the church at 9138 Caenen Lake Rd. has handed out dozens of meals per week and recently served its 10,000th meal.
Now, Lenexa UMC is making plans to continue the program into the foreseeable future.
Pre-pandemic the meals were served in person
- Historically, Lenexa UMC’s Wednesday night meals were mostly done in-person and were mostly for congregation members.
- The meals often served individuals already in the building for activities, like choir practice or an evening meeting, business administrator for the church Linda Stokes said.
- When COVID-19 hit and everything went into lockdown, the church’s meal nights also came to a screeching halt.
The meals changed during the lockdown
- Behind the scenes, church leaders were working to get the service running again, but in a COVID-safe way,
- From there, Wayne Dothage, chair of inviting ministries at the church, said the idea for a curbside to-go meal service was born.
- Each Wednesday, anyone can drive up to the church’s west parking lot between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. and get a sack meal with a pulled pork sandwich, a bag of chips and a cookie.
10,000th curbside meal served in February
- Stokes says the meal service as a drive thru has worked well, attracting more people than the sit down meal in the dining hall ever did.
- On a Wednesday night, they’ll serve on average about 70 people, with an uptick in traffic over the summer months.
- Since the first to-go meal was served in May 2020 to the first week in February of this year, 10,000 meals have been served curbside, the church says.
- Stokes keeps track of how many meals are served each week in a spreadsheet as a way to record community impact, which is how she knew when the church had hit its milestone.
The focus turned to addressing food insecurity
- Initially, the meal service was just about feeding people already at the church.
- Since 2020, it’s taken on a new mission, Dothage said: addressing food insecurity.
- People can always count on the regular meal, and accessing it in your car instead of having to go inside is just less intimidating for some, Dothage said.
- “Some people order enough meals that they can have meals for the remainder of the week,” he said. “It’s a combination of outreach to the community and then service to our own congregation.”
They will keep meal service drive thru going forward
- Though the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, the church plans to keep the curbside meal service going.
- “The belief is if we went back to inside, our numbers would go down and we wouldn’t be servicing the community in the same way that we are,” Stokes said.
Read about another local church’s milestone: This Johnson County church turns 110 this month
