SIMPSON — The parking attendants arrive as early as 6 a.m. to begin letting in cars at Salem United Methodist Church, and before 9 a.m., a sheriff’s deputy is directing drivers along McDonald Street.
It’s hard to imagine that this is necessary for a church with an average Sunday morning attendance of 89. But two Saturdays a month, this village of 400 gets more than its share of traffic from the Share the Bounty Food Pantry.
People begin arriving as early as 4 a.m., parking at a neighboring day care center to be first in line for free food and diapers. Volunteers, many of them senior adults, turn out rain or shine to box up meats and produce, canned goods and cakes and load them into cars so that no one goes home empty-handed.
“It takes a lot of people to make it go,” coordinator Linda Marsal said as she passed through a 100-year-old house known as “The Hut” that the church has converted into a food distribution center.
“We didn’t start big,” she said. “We were just trying to put it together with what we had. None of us could visualize this.”
When church members began the ministry eight years ago, it was intended as an extension of Backpack Pals, a program that provides food for schoolchildren who might not have enough to eat at home over the weekend. Volunteers like Rebecca McLawhorn were concerned that the 35 to 40 G.R. Whitfield School students the church served through Backpack Pals during the school year might not have access to summer feeding programs that offer free meals for children. So volunteers created a flier and sent it home with the last backpack of the school year.
“You’ve got to remember we’re out here,” Marsal said of Simpson, which is more than 2 miles from the nearest grocery store and 5 miles or more from Pitt County Schools’ summer feeding locations. “There’s nothing in this area.”
The first Saturday the pantry was open, only five families showed up to receive packages of food. By the end of 2017, the number had grown to 40 families.
“We went out on faith,” McLawhorn, 92, said as she worked to pack more than 100 of what the church calls “Blessing Bags” containing items like pudding, fruit snacks and peanut butter for children.
“I had a call yesterday from a grandmother,” McLawhorn said in an interview July 6. “She said, ‘Are you all going to be open in the morning? I need some things for my grandchildren.’”
Ida Burnett understands the predicament; she is raising two grandsons and a granddaughter ages 10 to 15. The family needs more groceries in the summer when the kids are not eating two meals a day at school.
“When you’ve got three or four kids in the house, they can eat,” said Burnett, who discovered the pantry one Saturday when she stopped at the church because she thought it was hosting a yard sale. What Burnett found instead was something she didn’t bargain for: free food for her family.
“This helps a lot of people because groceries have gone up so high,” she said. “They really look out for the people that come there.”
Share the Bounty partners with the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, Beast Philanthropy and Food Lion’s retail recovery program. To qualify, recipients must complete a registration form that indicates they live at the poverty level. Income is self-reported.
“I used to get this question all the time: ‘How do you know if they really need the food?’ Marsal said. “I have a standard answer: ‘I’m not the food police. That’s between them and God.’ That’s just the best I could do.”
There are indicators that most recipients are needy rather than greedy. Some ride together to the distribution because they don’t have cars of their own. Others travel from outside the county and wait in line for hours.
Volunteer Sandy Hardee has come to know many recipients by name. Having worked to register recipients since the pantry began, she has heard many of their stories. Some have come to eastern North Carolina from Haiti, Mexico or Ukraine. One man lives in a storage shed and cooks his meals on a hot plate. One woman lives in her car.
“They will tell you their stories,” Hardee said. “They’ll ask to be put on our prayer chain if they’re going through something with their family, and they almost become like family to me.
“So many that come through are so thankful. They just say ‘Y’all are a blessing. I don’t know how we’d get through without y’all.’”
Today, the ministry, which has never advertised since that first flier, sees about 180 families on food distribution days. That’s up from about 130 this time last year.
The Rev. Jim McConnell, who previously led congregations in Chapel Hill and Ayden, knew little about Share the Bounty when he became Salem’s pastor in 2023. He was surprised that a relatively small church had such a sizable food ministry.
“Somehow, like loaves and fishes, there’s always enough to go around,” he said. “That’s its own sort of sermon right there.”
Many families who visit the pantry have as many as three to five members each. That means at each distribution, the church is providing food for an average of 700 people, many of them children or senior adults.
“When we do this we are extending our Communion table outside of the sanctuary to our whole community,” said McConnell, who volunteers at the pantry alongside his wife and three daughters. “That’s the big thing to me that is extends across all sorts of lines. It extends across the us/them line that a lot of churches sort of struggle with. That’s the unique thing to me.”
Volunteers cross those lines as well, with support coming from young and old, church members and those outside the church.
When Marsal told a friend in her water aerobics class that the pantry seldom had breakfast cereal to offer its clients, the woman began buying boxes of it to donate.
“My friend who was in my class has died, and her daughters keep bringing the cereal as a memorial to their mother,” she said. “They bring it every two weeks, 50 boxes of cereal.”
Bentley Whitehurst brought in cereal to donate as part of a service project during the church’s vacation Bible school when he was about 5 years old. Now 9, he volunteers regularly with his parents and his grandmother, Barbara Headings.
“We started out saying we’ll just do it one Saturday,” Bentley’s mother, Kelley Whitehurst, said. “But honestly, I think we get more out of it than even the people in the line.”
Volunteer April Reed estimates that as many as two-thirds of Salem’s congregants share in the work of Share the Bounty, and she believes the church reaps the benefits.
“I have friends who their churches are dying because people are older,” Reed said. “I’m convinced this is why we’re still going strong because we have something we can all get behind. I really think that’s part of what has saved us.”
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