Welcome to our blog series—At the Table: Baptist Fight Hunger! Part 4 is by
Mark A. Reece, Jr., senior pastor of Piney Grove Baptist Church in Mount Airy, N.C. 

By Mark A. Reece

It’s a very pleasant drive through the foothills of North Carolina. Our corn crop this year is as healthy and pretty as I’ve ever seen it. The grape vines are overflowing and vineyards are often packed with tourists.

Country stores pride themselves with baskets of fresh produce that line the sidewalks and entry ways. One’s morning commute to work is a peaceful drive with glorious views of the Blue Ridge Parkway, neatly groomed and rarely any traffic at all.

They don’t call our little town of Mount, Airy, N.C., Mayberry for nothing!

It’s hard to believe hunger can exist here. It’s very easy to overlook. I’m grateful that the people of my church and other churches are better neighbors than that.

In rural areas, I’m discovering that poverty looks a little different from urban areas. Homelessness exists but it’s not in your face. I’ve never seen anyone holding a “will work for food” sign on a street corner. Seldom do we see anyone begging or walking on the street.

Piney Grove Baptist Church is a rural congregation of about 200 active worshipers. Our school teachers have been our greatest source of information concerning hunger, as they witness its effects on our children each and every day.

Piney Grove has always contributed money to the local food pantry, bought groceries for the needy, participated in seasonal canned food drives and World Hunger Month. In 2007, we decided to take a more direct and sustainable approach to fighting hunger in our community.

The first organized food ministry was the Friendship Meal. The Friendship Meal was born out of a desire to provide a warm meal for our neighbors who either didn’t have food or the means to enjoy being served a nice sit-down meal as most of us do on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Several group homes participate in the meal, making it a regular monthly event on their calendar. We have several regulars from the community who dine-in and a long list of volunteers who deliver take-out plates to those who are unable to come to the church campus.

Shane Claiborne

This ministry opened our eyes even more to the number of hungry people in our community and served as a catalyst for us to find other creative ways to fight hunger.

After a conversation with author and activist Shane Claiborne on a long car ride from a conference in Raleigh to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, I felt led to begin a conversation at Piney Grove that would hopefully lead to a community garden.

In Shane’s address that night at Wake Forest, he told the large crowd that his friends at Piney Grove Baptist Church were starting a Community Garden. Whether we were ready or not, Shane committed us to it!

The next spring the PGBC Community Garden was born!

We received a grant from the Surry County Health and Nutrition Center that enabled us to buy seeds and other necessary supplies. A church neighbor provided us with the perfect strip of land located next to the church parking lot.

In two years, we’ve built a strong gardening presence in the community and our neighbors are beginning to feel comfortable with making themselves at home in our garden and picking their own vegetables. Church members work in the garden and vegetables are delivered to shut-ins and neighbors.

Children are very dear to us at Piney Grove. We have a bookbag ministry that sends non-perishable food items home with children on Fridays so that we can be sure they’re fed over the weekend when not at school.

Just this past year, we launched a ministry called Grove’s Helping Hand. We receive non-perishable food items year round and a ministry team delivers food to select families in the community that express needs.

God has truly blessed our efforts to feed the hungry!

We recently received a significant grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina to purchase a commercial cooler that is already proving to help us in our efforts at combating hunger. The cooler enables us to keep our vegetables fresh from harvest to distribution as well as an abundance of fruit and fresh eggs that are donated to Grove’s Helping Hand from backyard chicken farmers.

We’re also finding other ways to respond to hunger through ministries that didn’t seek to do so initially. Our Kid’s Cafe tutoring ministry brings 20 students from a local elementary school to our campus every Monday and Tuesday afternoon. The ministry is primarily intended to help our Latino children enhance their reading skills. But, every session begins with healthy fruits and snacks.

I never imagined that our small rural church could do so much!

There is so much more that we can do in our small community to put a dent in the growing hunger dilemma. As I remind our folks, we can’t solve world hunger over night. But, we can change the world one community at a time, one hungry stomach at a time.

The people of Piney Grove have amazed me by their work ethic, courage, neighborly love and compassion.

I shouldn’t be surprised though. After all, it is Mayberry!

Check out an EthicsDaily.com interview with Tommy Haymore, director of Piney Grove’s community garden.

See additional information about the state of hunger in Surry County, N.C., courtesy of Map the Meal Gap, a project of Feeding America. Check out statistics for your area with this interactive online tool.