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Church gives out $40K in groceries
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Published: September 1, 2009
The congregation at Iredell County's largest church has gone bananas.
Members of The Cove fanned out across the county over the weekend and gave away a week's worth of groceries to 450 families in need.
"It was a life-changing experience," said Krista Riddle, who brought several bags of groceries to a family of four. "When we walked in the house and one of the little boys said, 'We got food now,' it tore me up.
"The lady we took it to came over and hugged me and kept saying, 'God bless you. God bless you.' "
Marion Karr said the blessing was just being able to participate and emulate the founder of his faith.
"If I want to see Jesus," Karr said, "I have to act like him."
Part of acting like Jesus, he explained, is doing the things Jesus did.
Karr recalled the story in the Bible in which Jesus encountered a crowd of several thousand and fed them with with five loaves of bread and two fishes.
"What the church is trying to do is to instill in us to stop being closet Christians," Karr said. "They said we should show up every week with a Bible in one hand and a can of soup in the other."
The groceries cost $40,000.
Karr described the experience as "a wake-up call" for The Cove's congregation and leadership.
"We learned that we have people right here in our community, right here in our church that are starving and living in their cars," he said.
Brooklyn Madding, The Cove's director of communications, said the grocery handout was part of an on-going project called "Go Bananas," which encourages extra-conventional thinking in crafting the church's role in the community.
"It's about reaching out to our neighbors," Madding said. "And doing what God commands us to do. The idea of 'Go Bananas' is that we're going crazy for God and getting everyone involved."
Madding said that when donation buckets were put out to help cover the $80,000 worth of needs the church identified, more than $115,000 was collected in one week, at the main church campus in Mooresville and the Statesville High School satellite location.
"Go Bananas" also includes helping people with transportation, health care and housing needs.
"It's one of those things where we have a plan and the plan keeps changing," Madding said. "We're going to do what God tells us to do.' "
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