The numbers have “gone off the charts,” said Chris Nolte, pastor of St. Paul. This past winter 10,000 bed- nights were provided by 1,500 WHO volunteers who served 13,000 hours. Support comes from 40 Vancouver churches and social-service agencies. “This has been a marvelous coop- erative effort,” Stender said.
CHRIS OCKEN
Food and family are what folks get at Faith/Santa Fe Lutheran Church in Milwaukee. Richard Suero, pastor, helped open the congregation’s food pantry to the community. Today the pantry serves 150 families, and the congregation has grown from 45 to 600 members.
young people taking food that’s left and slipping back into the night. Volunteer Barbara Carroll watches as the door closes. “I pray for them all the time,” she said.
Facing enormous need Unemployment is at 50 percent in the endless desert punctuated by the tiny town of Rock Point, Ariz.
Diabetes, alcoholism and suicide are far too common among its 3,000 inhabitants. Food and water are scarce. Residents drive 20 miles to windmill-driven wells, where they fill plastic tubs and toss them back onto their trucks. “Life’s a struggle here,” said
Lynn Hubbard, an ELCA pastor and executive director of the Navajo Evangelical Lutheran Mission, in operation since 1953 with House of Prayer Lutheran Church, a grade school and clinic.
He recently opened the Hozho Café at church, where mostly elderly people find sustenance. Hozho means harmony in Navajo. A clinic staffed by a nurse’s assis- tant is the only available health care. The sickest routinely wait an hour
24 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
for an ambulance. One in four of the schoolchildren lacks running water or electricity at home.
Not all are Christian. Some prac- tice traditional spirituality. It doesn’t matter. The mission is here first to meet human need. “And then, oddly enough, they think that you love and care about them, and then they start coming to Christ,” Hubbard said.
Home to mega-shelter The promise of a job draws a young family from Ohio. But they find no work in Vancouver, Wash., where the high-tech, timber and fishing industries are down. They land in a shelter at St. Andrew Lutheran Church, joining the new homeless that the pastor, Jim Stender, sees so much of now.
For nine years, St. Andrew and nearby St. Paul Lutheran Church have helped the homeless as part of one of the biggest shelter initiatives in the Pacific Northwest: the Winter Hospitality Overflow, or WHO. Every day from November to
March, WHO swings open the door to its sites when all other Vancouver shelters are full. That’s all the time.
Nutritious eating starts early A Yup’ik girl wanders in during fel- lowship, damp and shivering. Sores cover her face and arms. She wolfs down hotdogs and barbecued meat before vanishing.
Jana Deiss, pastor of Table of Grace Lutheran Church, Bethel, Alaska, knew what she was seeing. Boarding schools of the past that separated Alaska natives from sub- sistence traditions had birthed a lost generation of people now in their mid-years who never learned to hunt and fish.
Their descendants, like the girl,
hadn’t tapped into traditional skills either, much less those needed today to prepare nutritious meals. This resulted in greater risk of hunger or of lifetimes of dependence on Spam meat and ramen noodles. From that encounter last year, Kids in the Kitchen was born. It’s a once-weekly cooking class that teaches third- to sixth-graders how to select and prepare healthy foods. Table of Grace was an organizer. Young people learn about sharp knives and how to identify spoiled food. They make simple snacks and soups. They harvest from plots they have planted. They take trips to gro- cery stores, where they study labels. “I hope that I’m empowering kids to love nutritious food and to hand that down to the next generation.” Deiss said.
As for the girl, “As far as I’m concerned, she was Christ,” Deiss added.
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