Ministry of Food

For the last 2 weeks on a Wednesday night I have been helping out with food and service at the weekly Marriage Preparation Course sessions which completed last night.

It's nice to see a number of good friends that have recently become engaged attend the dinners and intimate discussions, learning and building strong foundations for a strong marriage.

Food and church ministry are probably most common in situations where the church provides catering services to people that hire the halls for various events (weddings, parties, engagements, other celebrations etc). We have a great church caterer who does all the official catering on a volunteer basis (but gets reimbursed through the church finances), but what other possibilities are there to expand this as a ministry that goes beyond the church door?

I've also been involved/attended a number of vacation camps, leadership conferences and training weekends over the years. Most recently I was speaking with the camp cooks at the last training conference. They are pretty much retired and have had a background in restaurants and catering so are probably more experienced that some when it comes to catering for large groups (between 80 to 150).

This particular training week offers training (in strand groups) on how to do church ministry such as writing a bible study, writing a bible talk, researching and arguing a biblical topic in light of what the world sees and an introduction to preaching.

We joked about the idea of having a cooking strand..............as in developing a cooking and catering strand to train up younger people that may be interested in using cooking as a ministry opportunity in the future (for church camps, youth camps, training camps etc)
Jokes aside, Uncle and Aunty were pretty sold on the idea actually coming into fruition!

If successful wouldn't it be great if various groups of people could be available to cater and provide this to the wider Christian community? I'd probably separate this from say those that run catering businesses to the general public, as this ministry idea is more based on doing this voluntarily and on a standard budget (nothing extravagant or expensive as most smaller churches and organisations that need help like this would have standard budgets).

I learnt much from Uncle and Aunty when I was a cooks helper about a year ago. To be a capable camp cook requires not only knowing how to cook, but also to plan meals with various dietary requirements, know how to work within a food and drink budget and also portion and quantity control so everyone is satisfied and there is little to no wastage or oversupply.

Much as we would like it, these very talented uncles and aunties will not be around forever so there will always be a need for willing and gifted people to take over this ministry and train future generations to continue this.