A rural church, a small budget, and a giant community meal

When Lutheran pastor Larry Johnson retired in 2007, he and his wife moved north from Minneapolis–St. Paul to Pine County, Minnesota. Like many rural areas, Pine County includes a lot of households that struggle with food insecurity. More than half the students in local schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

The church Johnson joined, Grace Lutheran in Sandstone, participates in a community food ministry that provides 50 local schoolchildren with backpacks of food each weekend. As he got more involved in his new community, Johnson began to feel called to address local food insecurity—and the need for authentic community—in a different way.

In 2018, after a period of praying and pondering, Johnson approached Kim Sturtz, then the pastor at Grace, with an idea: he wanted to start a community meal. “It immediately stirred my heart with gratefulness that someone else was seeing this great need for our community,” Sturtz recalled. “Together we made a list of others from the community who might also buy into this concept.”