MARS HILL, N.C. (ABP) — No one goes hungry in Madison County, North Carolina, for lack of effort by Mars Hill Baptist Church.
Mars Hill Baptist, adjacent to Mars Hill College in the mountains of western North Carolina north of Asheville, has 45 programs to serve people outside the church walls, many of them involving food.
Willa Wyatt, a retired middle school principal, leads the backpack, and summer feeding programs emanating from Mars Hill Baptist Church in North Carolina. (ABP photos by Norman Jameson)
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Madison County’s 20,000 residents live scattered among the rugged hills, often in small houses that cling to narrow two-lane roads. The county is one of North Carolina’s largest in land area, while its population of 20,700 is among the smallest.
Fifty-eight percent of its 2,500 school children receive free or reduced lunches at school and buses wind 2,500 miles through the hills daily to get them to school. When the last bell rings on Friday afternoons — or schools close for the summer — many children live at risk of hunger.
To combat those hunger pangs, Mars Hill members made their church a central distribution point for weekend backpacks of food, seven pounds of quality non-perishables slipped discreetly into the book bags children carry.
That distribution system is not available when school is not in session, so in the summer the church distributes lunches to places where hungry kids hang out, primarily using grant money from USDA hunger funds for the food and volunteers for distribution.
Tommy Justus, pastor of Mars Hill Baptist Church in North Carolina, helps unpack food delivered for a summer feeding program at a subsidized housing development.
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Mars Hill learned about the funds during a mission trip to help a sister church in New York City. In New York a school is open in every district where hungry children can get a meal in the summer. Mars Hill pastor Tommy Justus wondered why that couldn’t be done in a rural area as it is in the city.
Distance is a big factor. It’s hard to cover Madison Country’s 452 square miles, so Justus identified several areas around Mars Hill where children gather to deliver summer lunches, including the local swimming pool and a subsidized housing complex.
Because more than 50 percent of the county student population qualifies for free or reduced lunches, the USDA does not require volunteers to document and record information about who is receiving the lunches. That keeps those who really need them from being too embarrassed to pick one up because they’re offered to everyone.
Willa Wyatt, a retired school principal, directs the backpack program. Transportation is an issue because Mars Hill is at the edge of the county and one elementary school is 35 miles away. In the mountains that’s more than an hour.
Willa carefully plans and purchases food for the backpacks, motivated by the knowledge that one family told her the package is the food basis for their entire week. If she includes Tuna Helper, than she makes sure there is tuna in the bag; if she sends pinto beans, she makes sure corn meal is included to make cornbread.
She’s particular about the packages, too. Justus says with only a hint of irony that Wyatt won’t let him pack the bags because he’s not careful enough.
“This is a gift from God,” Wyatt said. “It needs to look as such.”
A.C. Honeycutt, who with his wife Susie, spearheads a drive to create "Fields of Hope" community gardens, stands before the five acres of potatoes he has planted with volunteers in Mars Hill, N.C.
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The current list of families receiving bags is 96 names long. Last year before federal funds disappeared for subsidized day care, they took another 78 bags to the local day care.
Keeping with the hunger awareness heart of the church, member A.C. Honeycutt, a local banker, with his wife, Susie, secured the use of five acres on which to grow vegetables. In its fifth year, Fields of Hope is on track to reach a quarter-million pounds of vegetables raised and distributed primarily through the local food bank.
The Honeycutts promote the idea everywhere they can and a dozen more Fields of Hope are under cultivation by other groups this year.
Honeycutt counts 650 volunteers who help plant, cultivate and harvest and fund the field.
He said he and Susie realized they are a “fully blessed people” who wanted to “do more” and they determined the greatest need was food.
“One in six people in western North Carolina struggle with food insecurity,” Honeycutt said. “When so many have to choose between rent, utilities, medicine and food, food gets pushed to the back.”
Mars Hill is one of only six churches in the 60-church association to have a fulltime pastor, and was seen as a “rich” church before it started pouring itself into Madison County.
“Our church sees the whole county as a mission field,” said Justus, pastor there for 16 years. Other area youth are welcome to participate in youth events from Mars Hill, and any children who can get there are welcome to participate in children’s choir.
The church hosts, sponsors, contributes to, or coordinates a host of other county-wide activities that result in people being fed, people being able to stay in their homes, utilities being paid and other benevolent ministries. Last year designated offerings exceeded budget offerings by 25 percent and the church is not in a building program.
“One reason our church is so strong is because there’s so much going on and so much variety,” Honeycutt said. “You can plug in easily and you’ll be a happy camper. If you want to make a difference, you can find a way to do it at our church.”
Norman Jameson is reporting and coordinating special projects for ABP on an interim basis and is a contributing writer for the Religious Herald.