Special delivery planned for Thanksgiving
A volunteer starts to put dessert into containers in advance of last year’s delivery of Thanksgiving meals.
The turkeys looked tasty coming out of the Bethany Presbyterian Church oven prior to last year’s delivery.
Members of some local congregations are cooking up a holiday special delivery.
“This is our fifth year of serving the community a Thanksgiving dinner,” Bob Steen of Cecil Township said about the annual outreach he helped start through the Crossroads United Methodist Church campus in South Fayette.
His congregation has partnered with nearby Bethany Presbyterian Church in Bridgeville, which hosts the effort of getting a massive amount of meals ready.
“Last year, we served 475 or so people, which was about 150 families,” Steen said. “We’ll cook this year probably about 52 birds. We’re estimating about 520 people.”
Recipients of the Thanksgiving outreach usually come by way of recommendation.
“These are not necessarily people who are poor,” Steen explained. “These are people whom we want to share God’s love with: moms who maybe are going through cancer treatment and just don’t have the energy to cook, or moms or dads going through a divorce and just don’t know how they’re going to pull off a Thanksgiving meal.
“The drivers take the meals and deliver it to the family Wednesday night, so they can have that meal with their family on Thursday,” he said.
Lauren Steen, his daughter, is one of the more than 100 volunteers contributing to the effort, touching base via telephone.
“We call all the families we delivered to last year to see if they’d be interested again,” she said. “I just call and verify all the information, let them know we’re bringing the turkey, the desserts, all the sides, that they don’t need to worry about anything for Thanksgiving.”
Her dad’s passion for preparing food helped pave the way for the project, with like-minded fellow Crossroads members.
“We started off really, really small,” he recalled. “A bunch of us got together and said, we love to cook, and we decided to cook some Thanksgiving meals for people in need in the community. I think that first year, we served about 30 people, which was about 13 or so families.”
Members of St. Mary Parish in Cecil joined the effort a few years later, and then Bethany congregants came aboard. There has been a shortage of neither volunteers nor donations toward the cause.
“We’ve been extremely blessed with that,” Bob Steen said. “In fact, this year we really didn’t have to do a fund drive. We’ve not had to be concerned yet about the cost.”
Drivers will deliver the meals to families on Wednesday night, in plenty of time for a feast the next day.
“The families feel really loved and blessed,” Lauren Steen said, “and we’re just glad that we can do it for them.”
For more information about the Thanksgiving outreach, contact Crossroads Church, 412-494-9999 or contactus@crossroadsumc.org, or Bethany Church, 412-221-5132 or office@bethanypresby.org.