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Prayers and pumpkin bread

"The Lord laid it on my heart to feed the hungry," Cathy Orton recalls. "I didn't have a clue how to do that."

But God told Cathy to bake, and bake she did. Biscuits and homemade bread twice a month for Christ Fellowship's Outreach Ministries. And now, a small team of women (and two men) has turned the kitchen in the Groot Center into Thanksgiving Feast Headquarters - Dessert Division.

 This year, more than 24,000 people will bite into a spicy square of homemade pumpkin bread as the ending to their holiday meal.

A dessert fit for a heavenly feast

This is pumpkin bread fit for heaven, sweet and buttery and ever-so-slightly chewy, with all the right hints of nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves baked right in. And prayer. Lots of prayer.

"We pray over it, that when people take it out they'll be touched by the Holy Spirit and be brought to the cross," says Cathy, who lives in the Acreage and worships on the Gardens Campus.

When she first proposed the idea of baking desserts for the Thanksgiving Feast, Cathy thought she'd be baking for a few hundred people. "I knew God was going to stretch me," she laughs, "but I didn't know how far."

Eventually the cause was adopted by PaceSetters, the church's ministry for mature adults. After that, the scale of production grew massive.

God's assembly line

Betty Fiebig coordinates the logistics of the baking effort. Her team has a regular assembly line: One person measures dry ingredients, one measures wet ingredients, others run the mixer and prep the baking sheets with batter. One baker tends the ovens and another oversees the cooling pans and the cutting.

Finally, volunteers wrap each piece individually and then assemble them into packages for freezing.

But that's not the only gargantuan effort that goes into feeding thousands of people a home-cooked holiday meal.

Thanksgiving, by the numbers

Bill Tumulty, Christ Fellowship's special projects coordinator for Outreach Ministries, ticks off the list: Seven tons of turkey, prepared by local firefighters. Eleven tons of mashed potatoes. One thousand volunteers contributing 9,000 man (and woman) hours. Seven tractor-trailers. And his favorite tidbit - 48,000 ounces of cranberry sauce.

That's enough to provide 24,000 meals in Palm Beach County alone. Christ Fellowship will partner with other agencies in Martin County and elsewhere in South Florida to furnish an additional 18,000 to 22,000 meals.

Lots of folks will get a taste of the pumpkin bread made by Cathy and her friends, and she's hoping they'll taste the devotion that went inside. "It's amazing," she marvels, "what can happen with a little bit of flour and sugar."

Please click here to learn more about Christ Fellowship's seasonal outreach projects.