Mad @ Poverty

One small, rural church in Atlantic Canada has had enough!  They've started to brew something good to help the poor and hungry.

Midland Baptist is a small congregation in a farming community in New Brunswick with an immediate mission field of about 200 homes. The church is on a corner with a driveway joining two roads, and we are 20 km from the nearest Tim Hortons — creating the perfect opportunity for a coffee drive-thru.

It began as a summer ministry for our two summer students: they would simply give coffee away one morning a week, wishing people in our community a good day on their way to work. 

Then came another idea. “Why not invite our community to join us in a poverty relief program?” Our hunch was that people genuinely want to give, but oft en need a convenient way to do so. We called it MAD@poverty (Make a Difference).

We did a pilot run for five weeks in the summer. Every Friday morning, we opened the drive-thru for three hours (from 6 - 9 a.m.). Within three weeks we were serving 50 cups of coffee. We were pleased to discover that at least 80 percent of those who stopped did not attend our church. As well, almost everyone was leaving a donation —$2, $5, sometimes $20. In fact, one lady made a $27 donation made up of change lying around her house, even though she wasn’t a coffee drinker.

On Thanksgiving Sunday we presented Canadian Baptist Ministries with a cheque for $1,000. This money will be matched by the Canadian International Development Agency, turning our $1,000 into $4,000 —significant funding to support a famine relief project in Kenya. The relief project is coordinated by Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a food aid and development organization that collects donations of cash, grain and other agricultural commodities to support the programming of its 15 member church agencies in the fight against world hunger. Canadian Baptist Ministries is one of the founding members.

An added bonus for our drive-thru is that we are able to buy our coffee from Just Us! Coffee, a fair trade coffee roaster out of Nova Scotia that supports coffee farmers in South America. 

We decided this was a “keeper” of a ministry as it really brought church and community together. People say it’s the novelty that first grabs them. “We saw the sign for your drive-thru in the middle of nowhere and just had to stop,” said one couple passing through town recently.  When people find out they are contributing to help feed the hungry, it becomes a really positive experience. 

We’re continually struck with people’s genuine generosity and concern for the poor. We’ve had at least three occasions where people wrote out cheques for $100 on the spot.

About 10 people in our congregation now volunteer as servers on a rotation basis to keep the drive-thru open.  Despite the difficult weather this past winter, we stayed in business and now have a good number of regulars. As long as there are people to help and people stopping by, we will keep the coffee brewing to make a difference in the lives of the poor and hungry.

This story was written by Rev. Alden Crain, Pastor of Midland Baptist Church in New Brunswick and a voluntary Regional Coordinator with the Foodgrains Bank.  This article first appeared in Mosaic Spring 2010 Edition.