PRINCETON: Sharing a meal, no questions asked

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   The Sanford Davis room at Princeton United Methodist Church looks like a family restaurant on Wednesdays, complete with covered tables and adults and children sitting down for dinner.
   The doors open up at 5 p.m. for a new church ministry, “Cornerstone Community Kitchen,” that organizers say is meant to nourish body and soul. Since June, the church has partnered with Trenton Area Soup Kitchen or TASK to feed the hungry by bringing free meals to the community, no questions asked.
   At the first dinner June 6, 25 people showed up.
   ”The first night, I thought we would have two to six” people, said Larry Apperson, a church member who helped start the ministry. “We were greatly encouraged. The next week, it was about the same or a couple less.”
   By his count, the church is feeding 30 to 40 people a week. For now, most of the food comes from TASK. Eventually, the church will be cooking everything on site, Mr. Apperson said.
   The people who came to the dinner recently ran the social demographic gamut. At one table, a Hispanic family of five including three children ate a meal that included chicken and vegetables. Nearby, two white women were eating together. By their clothes and appearance, neither group looked poor.
   Aside from that, every child who comes will get a bag containing cereal, powdered milk and a granola bar so he or she will have food the next morning.
   Organizers, though, make clear this is no soup kitchen. Rather, they see it as a place for someone to get a meal and be around other people.
   ”We don’t want to be a soup kitchen,” said the Rev. Jana Purkis-Brash, pastor of the roughly 600-member congregation. “We want to be a place where folks who can’t afford to eat can come and eat. And we also want to be a place where senior citizens or singles who are alone and would like meal companions (can) come. Students can come and experience community.”
   Mr. Apperson, a Georgia native who speaks with an easy southern accent, got the impetus from a feeding program at his church in his native Atlanta. While cooking breakfast from the back of a trailer was not something he’d bring to Princeton, Mr. Apperson knew he wanted to do something.
   ”That was the beginning of the incubation of the idea of feeding something here,” he said. “We were interested in feeding the hungry in Princeton. We were convinced there were, but nobody could tell us how many.”
   He and Rev. Purkis-Brash visited a United Methodist Church in Lambertville that has a community kitchen at lunchtime on Wednesdays. “And after seeing that, I think both of us knew we needed to get moving pretty quickly,” she said.
   Mr. Apperson spoke to Dennis C. Micai, executive director of TASK about doing something in this community. The church has a longstanding relationship with TASK, as volunteers from the church go to help the organization in Trenton each month.
   We had that desire to feed and the offer of TASK to provide the food, so it was a natural,” Mr. Apperson said.
   About 40 volunteers — most of them church members — staff the dinners by serving the food.
   ”I enjoy helping other people,” said volunteer Joan Klass.
   TASK, headquartered on Escher Street in Trenton, has six satellite sites in Mercer County including the one in Princeton, Mr. Micai said. For the fiscal year that ended in June, TASK gave out 195,000 meals, the most in its nearly 30-year history, he said.
   Mr. Micai, seated at a table across from where a family is eating at the church, said he attributes the increased demand partly to the economy. And while TASK continues to help its traditional population groups of the homeless and mentally ill, there is a newer demographic seeking help.
   ”We’ve seen more senior citizens, more recently unemployed, people that are working and making less money than they used to make and younger families than we’ve seen before,” he said. “The faces have changed a lot in the last couple of years.”
   United Methodist, located at the corner of Nassau Street and Vandeventer Avenue, has a community meal every Wednesday between 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Information is available by calling the church at 609-924-2613 or visiting the church website at www.princetonumc.org.