Providing peace of mind
Kingdom Celebration offers child care, food pantry for those in need
Bishop Antonio Palmer had one driving thought as the coronavirus pandemic began to consume day-to-day life in Maryland: How could his church, Kingdom Celebration Center in Odenton, help people where their needs were most intense? Palmer, in consultation with his wife and fellow pastor, Barbara — in his words “the brains behind all that is happening” — settled on two chief lines of service: child care and food distribution.
“What we’re doing now is what we were doing before the pandemic, but it’s heightened,” said Palmer, who’s worked as a pastor since 1995. “What was going through my mind was: What can we do to pitch in with so many more people hurting?”
In a community full of workers from Fort Meade and the National Security Agency, the Palmers knew it would be essential to preserve as many day care options as possible for parents who could not stay home.
The church’s Kingdom Kare center had to trim staff (from 21 to eight) and limit services to the children of essential workers (about 25, down from the normal 80), but parents described its uninterrupted service as a godsend.
“It’s stressful enough having to go to work every day, with everything going on with the pandemic,” said Jasmine Gore of Laurel, whose one-year-old daughter, Joy, attends Kingdom Kare. “Knowing that it was the people who had already taken care of her gave me big peace of mind.”
Gore works as a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital and her husband as a truck driver delivering supplies to grocery stores. She likes the homey atmosphere and constant updates offered by the church and would not have felt comfortable dropping her daughter at an unfamiliar day care center.
“If they were to have closed, I would not have had child care, and Johns Hopkins would have been one nurse short,” Gore said.
Meanwhile, Palmer’s modest-sized church, coordinating with hunger-prevention groups and other congregations from around Anne Arundel County, increased its food distribution from about once a month to at least once a week.
Local restaurants pitched in. Kingdom Celebration Center received 5,000 pounds of seafood from the distributors at True World Group. Holly Farms Poultry gave 4,000 pounds of chicken. As many as 2,000 people a week from 41 different ZIP codes have relied on the service. The drive-through lines are staffed by dozens of congregation members.
Palmer does his best to talk with every person. “You can feel their hearts — the burden just seems greater,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter if they’re driving through in a Lexus or an old pickup truck. Everybody’s feeling this pandemic.”
The church is also exploring the possibility of becoming a COVID-19 testing center.
“To see that spirit touch the whole congregation so they’re saying, ‘This is what we’re called to do, to be a people who serve,’ that’s where my heart is,” Palmer said. “You feel the urgency now.”