Salad luncheon supports local church missions
United Women in Faith, an organization that is a part of the Epworth United Methodist Church hosted a “purse-sonality” salad luncheon on Thursday, raising money for church missions.
Bev Enger, chair of the salad luncheon talked about how the luncheon was a comeback after the pandemic.
“We have been doing this for quite a few years and of course we haven’t done it for the last 3 years because of Covid, so we are back at it and we pray that everybody is safe today, we will have a good event,” Enger said.
The former name of the organization was United Methodist Women and they changed the name recently to United Women in Faith and there is a cause behind it.
“Well, Women in Faith, actually we have a new name, so we feel like it is open to anyone, you don’t have to be a United Methodist, you know any woman who feel that they have a connection with God and would like to learn more, to be up service, we would love to have any woman to join our organization and be a servant.” Enger said.
Adding to Enger, Michelle Grebel, long time member of the organization talked about the organization and some of the goals they are trying to achieve over time.
“One wonderful thing about the organization is that our main focus is women and children, ministry towards them, give them a foot forward because as women we have less power than men. We have to help each other and not put each other down, in this we are united in one great cause of helping women and children.” said Grebel.
The “purse-sonality” luncheon was organized as a part of fundraising,
“We do it mainly to raise money for missions, we do a lot of local ones like APOC, Backpack Program, Food Pantry, we also give out camp scholarships, we also give other missions around the state and the world and so we do as much as we can. It’s something that we do yearly to raise money, it’s not a big money raiser but we also like to do it for the community, just to get people together.” said Enger.
Besides the fundraising, the luncheon was an invitation for everyone in the community to have a fun time.
“We want to include everyone, people that we don’t agree with, people of color, people of different sexual indications because we feel that Jesus opens his hands to all. This is for fellowship, sometimes people have a hard time coming into the church building and now you come in here and have a good time and realize this is just like a basketball game.” said Grebel.
The luncheon was two hours long and was open to anyone in the community, said Grebel.
“We serve from 11 to 1 just for 2 hours, we have people donate all the salads, so the women of the church get called and donate whatever kind of salad they would like to bring, we have vegetable, fruit salads and also a feature salad which is a pineapple pretzel salad which everyone can taste, new salad we call it and anyone can come in who likes salads,” said Enger.
The event was advertised by the organization through different means so that everyone in the community knows about it and they also had some volunteers who worked behind it.
“We put posters all over the town, we put it on Facebook, ads on newspapers, community calendars and all that. I have some younger ones that come in and do the table settings and they help us in any way they can. It is probably 20 to 30 of us,” said Enger.
Grebel shared one last bit of food for thought.
“We focus on things that hopefully make the world a wonderful place, that is one step at a time and of course you don’t see a great change right away.” said Grebel.