Good food for good works

nce the leaves start falling and the temperatures start to drop, area churches start cooking.

Whether it's a sausage supper at a Lutheran church, a chicken and dumplings dinner or apple butter from Evangelical United Church of Christ, food sales help area churches fund mission projects.

Churches can raise $10,000 or more from their dinners and sales. Some of the money is sent to denominational projects, and some stays in the local community.

Volunteers from Christ Lutheran Church in Gordonville are making sorghum molasses this weekend, and all the proceeds from the product's sale will go to the church's mission.

A few years ago, the church gave $4,000 to a church-building effort in South America and spent several hundred dollars more buying Bibles to send overseas.

Ellen and John Lorberg hold the sorghum making at their farm outside Gordonville. People can stop by to see the process between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Already, 90 gallons of molasses have been made and sold. Ellen Lorberg expects between 120 and 130 gallons for this year's crop. Church members raise the sorghum on their land, harvest it and then work to make the molasses.

"People have been good to wait for it and buy it," she said.

Orders already have been placed for the homemade apple butter that's been a tradition at Evangelical United Church of Christ since the 1970s.

Maybe it's the church's German heritage, but making apple butter is just part of the fall tradition, said Verla Sailer.

Her family's recipe is used to make the apple butter, but 50 church volunteers help during the weekend, coring and slicing the 10 bushels of apples. Other volunteers help cook the apples down to a mushy sauce, stirring them in copper kettles over an open fire.

Pastor Randy Hekman said the volunteers make the apple butter as much because of tradition as they do for fellowship. He took his turn stirring the kettles of apples Friday morning, making sure the mixture wouldn't scorch.

Orders for the apple butter can be placed by calling the church office.

Across town, volunteers are slicing apples for another delicacy: apple pie.

Volunteers from First Church of the Nazarene spend weeks baking nearly 4,000 pies. About 3,000 are apple and another 1,000 combined are pumpkin and pecan.

Tyronza Pringle, missions project coordinator at the church, said people start asking about the pies in the summer, and orders are coming in steadily now. Volunteers only have been making them for the past three weeks.

"We always sell as many as we make," Pringle said.

The pie-making tradition goes back at least a decade, members said. Though no one is certain of the exact date, the church knows that its youth group used to make pies and sell them for fund-raising efforts.

Eventually the pie-making project expanded. In the past few years, nearly $20,000 for missions projects has come from the pie sales.

The money has been used for "work and witness" mission projects that have sent church members to Ecuador, Brazil, Africa and Guam.

This year's trip is to Riobama, Ecuador, where 20 volunteers will build a church.

The trips are scheduled by the Nazarene denomination and send teams all across the globe. Sometimes the Cape Girardeau church will join other congregations in its district to work on a larger project.

Two years ago the congregation sponsored a trip to Latoma, Ecuador, and constructed a cinderblock church, Pringle said. By the time the group left, the church was filled to standing-room-only capacity. Last January, the church went to Guam as part of a larger work.

Pie sales are the only mission fund raiser for the church. The church sends $10,000 minimum to the area where it will be working so that supplies can be purchased in advance of the trip.

Church members pay for their travel, but teenagers and those who can't afford the complete cost of a trip are subsidized by the church. "A big bulk of our expenses comes out of the pie money," Pringle said.

The pie ministry is just as much an outreach in Cape Girardeau as it is a part of the Nazarene's global missions effort.

"We think of it as a tremendous way to share our faith, not only in Ecuador but even at home," Pringle said.

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126