It’s just several hours past midnight when volunteers gather to begin preparing about 9,000 meals for the day as part of one Florida Baptist Disaster Relief feeding team.
On this day, the team, consisting of 10 to 20 volunteers in Sarasota, will prepare about 5,000 hamburgers and 4,000 barbecue pulled pork sandwiches along with 9,000 servings of baked beans. Yes, that’s a lot, but it was just one of eight Florida Baptist Disaster Relief kitchens — five field kitchens and three fixed kitchens — preparing meals to help people impacted by Hurricane Milton in Florida.
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And while this work started Oct. 10, a feeding team as well as cleanup and recovery teams were still working the first week of November in Plant City, responding to 659 requests from families still needing assistance after the hurricane, according to Steve Norris, FBDR’s state feeding coordinator. Numbers really do tell a story, which is why he enjoys sharing these results from Oct. 10-Nov. 19 FBDR efforts:
- 64 professions of faith
- 430 Bibles handed out
- 529 gospel presentations
- 7,043 ministry contacts
- 91,805 meals prepared and distributed.
Norris, from Madison Street Baptist Church in Starke, also likes to share what he calls a little-known secret. “Seventy-eight percent of the time when you see the Salvation Army or the American Red Cross anywhere in America at a major disaster, a Baptist kitchen cooked the meal. On any given day, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief is as big or bigger than the Salvation Army or American Red Cross. We have 110 kitchens across the U.S.”
The three organizations now work together, with the Salvation Army and American Red Cross paying for the food and delivering the meals, while Southern Baptist Disaster Relief prepares the meals. Norris oversees operations at all of the FBDR kitchen sites. He and his wife, Vi, have been doing this for 11 years.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by David Moore and originally published by the Florida Baptist Convention.
