The Breaking Bread Dinner Church will move from Aaron McNeil House to the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen — and the weekly Thursday evening meal will be served in the soup kitchen instead of through carry-out service.
The announcement of a new location and format was made Tuesday on the Aaron McNeil Facebook page. It comes as the Dinner Church transitions to a director.
Donna Williams, 80, a lay minister for the United Methodist Church, established Dinner Church six years ago and served her last meal on Christmas Day shortly after announcing in a letter to Hoptown Chronicle that another Hopkinsville minister had agreed to take over the program for her.
Originally, Dinner Church was served as a sit-down meal to a few dozen people with a brief devotional inside Aaron McNeil. But several months after it was established, the program shifted to carry-out meals because of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
Then as the demand for free meals outgrew the dining space, the to-go service continued. Over the past couple of years, 400 to 500 meals have been handed out every week. Since 2019, Williams has raised all of the Dinner Church funding through donations while recruiting a few churches and organizations to pitch in as servers and occasional cooks.
There will be no Dinner Church on New Year’s Day as the program transitions from Williams to the new director, Chris Childers, 47, the pastor of Bridge of Hope Fellowship. The non-denominational church is on South Main Street between 10th and 11th streets.
Childers and his congregation will resume the Dinner Church on Jan. 8 at Salvation Army.
“We love our downtown. It’s our neighborhood,” Childers, told Hoptown Chronicle in a recent phone interview. He said Dinner Church “is right in line with our heart and mission for this city.”
Serving the Thursday meal inside a dining hall will allow Dinner Church to return to its “original concept,” said Childers.
“What Donna has done is nothing short of miraculous … we absolutely want to honor her and pick up where she’s handing it off,” he said.
Childers praised Williams for her persistence. Under her direction, Dinner Church provided meals to people in need for roughly 310 consecutive Thursdays.
“It takes a lot of courage to keep showing up week after week,” he said.
The Salvation Army of Hopkinsville’s Soup Kitchen is located in the agency’s main building in the 300 block of Seventh Street between Liberty and Clay streets. The entrance to the Soup Kitchen is at the rear of the building along Eighth.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
