Church’s generosity feeds the hungry

Published 9:50 pm Monday, December 22, 2008

EVERETT — There are two days each year when Trygve Anderson can boss everyone around, no questions asked.

“We need people to start packing!” he shouted Monday morning in the large basement room of Central Lutheran Church in downtown Everett. “We need to get going and get those drivers out there!”

Twice a year, every year, volunteers at the church submit to this organized scramble to assemble and deliver boxes to people who can’t stretch their dollars far enough to purchase a holiday ham or a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. They’ve been collecting money to spend on food to fill the boxes for as long as anyone can remember, but four years ago Anderson upped the ante.

That’s when the church marked its 100th anniversary. To celebrate, Anderson suggested that the church raise enough money to put together and deliver 100 holiday food boxes; 50 on Thanksgiving, and 50 on Christmas. Every year since, the church adds a box. And every year, the local Volunteers of America office can hand over a list of families, plus one.

There are 104 boxes going out this year, Anderson said. Forty-eight were delivered on Thanksgiving, and the rest were delivered on Monday. Volunteers with four-wheel-drive vehicles slipped and skidded around Everett to knock on doors and carry in boxes valued at about $80 each. Recipients, bleary-eyed from sleep and weary from days of snow that makes a cash-strapped holiday season just that much harder, blinked, paused, then smiled.

That’s what the boxes are meant to do, Anderson. And not just for the recipients. For the volunteers, too.

“We’re not exactly thriving,” Anderson said of his church, which attracts about 80 people each Sunday morning. “But this is just the right thing to do.”

After 104 years and now in an era when traditional downtown churches are shuttering faster than a car can slide into the ditch on a snowy night, the annual holiday giveaway reminds church members that they’re still here, that someone still needs them and that they’ve certainly weathered rough patches before.

A giant revolving display near the box staging area shows photographs of every confirmation class in the church since 1918. There are bright spots and tough times — short flapper-style haircuts in the 1920s and feathered mullets in the 1980s. There’s the year the church decided the kids being confirmed should wear white robes (1946) and the year they did away with them, to reveal mini-skirts and scruffy pant hems (1990). There were classes of nearly two dozen students in the 1950s, and one class of just two students in 2007.

But through it all, the Olsons, the Larsons, the Stephensons, the Andersons and all their Nordic relatives show up again and again.

“My parents grew up in this church, and they’re still active here,” said Nancy Olson, 52. “It’s not so amazing that I still come here, too.”

Olson’s three college-aged children rushed from one room to another as they worked to fill the orders. There was no sign that she’d had to coax them out of bed on a cold winter morning.

“We just think this is the right thing to do,” Olson said.

It’s difficult to say who benefits more from Central Lutheran Church’s generosity: the people who receive the boxes, or the people who fund, assemble and deliver them.

After 104 years, it’s just what they do at Central Lutheran. It’s a habit, one that reaps divine dividends. After 104 years, the idea that the volunteers call it a day and tuck in to lick the wounds that come when a congregation shrinks, well, that’s simply out of the question.

After 104 years, they said, why stop now? After 104 years, why not make it 105?

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.