Walk-In Dinner Program

Since July 1993, Grace Church has participated in the Walk-In-Dinner program sponsored and co-ordinated by Family Promise of Bergen County. Overall the program provides a hot dinner every day of the year for persons who come to the Housing, Health and Human Resources Center in Hackensack. Anyone who comes gets dinner, no questions asked. In this way, we attempt to mirror God’s grace, freely given. As Grace Church’s share in the program, we prove a dinner bimonthly on the first Thursdays of odd-numbered months, ordinarily to between 90 and 110 persons. Our standard menus include a cooked item of either chili over rice or ziti with meat sauce, salad, bread, beverage, and dessert. Persons contributing cooked items prepare them at home and bring them to the Grace Church kitchen ordinarily in the afternoon of the dinner. Others bring the non-cooked items to the church. A team of between six to eight volunteers takes the food to Hackensack and serves the dinner. Grace Church receives help from a number of non-members. We call them the Friends of the Walk-In-Dinner. Between members and friends we hope to keep participating in this program for a number of years into the future.

Christmas Program

Since 1999, we have been involved in an “angel tree” program at Christmastime. Originally we worked with the national Angel Tree program, affiliated with Prison Fellowship. The goal was to give presents to children of parents absent because of incarceration. More recently, we have provided presents for children–and sometimes parents–who are part of the poorest of the poor. In some years, we have worked with Apostles House in Newark, an Episcopal Church affiliate, which is especially concerned with single or homeless mothers and their children. Again, we have opened this ministry to our friends outside Grace Church and are seeking ways to strengthen it.