San Antonio church offers pre-Easter Community Blessing

SAN ANTONIO—More than 70 members of Madison Hills Baptist Church in northeast San Antonio spent last Saturday morning providing groceries to neighbors in need, while also inviting them to learn about the Bread of Life.

Volunteers sorted and sacked groceries at the church. Teams from the church then loaded the sacks into pickup trucks and went door-to-door through the surrounding neighborhood, delivering groceries to more than 200 households.

“There were people in tears. They couldn’t believe a church would be giving out food, knowing how expensive groceries are now,” Pastor Robert Bennett said.

At James Madison High School, located across the street from the church building, two-thirds of the students are Hispanic, and half of the students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

The Community Blessing outreach event focused particularly on older homes in the neighborhood, many of which had transitioned to rental property in recent years, Bennett explained.

“We are right in the middle of the community, and at some of the homes where our people delivered groceries, our members were told, ‘We didn’t even know the church was there,’” Bennett said. “But some of them came to church on Sunday morning.”

Community Blessing volunteers from the church also made discoveries through the door-to-door outreach.

“We found a group home for mentally challenged adults that we didn’t know about. We left several sacks of groceries,” Bennett said. “And our people will be going back to some homes to mow the yards, because they found out the people who live there aren’t able to do it.”

In addition to offering food and a greeting from Madison Hills, members provided their neighbors information about Easter activities at church—particularly inviting them to Easter worship services scheduled in the leased Performing Arts Center at James Madison High School.

“We have a relationship with the school, helping them by providing food to homeless students,” Bennett said. “And twice a year, we feed the whole staff.”

While the Community Blessing initiative concentrated primarily on a low-income area, Bennett noted the church also has an ongoing outreach to new residents of the 1,000 homes that are being built elsewhere in the community.

“We take them bags of cleaning supplies when they are moving in,” Bennett said. “We’re ‘the bag people.’ That’s how people know us, whether it’s groceries or cleaning supplies. That’s OK, just as long as they know it’s all from Jesus.”