Photo by Joe Chavanell
FEEDING THE LORD’S SHEEP BY LINDA OWEN
In 1986, when Seth Kuehn owned a vending machine business, he would service his soft drink and snack machines
explains, they were still thinking small.“We were feeding the needy on holidays—not realizing that they had to eat every day, not just Thanksgiving and Christmas!” Soon he and a few friends connected with HEB, a local grocery chain, and other food suppliers—and Daily Bread Ministries was born in 1996. Since that first distribution, the ministry has grown from Kuehn’s garage to a rented, 20,000-square-foot warehouse in the middle of downtown San Antonio. It is a temporary facility, which they are quickly outgrowing. Inside the warehouse are crates and flats of breads, pastries, ice cream, and cookies from local grocery stores and wholesale distributors.There is also an amazing variety of produce—tomatoes, peaches, pears, apples, cucumbers, squash, and bananas—that is donated by local wholesale produce companies. The food, shipped out by private or church vehicles at the rate of 50 truckloads per hour, is distributed only to ministries and agencies. According to Frankie Klonek,office director at Daily Bread Ministries (DBM), they don’t turn anyone away when people come in off the street or call them for help. “We get their name, zip code, and telephone number and connect them with one of our ministries so they can be serviced on a weekly basis,” she says. “We don’t give to individuals,because we want the churches to follow up with the people that are getting food,” Kuehn adds. “Any time there’s a need for food, there’s an underlying issue that has caused that need; and we believe through the church we can minister to that need.” Through the tireless efforts of their volunteers and partner-
in the evenings so he could fill them in half the time. One of his clients was a hotel, and night after night, when he entered through the freight entrance, he spotted workers hauling perfectly good food out of kitchens and banquet halls and throwing it in the garbage dumpster. “‘My goodness, I can’t believe this,’” Kuehn remembers thinking.“I never grew up that way.We never threw anything away—and it kind of got me,” he says. For the next three years, Kuehn felt that the Lord wanted him to do something. “But what?” he wondered. “One day I literally heard from the Lord in my spirit, saying, ‘You could do something about that.’" At first Kuehn joined other San Antonio, Tex., church members who were feeding the hungry in one of the housing projects on Saturday mornings. But still he felt the Lord’s will pressing heavily on his heart:“I felt he wanted more from me,” he says. He prayed for guidance, asking for a way to meet the needs of the hungry more than one Saturday per month. In November, 1995, Kuehn decided to go to a local grocery store and ask the bakery department for something to feed the needy at Thanksgiving. When he and a friend returned the day before Thanksgiving, they were given enough food “to load our vans up so full we couldn’t see out the rearview mirror!”They then raced off to the Eastside of San Antonio, gave it away through the pastors there, and a lot of people got some much-needed food for Thanksgiving. But, as Kuehn
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ing churches, DBM serves over 400 ministries and every year distributes millions of pounds of food, as well as clothes, furniture, bedding, nutritional supplements, and personal care items. It serves faith-based drug and alcohol rehabilitation groups, ministries to the homeless, housing projects, shelters for abused women, Christian schools, and church neighborhoods. DBM feeds over a thousand people three meals a day. Although the primary target of this ministry is the hungry of San Antonio, DBM has also established small food banks in five other Texas counties.These divide the food up among seven or eight ministries, who feed another 5,000 people in South and South Central Texas. In McAllen, five minutes from Mexico, Daily Bread volunteers drive across the border to a garbage dump where thousands of people, known as “the squatters,” live. From inside a tent church, the McAllen group provides food and supplies to them as well as to an orphanage of 128 kids. Through one San Antonio church, Daily Bread recently sent 5,000 diapers to kids that live in these garbage dumps. Although food distribution is the primary focus of DBM, they have also given away hundreds of mattresses. Some were donated by hotels, which change their mattresses from time to time; other recycled bedding came from hospitals, which clean the bedding before donating it. Kuehn sees the ministry in Mexico as particularly significant. “People from the interior come to get jobs at the factories on the border, but when they get there, there’s no job,” he explains,“and they go back home and leave the kids behind because they can’t afford to care for them. Mexico has a huge, huge problem this way, and unfortunately the government does not recognize them as orphans. “But there are people out there with compassion, and they’ll bring the kids home with them. At first they’ll have two kids, then five, then 10, and then 50 kids—and they can’t feed them without help.” The outreach into Mexico is not only through McAllen but also other communities.“There are people all over the place doing this.The Lord’s been bringing us together in networks, and we’re doing things in coordination now,” Kuehn says enthusiastically.“It’s exciting just to see what God’s doing.” With such a massive and extended ministry handing out huge amounts of food and supplies, there has to be accountability. Every new group goes through a screening process before they are given food to distribute. After a preliminary interview, they are given precise instructions:“Do not sell it, trade it, or barter it. It has to be given to people in need—and make sure they need it and will use it as food and not sell it!” The policy on misuse is rigid, and, although rare, anyone who is caught selling is removed from the receiving lists.
Fortunately, for most, the heart of the ministry is spiritual, and volunteers see their efforts as discipleship. Every morning, after the dozens of vans and trucks arrive, about 100 volunteers form a large circle in the huge, paved parking lot to sing, pray, and worship together. Kuehn reads from the Bible and sends his team out as servants of the Lord. Kuehn says that he sees God at work day after day. People come into the warehouse because they have heard or read about Daily Bread and feel called to be a part of it. He has seen participating ministries “get addicts and homeless off the street, and help them put lives back together because someone cared enough to feed them and nurture them.” “I know we’re doing the Lord’s work because of what it says in the Scriptures,” he adds adamantly. “God commands us again and again to care for the widow, orphans, alien, and needy,” he explains. “One ministry that distributes our food is the Widows Ministry, which delivers to the homes of elderly widows.We have groups that feed a dozen orphanages in Mexico; we have many groups that feed the homeless; and we have a group that feeds destitute people who are here from Mexico and waiting for visas.” Kuehn is blessed to see the fruits of his labors. However, he is quick to relinquish any credit for the success of Daily Bread, humbly giving credit to the Lord for creating the network of volunteers and wholesale suppliers.“God’s given me the connections and the people.The Lord empowers us all to do our part in his plan,” he says. “When the Lord gathers the world together and he separates the sheep from the goats and judges the nations, you know what he judges them on?” Kuehn asks. “He doesn’t judge them on what church they went to or how much money they tithed, their perfect attendance, or their car or house or anything like that, but whether they’ve given to the ‘least of these’—the prisoner, the sick, the naked—a cup of water, food, clothing and the like.” Kuehn plans to spend the rest of his life doing just that. “I’ll do this as long as God gives me the helpers to do it,” says Kuehn. “Right now there’s such a tremendous growth opportunity here—we’re turning out millions of pounds of food a year, but we’re still on the edge of what we can potentially do. Once we get the new, larger facility—we need to increase our refrigeration space right now—we will be able to do even more. I’m excited to see what God will do next!” ■ Linda Owen is a freelance writer in San Antonio,Tex. To learn more about Daily Bread Ministries, go to www.coventant online.org/dailybread.htm
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