‘There’s a lot of people who need this kind of help’
Life Church, a cozy, quiet building nestled on Main Street, is a place for churchgoers to worship, pray and heal.
But the church, according to member Linda Arnao, doesn’t just feed the community spiritually — it also feeds people physically.
On Wednesdays from 2 to 4 p.m., Life Church hosts an emergency food pantry for members both inside and outside of the local community to come and take what they need.
Arnao, the food pantry director, said this past Wednesday, the church was prepared to feed more than 60 people.
“It grows all the time — right now, I think we’re up to between 60 and 70 people who walk through our doors on Wednesdays,” assistant pastor Marie Campbell said.
According to Campbell, the church receives monetary and food donations in addition to purchasing its own goods for the pantry.
“We get all donations from all over, but not from the state — we don’t take any funding or anything like that,” Campbell said.
The pantry has been a resource in the community for roughly four years, according to Campbell.
“We knew that a food pantry was something people would come to, and we just opened our doors,” Campbell said. “We started out with maybe 20 bags, maybe even less, and now in this short time, we’re up to 70 [or] 80 families. We gave over 26,000 pounds of food last year.”
The difference between the pantry at Life Church and other pantries, according to Campbell, is there are no guidelines or limitations.
“[At] our food pantry, you don’t have to live in Williamstown. You can come every Wednesday, you don’t have to show us an ID, you don’t have to show us how much money you make, and there’s no restrictions,” Campbell said.
Campbell explained some other pantries have rules on how many times per month you can attend, but at Life Church, they can come every week if needed.
“There’s a lot of people who need this kind of help,” Campbell said. “Not only just the food and the clothing, but we’ve heard people come in here and go, ‘I come for the prayer’ — because the prayer makes a difference for them.”
Aside from food, the pantry also receives clothing donations that are available to men, women and children.
Campbell noted that while she doesn’t want the community to use it as a crutch, she wants the church to be a hub for people to get the further resources and help they need. In addition to the the pantry, the church has also given free health screenings, implemented a recovery ministry program, which is headed by Campbell, and has visited motels in small groups to drop off food donations and offer prayers to the people staying there.
“They could’ve been there for years, they could’ve been evicted from their homes,” Arnao said.
“We have homeless people who come here. We have people who’ve asked me for cardboard to put in the bottom of their tent, because they’re living out in the woods, in a tent. So, for whatever reason they’re in that predicament — they need somewhere to go that can help them out,” Campbell added.
According to Campbell, the idea to start a pantry essentially fell into their lap, when they got a call from a food donation company, informing the church their local Wawa was willing to donate food if the church had a pantry.
“We were just talking about a food pantry and they just happened to call us — and that’s how we got started,” Campbell said.
Arnao noted some of the businesses that donate are Outback and Wawa, in addition to members of the community.
“I would love for us to grow so much that we would be able to help change their lives, not just feed them,” Campbell said. “People say, ‘you teach somebody how to fish, you feed them for life — you give them a fish and you’ve fed them for one day.’ Our philosophy is — we want to feed them for life.”
To get involved, contact Life Church at info@lifeishere.org, or call (856) 629–4680. The church is located at 1509 N. Main Street in Williamstown.
