Every Monday at noon, high school students flood into Yarmouth Wesleyan Church in Nova Scotia for a free lunch of mac and cheese.
Mac and Cheese Mondays started out small. Around 2010, the youth pastor at Yarmouth Wesleyan began inviting 20 or 30 students over to his apartment for lunch, Bible studies and conversation. But a couple of years later, Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School (YCMHS) was looking for a place to expand. The church had the perfect property to offer them, and once the new school was constructed, moving Mac and Cheese Monday to the church building across the lawn made sense.
Word spread, and soon, 30 students became 100, which grew to 150, and the numbers kept rising. The lunches had to pause during the pandemic, but when Mac and Cheese Monday picked up again in 2023, the church started seeing 200 students each week. Yarmouth Wesleyan’s youth pastor, Brett Smith, estimates that close to 280 high schoolers come through the church some Mondays.
Samuel Green, a YCMHS student, says, “It’s a ministry that spreads and shows the love of Christ through serving, hospitality and creating an open environment to have meaningful conversations and help people feel comfortable to share their cares and beliefs.”
“Students will literally come in the back door and will work their way through the church, which is laid out in serving stations,” Pastor Brett explains. “They’re served Kraft dinner. We cook like 95 to 100 boxes of Kraft dinner a week.”
With that much preparation, Mac and Cheese Mondays involve the hard work of 20 or 30 retired volunteers on two rotating teams. They show up at 9:30 on Monday mornings and work through the 12:05 to 1:10 lunch hour. Some have been volunteering with this ministry for years, and by now, they have their mac and cheese system down to a science.
“At the core of the team is a love for the next generation and the ability to see the potential that God sees in the next generation,” Pastor Brett says.
They aren’t too concerned with gaining exposure for the church. “By nature of the size of our church in a small community, we have a lot of people that are already familiar with our church,” Pastor Brett says. In a town of about 7,000, they often hit 575 in weekend attendance — and that number doesn’t include the two other campuses in Yarmouth Wesleyan’s network.
In addition, Yarmouth Wesleyan is gearing up to celebrate its 75th anniversary in September. Such a longstanding pillar of the community needs little introduction. Instead, says Pastor Brett, they want to help students get comfortable in their space.
The hope is that familiarity with Mac and Cheese Mondays will help more students feel comfortable showing up to Wednesday night youth events. Pastor Brett says, “The discipleship takes place on Wednesday nights.” Those are the times when they put a stronger emphasis on praying, studying Scripture, worshiping and sharing testimonies together.
That isn’t to say that Mac and Cheese Mondays are only about food, though. “We do want to not just satisfy physical hunger, but we want to satisfy spiritual hunger,” says Pastor Brett. They started looking for ways to share the gospel with students more directly. This February, they decided to experiment with running Alpha Youth during Mac and Cheese Mondays.
“Alpha Youth is a video-based discussion tool, essentially, that is designed to explore the gospel,” Pastor Brett says. For several weeks, they played Alpha Youth videos on the church’s auditorium screen, and they set up a few discussion tables for those interested.
“You could come in with your mac and cheese,” Pastor Brett says. “And if you wanted to just be by yourself, you could. You’d still hear the video. But if you wanted to be part of a discussion group for Alpha Youth, then we have student leaders that are ready to guide discussion.” Six or seven student leaders from Yarmouth Wesleyan’s youth group helped direct the tables.
Though the discussion tables would dwindle over the lunch hour — starting around 22 students, sometimes shrinking to five or ten — the conversations proved fruitful. “What we did see through Alpha Youth,” Pastor Brett says, “is we had five students that started to come to South Shore Youth on Wednesday nights as a result of Mac and Cheese Monday and Alpha Youth. Which may seem minor, but we hadn’t seen that crossover before. That was a pretty big change for us. So, it was worth celebrating the fact that it helped unchurched students bridge the gap to a ministry program that happened at a different time through the week.”
Yarmouth Wesleyan isn’t sure exactly what changes lie ahead for this program. Pastor Brett says, “Whether it continues in the same format or not, at the end of the day, whatever happens in the fall, we want to make sure we’re sharing the gospel with teenagers.”
Samuel says, “Mac and Cheese Monday has been a great experience for me. It’s been a space where I can spend time with my friends, see other people do the same, and all the while be in a great place to share the love of Jesus with others.”
Jerah Winn is a writer for The Wesleyan Church. She is passionate about sharing stories with others for the glory of God, and she currently resides in Central Indiana.
