Every Tuesday evening, a small team of volunteers at Parkview Wesleyan Church in Chesterfield, Indiana shares a hot meal with anyone in their community who comes to ask for one.
Susan Walker, the primary organizer of Parkview’s Share-A-Meal Ministry, said, “Right now we’re feeding anywhere from 140 to almost 200 a week.” She added that as of March 17, 2026, they’ve given out 30,337 meals.
Susan was on the team that started the Share-A-Meal ministry in March 2019. “There was three of us ladies that had talked back and forth,” she said. She described her own inspiration for the program not as a calling but a feeling of being spoken to.
“I kept hearing about the kids on Wednesday evenings coming to Kids’ Club, and they didn’t have any dinner. They would just be thrilled to get a snack or a hot dog or anything that was provided to them. And that just … it kept weighing on me all the time,” Susan said.
Susan and the two other ladies spoke to their pastor, and Susan presented the idea to the church board. Then they put their plan into action. At first, they only offered a meal every other week. “In our first week that we did it, we had 12 people that came. Part of those — about half of that was church youth … We went on for several months, every other week. We just got such a response and so many people started coming from a little apartment complex across from the church.”
She recalls working to spread the word in those early days. They relied partly on word of mouth, but Susan also spent time distributing flyers at local businesses. The soup kitchen’s popularity grew quickly.
“After about three months, if that long, we switched over to doing it every Tuesday,” Susan said. “We only provide a hot meal, and at first when we started, we started as a buffet. People would come in and sit, and that was a major blessing too, because we got to know the people better.”
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they had to reevaluate. “We didn’t want to give up on it,” Susan said. So, they switched to a drive-through method. This worked out so well that they’re still doing it six years later. Susan hopes that eventually they’ll get enough volunteers and interest to invite people back into the church to eat their meals. But for now, the drive-through enables the Share-A-Meal team to serve as many people as possible.
People drive up, let a volunteer know how many servings they need, and get handed to-go boxes containing their meals. Susan noted that the containers end up being one of the largest expenses for their ministry. The team of three to 10 volunteers who cook and serve the meals provide most of the food.
“We all cook, bake cakes here at home. There’s one lady and her grandson from the very beginning, that have made a lot of our desserts. But now we’re getting outside help through a pantry that we connected with a few years ago,” Susan said.
For several years, that same lady and her grandson have also been delivering meals every week to shut-ins who can’t get to the church themselves. Recently, when that lady was unable to continue the deliveries, Parkview’s pastor and his wife started handling the delivery process.
Pastor Philip Trent and Heather are putting “feet to the message of service” he has preached for years by partnering and sharing in a ministry God has laid on their people’s heart long before they arrived. “I want to see them succeed and fulfill God’s purpose for them,” said Pastor Philip. And our prayer is that “our community will not just see our love, but ultimately, the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ!”
As for the food, Susan said, “Every week we vary. It’s not just a soup kitchen.” They’ve served beans and corn, lasagna, chili, and a host of other casseroles and similar hot dishes. And if they run out of food, they make sure to have hot dogs or sausages on hand, so that no one goes away hungry. The key, she said, is that “I wanted people to get what they can’t always have at home.” They try to always offer some kind of vegetable or fruit in addition to whatever main dish they cook.
“So many people tell us that they look forward to our meal. It’s the only hot meal they get a week,” Susan said. She looks forward to Share-A-Meal herself. Parkview has been a major support for the ministry since the beginning, and for Susan, participating in it has been a huge blessing.
As a specific example, she remembered a story from about a year-and-a-half ago. A woman who had come for a meal several times lived on the opposite side of town from the church. “She had been in a wreck one day,” Susan said, “and she walked all the way from her end of our town to the other to our kitchen and asked us ladies to pray for her. So even though we’re just handing the food out, we really feel that we’re touching lives, and we probably will never know how many.”
Inspired by her experience with Share-A-Meal, Susan encouraged people to look for ways to care for others, no matter how old you are. “People have said through the years when I’ve talked with them, ‘I don’t know anything I can do,’ or ‘The Lord doesn’t seem to be pushing me to do anything.’ Well, I was 70 and then the Lord started working on my heart. So, it may not be when you’re young.”
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.
