St. Matthew's Soup Kitchen

On Tuesday we had ten people from Lord of Life serve at St. Matthew's Church Soup Kitchen in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood. St. Matthew's will be the September mission of the month at Lord of Life.

St. Matthew's is an old German Lutheran Church that once had more than 1,600 members. Today, it is a far cry from that. The church is mainly Hispanic and the predominate language is Spanish instead of German.

Pastor Loza is the pastor of St. Matthew's. He has served at St. Matthew's since 1980. There is no doubt that Pastor Loza is at the right place where God has called him to be. We look forward to having Pastor Loza at Lord of Life in September. Pastor Loza shared with me his heart for inner city ministry. It is not a calling that everyone could embrace. It takes a certain hardness mixed with compassion.

As with many inner city neighborhoods, the neighborhood around St. Matthew's has its share of poverty. We served meals for about 120 people, mostly men. Many of those whom we served on this day were unemployed and lived in a homeless shelters. As we left there were some men gathered on the street corner drinking alco hol.

St. Matthew's has a very different population that it serves from what we serve at Lord of Life, and yet the need is exactly the same. People need Jesus. While I was there, Pastor Loza asked me to read the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. Jesus declares in John 6:35, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty."

Gary Kessler said it best on our trip. He said, "when it comes down to it, our needs are really simple, and our needs are the same." We may live in different neighborhoods. We may come from different nationalities. We may speak different languages. But when we get down to it, we are not the different. We all need Jesus.

We pray that we feed people not with just bread and soup, but with the Bread of Life as well.