What does it look like when we step out of our comfort zone in an effort to follow God's lead? Listen to Scott Crews, HOPE's New Food Pantry Director, share a bit about his story of faith. Scott also gives us recent updates on the day to day of the Food Pantry! We hope this episode will inspire you to follow whatever "inner nudging" you might be feeling in your life too, trusting that God will be there every step of the way! Special thanks to Scott for sharing on this episode.
NOTES & RESOURCES:
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
What does it look like when we step out of our comfort zone in an effort to follow God's lead? Listen to Scott Crews, HOPE's New Food Pantry Director, share a bit about his story of faith. Scott also gives us recent updates on the day to day of the Food Pantry! We hope this episode will inspire you to follow whatever "inner nudging" you might be feeling in your life too, trusting that God will be there every step of the way! Special thanks to Scott for sharing on this episode.
NOTES & RESOURCES:
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.
Jeff Bills:Hey everybody, welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. I'm Jeff Bills. I'll be your host today and I'm being joined by Scott Cruz. Hey, jeff Scott, good to have you with us, thank you. So, for those of you who don't know Scott, scott and his wife Vicki have been longtime members of Hope sometime in the 90s, right, scott Coming up on 30 years, I think. Yikes Raised two girls while active here at Hope. Among the many things that Scott has been involved in, he's been involved in small groups, he's been involved in our worship arts ministries and was one of the first members of our lead team back in the day, starting when I was 12. Yes, exactly, didn't we both? Currently, scott is the director of the food pantry and so wanted to have an opportunity, wanted to check in and find out what's going on in the food pantry. But before that, just to talk about your own story of coming to the position of the food pantry. So, rewinding all the way back to….
Scott Crews:That was early 2000s really, when I started. It has its roots in that time. I'd started helping out with some of the youth mission trips. In fact I went to Biloxi I think was the first time as a leader and it was on those trips that I kind of discovered that, hey, I like doing this kind of service, I like helping people and I kid people all the time. Now I still have from when I was in second grade a little card that says Scott is a good helper, with a little red star, and I remember those little sticky stars you just get and that was from one of your teachers.
Scott Crews:That was when I was in second grade, yeah, and so that has kind of been. My motto is that I'm a good helper. I started then in 2011, when Rick Cort started the mission trips to Haiti the adult trips. I started from the first one. I joined him and I made I think they did eight, I did seven, and it was just something I look forward to doing every year, not because it was fun. There's not a lot of fun that happens in Haiti these days unfortunately.
Scott Crews:But it was very clear that that was what I needed to be doing. So that's how I kind of got started with hey, I think I'd like to help and I like to do this stuff in the nonprofit world, if you will. So that time goes on.
Jeff Bills:And just to be clear, when you say help, I mean and I know you well enough to know I mean you're a roll up with your sleeves kind of guy and you'll help wherever asked. But Beyond that, there's a leadership component to the ways that you help.
Scott Crews:Yeah, so in the meantime I'm in the corporate world, growing in responsibility in various industries and, yeah, I've gravitated into the corporate leadership arena, which is, yeah, another one of my gifts, if you will, or callings, so those two things started to come to play and doing those mission trips. So I was, I was the guy that every we used to kid about it, I was the last guy out that was kind of my leadership roles to make sure that everybody got where they were going to go. Rick, some other folks would be in the front leading everybody down the road.
Jeff Bills:I was the guy that made sure we didn't leave anybody behind right, right, the I'm last Moniker that you carried, right, yes, yes, all right. So so that's, that's the backdrop. You're you're having these experiences volunteering in different capacities, in mission trips, both with youth and with Adult trips, finding that this is something that you're you're loving to do. How's how's that lead into the food pantry?
Scott Crews:Yeah, well, so 40 years of corporate experience came to a screeching halt last July and, coincidentally, jeff, you and I were talking about it and, literally as an offhand comment, at the end of one of our discussions you had just mentioned and you chuckled about it, you said well, hey, there's always this food pantry position that's opening up Down the hill. Yeah, we refer to it as being down the hill. Yeah, the former director had submitted her resignation and no, there wasn't anybody really to step into her shoes right away. Yep, so I just kind of went because I tend to do this sometimes to my wife's Concern I go sure I'll do that and agreed to a 90-day In term assignment. Do it, leading the food pantry, right?
Jeff Bills:Yeah, so what? What we were dealing with is we had this thriving food pantry and and run by volunteers and a part-time director, and and Erica gave us plenty of notice that that she needed to move out of that role and and Address family needs. She has two teenage boys and they just needed her full attention. So Looking for that replacement To come in was was challenging because it's a big job and and so forth. So, yeah, you came in with the idea of You'll help us out for 90 days. Sure.
Scott Crews:Yeah, literally within a week or so, I had come back to you and said, well, maybe this we could do something. And At that point I was still in the honeymoon phase, if you will, of being furloughed. I was fortunate enough to have a severance package from my former employer, so I didn't have to run right out and find more work. So, at the same time, you know something all along something's been gnawing at me about Moving out of the corporate world. It had been for probably growing over the past 10 or 15 years yeah, I want to do something different, and and this just kind of just happened. So, before I even knew it, I was yeah, you had asked if I'd come in and help out. I said, sure, for 90 days, heck, I can do anything for 90 days. And so I stepped right into it and it was like jumping into a nice warm pool.
Scott Crews:It was just easy to do. It wasn't. It's not easy work I shouldn't make it sound like that but it just. There was an ease with which I took to everything that was going on there. I'm in a lot of credit to the former director, erica. She was a great job building the thing from where it was to where to where. It is absolutely so. There wasn't a lot of me having to just start from from, you know, a dead stop. It was just making sure that we didn't run off the road.
Jeff Bills:Yeah, what was going on with you internally as, as the kind of weeks started to click off?
Scott Crews:Well it, at first I was. I was just looking at it as, hey, this is kind of fun, I can bring all of my corporate experience to bear, yeah, and while I'm learning what it's like to be in the nonprofit world, so the good news is there's a good deal of overlap between the two worlds, so that's why it was comfortable for me to kind of step in. But at the same time there's a lot of stuff about the nonprofit world that I didn't know. So it was kind of an adventure, if you. But all along, something again is not at me about. This is more than just, hey, you can do this For a little bit of time. Maybe it's something that maybe this is a god thing, maybe there's something more to it than just another job. And so that got me actually kind of scared me a little bit because I Wasn't ready for that.
Scott Crews:Yeah, but I kept taking steps forward. You and I met quite often and talked it through, vicky, and I talked about it quite a bit and worked through some of the concerns. But yeah, I stepped into this. Late October, early November I think, I came back to you and said I'll be willing to take it on full-time. But even when I said yes, there was still quite a bit of my gosh. What am I saying yes to? Yeah, because from our family's perspective, I'm probably three or four years away from quote-unquote retirement right financially you know those kind of things. So it's a fairly large step off the off the edge.
Jeff Bills:Yeah, and Waiting now and expecting that God's gonna catch me along the way so, so you're dealing with the realities, the logistical realities of that, the financial realities of that. How does that look, you know, from a spiritual perspective? Hmm?
Scott Crews:for you? What good question. Yeah, I just want to last point on on the former and Erica's job that she did. She did that job a full-time job, on a part-time hours or part-time Basis? Yes, oh, quite a while. She did an amazing job because when I walked in looking at it as a part-time situation, it didn't take me very long to realize, no, this is a, this is a full-time job the way it is now, but from a spiritual perspective it's. It's really. I've found in my old age that it's way easier to see God working in my life. As you've said, in the rearview mirror. Yeah, you can see it pretty obviously when you look back on your life. But going forward, well, I'm finding it's Really hard to see what's happening next and I'm really tempted to go. Can't you just show me, like the?
Jeff Bills:next. I don't see the whole thing like the next 10 steps.
Scott Crews:Yeah, it's when I'm there and in the job and doing the work. It's terrific, it's I have. I find a lot of joy in doing that. Mm-hmm when I step away from it and step back into the people standing around me going oh are you sure this is gonna work? That it's. It can be a challenge, yeah yeah, and we've been and continue.
Jeff Bills:It's an, it's a process right, and God's spirit is always leading us forward, and so this is it. This is an era For you and for the food pantry, and we don't know if this era is going to be a year or three years or ten years. We're just trusting God here and now, and and you guys, you and Vicki, in your, in your own lives, are taking that adventure as well.
Scott Crews:Yeah, yeah, yeah, trust me, this is not an easy process for us. You know, for me, everything I've been taught from when I was a little guy, all through my corporate life, is, you know, plan first, then execute, and this whole thing to me is an execute first and the plan will come. You know, that's not to say that we don't set plans. Yeah, it's not like we're just kind of making it up as we go. Every day we're down at the pantry but yeah, we have plans.
Scott Crews:But it's the theme really is the opposite of what I was used to in the corporate world. So, in a small scale, for me, you know, I I look at stories like Abraham and David and Peter and Matthew, all the Disciples as well as like kind of what they got asked to do too. You know, drop your nets and come follow me, leave your tax booth, collectors booth and can't come follow me? Oh, it doesn't. In our world, the secular world around us, that doesn't make any sense. Don't take a step until you've got it figured out what's gonna happen next. So it's been a fascinating few months for sure.
Jeff Bills:That's the adventure of trusting the Lord. I guess I used to say this to Marilyn all the time when she would talk about feeling like the role that it was growing as the Worship Arts Ministry was growing. It was too big for her, she was way out of her comfort zone and I'd say that's a great place to be. That's where God shows up. She hated when I said that, but it's true. I'm excited for you and how you're going to see God show up, not just in the food pantry but in your own life and in your own life experiences. So big step for you guys, big step for the church. Let's talk about the food pantry itself. What's going on down there these days?
Scott Crews:Well, this thing has really it's just kind of exploded over the last 10 years. It went from just a few families being fed part in a part-time setup running out of literally a closet in the building here, all volunteers, all volunteers to, to maybe 50 or 100 for a while and but over courtesy of COVID, our friend COVID it went up to we're now feeding 520 families or so per month, which that's more than that's not individuals, that's families, so it's a lot more individuals that represented by those families that's probably close to a couple of thousand people. Yeah, it's so. It's a small business that's running down the hill there at the pantry it's. What's great about it is that I stepped into this role and a lot of the work that Erica and her predecessors did. They sell all this up. I can't take credit for how well it works right now. Part of what I did as I stepped into this role was to figure out how we could keep the car on the road. If you will, it's rolling down the road, it's going okay, but is it going to be sustainable? And that's what we've been working on for the last few months. I think we're making a lot of progress there. So it's we're feeding all those families. We've got a great group of volunteers, a core group of volunteers.
Scott Crews:One of my first things to do was to kind of establish a management layer, so identified some folks who were already doing the work, but we just kind of formalized the role to get the director out of doing a lot of day to day activities. Admittedly, the director does a lot of day to day activities but that's because he likes doing stuff like that too, and so we've done those kind of things. We're building, we're strengthening our relationship with the South Jersey Food Bank. We get 75% or plus of our food from the food bank itself. So that's a real important relationship that we need to be strengthening and nurturing.
Scott Crews:But we're also working, you know, along the edges and strengthening building relationships with various organizations. So we're starting to delve into having folks come to us as a group event. The AAA of South Jersey has come to us done that with. A couple of law firms, are doing their community activities. They work them through us by having an event at our location, right, so it's good not only for them to come and serve, but they're going to walk back out into the community and say, hey, this is really neat place over here at Hope Church doing, you know, helping food insecure folks. So it's going to help us kind of organically spread the spread the word across the community. That's great. What do you see going forward? What's next for the food pantry?
Jeff Bills:Well, like I said, we're for now moving from a part time to a full time role for the director.
Scott Crews:That's going to allow us to stabilize things going forward. One of the immediate things that we're going to be doing over the next few weeks is we're going to do some construction Inside the food pantry building itself. That will, when it's all said and done, will literally double the amount of room that we have for shelving inside the the food pantry. Because we have more shelving, we'll have more room to store food that we get from the food bank. But it's an art shopping with the food bank, because it's not like going to the shop right and saying I need more peanut butter. So you go to the peanut butter aisle when they have peanut butter, they have a whole bunch of it. You better take it now, because we might not have it for several months later.
Scott Crews:So it's a different way to shop. We have more shelf space that provides us with more of the foodstuffs that we need in order to provide a well-rounded package to a family, and that allows us to spend less money out of the hope budget to supplement. That Makes sense, so we're on our way to doing that now.
Jeff Bills:Okay, Okay, so that project's underway. Wow, you know it's. It is like a small grocery store down there and and sometimes stuff goes wrong. You had a situation recently where something went wrong.
Intro:Yeah, yeah it went wrong in a big way.
Scott Crews:Yeah, so we have. We have two large refrigeration units outside of the food pantry. They're in the what used to be the drive-through for the old bank branch. There's a refrigerator and a freezer and everything that, when it breaks, it never breaks. At a convenient time the freezer broke and so that turned into a. Well, it was like the old days when I used to write software turned into an all-nighter. You know, we were moving stuff out of the freezer and trying to save the food before it thawed out, and we did a pretty good job. We got everything migrated into various freezers all over the place, including my own and my basement. But what I had not thought about in that all that chaos was we were about to get a delivery from the food bank and a quarter of that delivery was frozen food.
Jeff Bills:And you're talking about thousands of pounds of food and we're not talking about a couple of grocery bags?
Scott Crews:Yeah, we get. We get about nine to 11,000 pounds of food a month from the food bank. Okay, so I am literally one night at a service at Hope. I'm sitting there after the thing ends. Bill Walenda, a member of the church he does all our ordering with the food bank is right in front of me. So I grabbed onto his shoulder and was crying my my to give him my tale of woe about what we're going to do with this frozen food stuff. While we're having this conversation, I'm talking to Bill. This gentleman walks up to the side of us and he's obviously waiting to talk to Bill. So I'm telling him well, I'm like, oh, we're going to put all this frozen food, we've used up all our space, and he just kind of intervenes and goes I've got a freezer by that point. I'd heard enough people with freezer stories.
Jeff Bills:you know I could take a.
Scott Crews:I could take a hamburger from the, put it in my freezer. And I kind of kind of poo pooed him and he goes no, I have access to like thousands of feet, square feet of freezer space. And I looked over at him and I stuck out my hand and I said hi, I'm Scott Cruz, I'm your new best friend. We are now friends.
Scott Crews:As it turned out, we were able to take all of that food that we were, but we might have lost and moved it into a, into their warehousing space and their freezer. And they said just come, get, come back and get it when you can. And I gave us the freedom to to get our machinery repaired and get everything back in order. And then we went and got it and pulled it back. But that built a vital relationship and it some might write that off as a coincidence that he just happened to be by. What guy walks up into the middle of a conversation at a church service that happens to have thousands of square feet of freezer space, right when you're at the end of your rope and you don't know where to where to turn? And there it is 100%.
Jeff Bills:You know, like the Holy Spirit, totally a choreograph that total loaves and fishes too.
Scott Crews:It wasn't like I got a guy with a freezer. I got thousands of square feet of freezer space way more than I really needed.
Jeff Bills:Yeah, and now this longterm relationship that that could be forged, absolutely Whoo Good stuff. Good stuff, that's, that's the joy of the work that we get to do and that's that front row seat that we talk about, right, oh?
Scott Crews:absolutely I. I've only been down there for four or five months and I could hand you a half dozen circumstances or stories right now where it's pretty hard to write it off as coincidence of how the things just played out people in desperate need, with folks here who are volunteering, coming alongside them and nurturing them, us having the resources available to help them along their way. Yeah, coincidence.
Jeff Bills:Not likely, nope, no. So we could go on and on. I mean, there's so many great things going on in the food pantry and God is doing some really important work down there, but there's always more, and so what are some ways that somebody who's listening to this podcast or decides to share this podcast with friends? How can people get involved? How can people help what's needed down there?
Scott Crews:Yeah, sure. So if you're interested in volunteering, first of all, you can look. If you're here at Hope, you can locate me. I'm around quite a bit. Be happy to get you set up. But if you send an email to foodpantry at meethopeorg, we'll certainly get you connected with the right folks. If you're in need, you can call the church directly, you can send an email to that same email address or you can go to Hope's website, to the Food Pantry page, and you can get connected that way.
Scott Crews:And also a good way for folks who want to donate food or related products. They can go to that same page. There's a link on that page that tells you this is what we're looking for, or what we need right now. Right, and we want to drop it off. You don't have to coordinate to have somebody there. We have a. It used to be a bank branch, so where the ATM machine used to be is the vestibule and that outer door is unlocked. It's got a shelf inside. You can drop by literally 24, seven Nice. You can drop off food products and whatnot and we will make sure they get to a good they will go to good use.
Jeff Bills:Yeah, and just to piggyback on something you said, 75% of the food comes through the South Jersey food bank. That means 25% of thousands of pounds that go out the door each month come from folks who drop food by, and so it's an important part of the way that this church is involved in that ministry. The numbers are impressive.
Scott Crews:right, it's 500 and some odd families, that's the large enough number. But when you realize how many individuals are being impacted by that, those food products that you decide to donate, they go to good use and they are very much needed.
Jeff Bills:And it's people right in our neighborhood. You wouldn't know they were there until you start to look.
Jeff Bills:And, of course, if you're somebody like me who forgets when you're in the grocery store, you can also make a financial contribution that goes directly to the food pantry by going to our give page on the website and there's a drop down menu and you can designate a gift to the food pantry as well. So, scott, welcome aboard. We are thrilled to have you leading this really important ministry and grateful that God worked it out for us and for you and see where that leads in the future.
Scott Crews:One day of the week I'm excited about it and doing it.
Jeff Bills:The other day of the week, I'm nibbling my fingernails down to the quick. You just described 32 years of my ministry here and please, if you have any questions, like Scott said, reach out by phone or by email. See them in the hallways here at Hope. See them down at the food pantry If you've never been to a distribution day. It's two Wednesdays a month.
Scott Crews:Right, it's the second fourth, and when there's a fifth Wednesday in the month, the fifth week. So it's those second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. Yeah, if you just want to show up one day, you can just come and watch what we do. You will be amazed. It's just a sight to see. But we'll be careful because we will put you to work.
Jeff Bills:So thank you all for tuning in and we'll look forward to being back with you next week for the Meat Hope Podcast.
Intro:Thanks for being a part of the Hope community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand. You can learn more at MeatHopeorg or find us on socials at MeatHope Church.