Helping mission is easy as pie for church group
Helping mission is easy as pie for church group
By Steve Schering Contributor November 18, 2011 10:54AM
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Updated: November 18, 2011 2:07PM
What started as a small delivery to Christ Church of Oak Brook has turned into a three-decade partnership between the church and the Pacific Garden Mission of Chicago.
In 1981, after receiving a donation of apples, members of the women’s Bible study decided to bake apple pies for the mission in time for that year’s Thanksgiving.
Shirley Schroder of Hinsdale has been with Christ Church since 1973 and headed the pie bake for the last several years. This year she handed that responsibility off to Rachel Buzzell of Western Springs, but on Nov. 16 Schroder was helping to fill the homemade pie crusts prior to their trip to the oven.
“A lot of people have been doing this for many years,” Schroder said. “It’s nice you get to spend the morning together and have fun.”
Inside Christ Church’s kitchen, 24 volunteers arrived early in the morning to begin organizing the ingredients to make and bake 108 pumpkin pies.
The pies were picked up that afternoon by Pacific Garden Mission and are frozen until they are needed on Thanksgiving Day.
“A lot of the people at (Pacific Garden) are without the niceties of home,” said Donna Cirignani of Hinsdale, in her second year of volunteering. “We hope to give them that with a slice of homemade pie. Pie making is a lost art.”
Kramer Foods of Hinsdale donated all the ingredients, pie tins and shipping boxes to the church who had no trouble recruiting the two dozen volunteers to spend the morning baking.
Nan Barnhart of Clarendon Hills has been baking pies for the church for most of the past 30 years and remembers peeling the apples one by one before they switched to pumpkin pies years ago. She has picked up a few tricks over her years of baking the pies.
“All of our ovens are different and we put them in at different times,” she said, gently moving the pie tins inside the oven. “It’s impossible to time them. When the filling doesn’t shake anymore I know they’re done.”
After four hours of baking the women were down to only a handful of tins as the finished pies cooled in a room down the hall ready to be picked up.
“This is like a well-oiled machine,” Buzzell said. “These women got it down.”