DRAWN BY THE DINNER BELL … A massive line of traffic fills the back parking lot of the First Christian Church in Wauseon, where hungry residents wait to order heaping helpings of delicious chicken pie. The line lingered out of the lot and wrapped around the block onto North Fulton Street.
By: Jesse Davis
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
jesse@thevillagereporter.com
To some people it may just be delicious chicken pie, but for one church in Wauseon, it’s well over a century of tradition.
Last Wednesday, the First Christian Church on Elm Street served its annual homemade chicken pie supper for the 143rd year. The suppers consist of the chicken pie along with mashed potatoes and gravy, coleslaw, cranberry salad, and dessert pie.
At $10 per meal, the 720 prepared meals are sold starting at 4:30 until they are gone, usually an hour or less. “It’s hard to believe until you see it,” Glen Lammon said.
Lammon was one of several volunteers handling the three lanes of hungry residents funneled into the church’s back parking lot in a mad dash for the ever-popular meal.
Money raised from the sale goes to finance the projects of the church’s Christian Women’s Fellowship, among them scholarships, kitchen equipment and maintenance, the Cleveland Christian Home, and a women’s domestic shelter.
Fellowship secretary and chair of the church elders Jayne Ferreira said she has been involved in the supper for about 40 years, and in charge for more than 15. She said her favorite part is the camaraderie.
“We come together and have a lot of fun,” Ferreira said. “We get really stressed ahead of time and then come that day we get really excited. It’s a lot of fun. We just get it working like clockwork, it all comes together.”
According to Ferreira, somewhere between 50 and 75 volunteers are involved in the event, between those who help out the day of the supper and those who help with the prep, like cooking chicken the entire day prior.
Part of that strong volunteer spirit comes from the history of the event being intertwined with the history of the families in the church.
“One lady that’s baking the chicken pies – her grandmother baked the chicken pies, they passed it down that they all do it,” she said. “The ladies that come back to do the gravy – it’s just kind of a tradition in their family that that’s their job, they come and do the gravy every year, those two sisters. And their mom does the cranberries.”
Even when the suppers are all sold and the cars have cleared out, there’s still work left to do.
“It takes us probably another hour to get everything cleaned up. We’ve got people doing the dishes right along to clean as we go,” Ferreira said. “It’s basically just tearing everything down, wiping everything off, and finishing up the dishes.”
As for how she ended up in charge? “Just lucky I guess,” Ferreira said, laughing. “I’m good at organizing things, and everybody will help. Everybody wants to help but nobody wants to be in charge, so I can do that. But the only reason I can do it is because everybody does their job so well, it makes it easy for me to be in charge.”