Native American Church Strives to Improve Its Community’s Nutrition

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Special to United Methodist Insight | Nov. 11. 2024

November is Native American Heritage Month, timed to honor the harvest season and the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when Wampanoag Indigenous people and European Pilgrims shared a harvest feast in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. But the poignant irony is that many Native American families suffer today from diseases caused by poor nutrition, in large part because they lack sufficient access to the healthy foods of their heritage.

It’s a widespread problem that an historically Native American United Methodist church in southern New Jersey is trying to address. Many ancestors and current members of St. John UMC in Bridgeton are Lenni-Lenape-Nanticoke, a confederation of indigenous tribes who inhabited the Delaware Bay region despite European encroachment on their lands.

While most of the Lenape, also known as the Delaware people, were forced to migrate west under President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, many hid and remained in the area. The small, remnant Lenni-Lenape-Nanticoke tribe in southern New Jersey is headquartered in Bridgeton. And the church, interracial since its founding in 1841, now helps feed a large multiracial community with nutritious food giveaways twice a month.   

In October and November, the church delighted its neighbors, especially appreciative tribal elders, with packaged venison. The lean, healthy deer meat was donated by hunters in the group New Jersey Hunters Helping the Hungry. Recipients use the venison to make chili, stew, burgers, tacos, meatloaf and even jerky. The church is also giving away hundreds of donated diapers, coats, sweaters and other winter wear.

On two mornings each month teams of volunteers — church members and neighbors — unload large pallets and boxes, and then greet a continuous queue of vehicles that circle the parking lot in front of the small, tall-steepled, gable-roofed church. Volunteers give occupants bags containing a variety of free, donated, healthy foods that the recipients themselves select from a list. It’s a mobile version of the “client choice” model of food distribution — better than distributing pre-packaged bags of food. This model enables recipients to make choices to meet their dietary needs and desires, reduce food waste and improve their overall consumer experience.

‘We want to change diets’

What St. John’s food ministry coordinator Cynthia Mosley (Lenape) really wants to reduce are the illnesses caused by the typical, unhealthy foods too many of her neighbors consume. “We are plagued with health disparities: diabetes and complications, hypertension, obesity and heart disease,” she said during a recent food giveaway event. “We want to change diets, and more fruits and vegetables are key to doing that.”

In 2021, St. John and the Tribal Council collaborated with The Food Trust, a nonprofit organization focused on nutrition security, and the state Department of Health to discuss tribal members’ food and health concerns. Tribal elders believe that the high rates of diabetes and hypertension (high blood pressure) among Native Americans are due to diets that lack traditional food items like corn, beans and squash, fondly named the Three Sisters by many tribes and considered a sacred gift from the Great Spirit.

Mosley, raised on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, is a retired registered dietitian with many years of service on reservations. With only a “shoestring budget,” she is constantly and successfully writing grants to get needed help from various funding sources to build St. John’s food-sharing operation.

“Our Creator and our community help us to keep things going,” she says. “Otherwise, we would have given up a long time ago. But we keep the faith.” 

That community includes supportive organizations, churches and other faith groups. Last year they were able to erect a sturdy, Amish-built pavilion to display food, clothes and other items on sheltered tables for guests to choose from. That’s where they also provide takeaway meals for local children in the summer when school lunches are not served. The church also received about $3,000 to purchase a moveable produce stand on wheels, where clients can enjoy selecting their own fresh produce.

Next Mosley is seeking funds and praying for an 8-by-10-foot outdoor walk-in refrigerator — too big for the church’s small kitchen — to store and offer fruits, meats and vegetables to struggling families more often than just twice a month.

“Now that we’ve got them eating healthier foods, we have to keep offering it every week,” she said. “A freezer would allow us to do that.”

Much of her support and most food donations come from the popular Community Food Bank of New Jersey (CFBNJ), which delivers food to more than 800 community partners, including food pantries, soup kitchens and feeding programs for children and senior adults. CFBNJ honored St. John with its prestigious Hope Award in 2023 for its nutritional impact on its community. The agency sends staff there monthly during food giveaways to register low-income families for the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP—formerly Food Stamps) to help them buy groceries. Staff also provide brief nutritional education to vehicle occupants awaiting their bags of food.

The Rev. Douglas Goldsborough, a retired-but-busy part-time pastor who serves St. John and a second church nearby, labors alongside hard-working volunteers on food giveaway days.

“It’s not bad because we have plenty of help on most days,” he said. He also credited Mosley’s efficient leadership and resourcing efforts for making the job easier.  

Fighting hunger in NJ’s poorest county

But many more people of various races and ethnicities are coming in search of food these days, driven by inflationary food costs and severe poverty in Cumberland County, which has New Jersey’s lowest household income. The numbers rival the crowds that came during the difficult Covid pandemic days, when hunger was rampant.

One group showing up in recent months are Ukrainian refugees. About 130 of their families live in the area as foreign nationals with Temporary Protected Status, due to U.S. support for Ukraine in its brutal war for survival against Russia. Many of them came there, Mosley said, because they remembered that Ukrainians were brought to the Midwest in the late 1800s to work alongside Native Americans harvesting wheat crops. Ukraine is the world’s largest wheat producer, and Americans found growing wheat difficult back then.

“Our Native people knew how to do it, but there weren’t enough of us,” Mosley said. The two groups befriended each other, she explained; and many Native people — herself included — still have a floral-patterned symbolic scarf they wear to remind them of that friendship.

One of only a handful of predominantly Native American churches in the denomination’s Northeastern Jurisdiction, St. John just celebrated its anniversary joined by members of the Greater New Jersey (GNJ) and Eastern Pennsylvania (EPA) Committees on Native American Ministries (CONAM). Mosley is acting chair of the GNJ CONAM. The two neighboring committees have collaborated for years, setting the example for the new partnership their two sponsoring conferences have fostered over the past two years.

In fact, EPA CONAM members recently donated $1,000 of their Native American Ministries Sunday offering funds to help St. John in its efforts to buy the walk-in refrigerator. They also have attended the church’s celebrations of its Lenni-Lenape-Nanticoke history and culture, held on fifth Sundays.

One recent celebration featured dancers and drummers who presented and explained several songs and dances. Plus, they led a traditional litany honored the Creator God and the creation of the human family. The standing prayer, spoken while turning toward the earth’s four directions, included adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication for wisdom, healing, purification and reconciliation.

for Mosley and other St. John members, the church’s dual efforts to protect both the heritage and the health of its people are crucial to their survival and to the legacy they want to leave to coming generations.

John W. Coleman serves as editor-at-large for United Methodist Insight.