Feeding souls

Eric and Derric Wright grew up without a home. Sure, the twin brothers lived in houses with their mother, but they moved every year, as if players in an extended game of musical chairs. Their mom’s financial limitations took them from New Orleans to several houses throughout north Baton Rouge and eventually to Texas. Each time they felt settled, the music began again. It was when they returned to Baton Rouge that the music finally stopped. They found a seat. They found a home. That home is the Baton Rouge Dream Center, an inner-city campus of Healing Place Church’s Servolution outreach ministry. The boys walked four miles almost every day to get to the after-school program at the center. “If we stayed home,” Derric Wright says, “we knew we was gonna do somethin’ stupid. But if we went to church, we’d start doin’ what we like to do or love to do. And that’s serve others and try to make a difference in the world.” Healing Place is a nondenominational church with 6,000 members spread among its eight local and international locations. Feeding people in need is one of the church’s many outreach programs. With multiple 100-gallon cooking pots, twin rotisserie smokers—each capable of cooking 800 pounds of food—and a 30-foot barbecue pit and mobile convection oven, Healing Place is uniquely prepared to feed victims of even massive disasters, as well as the people who respond to them. They fed police at Ground Zero in New York after the 9/11 attacks, and they’ve fed victims of hurricanes and tornadoes. Click here to find out more about how the Baton Rouge branch of the church is reaching out to the hungry.