The Friday Food Ministry
The Friday Food Ministry has been the core social justice ministry of St. Thomas’s Church for over 25 years. A ministry coordinator organizes volunteers from St. Thomas’s, other churches, high school and university groups, and community organizations to prepare 53 evening meals a year—one each Friday and a Thanksgiving feast.
Volunteers prepare the meals on Thursday evening or Friday afternoon. Dinner is served to 80–100 guests during the summer and 50–70 guests the rest of the year, when more of the city’s Out of the Cold food programs are open.
We invite you to support the Friday Food Ministry by volunteering or offering a donation. Even better, get a team of colleagues and friends together to sponsor, prepare, and serve a meal. Your support will ensure that we can provide people in need in our community with the chance to enjoy a weekly meal, some fellowship, and respite. To donate, scan the QR code below or visit this page.
You can find the latest update on the program and our needs, and a list of upcoming dates using this link.
You can also sign up for our volunteer list here. Our email list is the main way that we co-ordinate volunteer efforts and donations. It is a low-volume list (4–6 messages monthly).
For answers to specific questions, please contact the program co-ordinator, Wendy Kirschner, at fridayfoodministry@gmail.com
Friday Food Ministry Survey | September 2025
By Andrew Gray
The Friday Food Ministry is St. Thomas’s signature social justice ministry, with real significance for the parish and forming part of its Anglican Catholic identity. It is, for me, a very important part of my relationship with St. Thomas’s. But what does it mean to the guests of the ministry and our relationship with them? We have recently tried to find answers to that question.
As to the ministry, I have been involved in a variety of ways since shortly after my arrival at St. Thomas’s in 2012. While I was initially drawn into the life of the parish by the celebration of Mass, the hospitality of the Friday Food Ministry has certainly helped me stay. As a church phenomenon, this anecdote shouldn’t be surprising. The role of social justice within Anglican Catholicism is a well-known part of its legacy. It is also well-documented that social justice engagement is a source of parish growth, which my own story represents. A correlation between parish growth and social justice engagement emerges, for example, from a study of Anglican Catholic parish growth conducted by the London-based Centre for Theology & Community (see “A Time to Sow,” linked here). The Afterword notes that “the congregations most engaged in social justice seem to be best at reaching the unchurched, and that these churches are drawing worshippers from a growing range of cultures, races and social classes.”
As to the meaning of the ministry for our guests, recently, under the leadership of Wendy Kirschner, we decided to ask our guests how we have been doing. Over two Fridays in the spring and summer, we surveyed our guests and sought feedback, asking questions about their involvement with the ministry, what they like and what might be done differently or better, and what might be added to the ministry to enhance it.
Highlights from our survey are as follows:
63 surveys were completed by guests. While difficult to gauge precisely, this is a large sample of our guests. Apart from the feedback itself, the level of participation and the care taken in the responses reflects the significance of the ministry in their lives and the success of its leadership in generating trust. We asked guests to evaluate their experiences on specific aspects of the food service. Our guests were also asked to score their overall experience on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the highest). The average score was 4.29. Removing a couple of atypically grumpy outliers, the average score jumps to 4.39.
We learned about our guests, including that the longest-attending individual has been coming on Fridays for an astonishing 20 years. While this is a heartening show of loyalty, it also underscores the persistence of poverty in the lives of some of our city neighbours. We also learned that a significant number of guests have been joining us for around 18 months, a period indicative of the transitory nature of some experiences of poverty—people often fall into poverty and food insecurity for shorter periods of their life, and it is nice to think that providing reliable and friendly access to healthy meals might help people emerge from poverty.
The Friday Food Ministry offers more than food. It provides the opportunity for friendship. Guests arrive in the parish hall on Fridays well before food service begins and have the opportunity to meet with friends and socialize. When asked in the survey what more St. Thomas’s could do to enhance the experience, suggestions to augment this social time—perhaps with music, film or other entertainment—came up a number of times. We asked whether offering health-related services would be useful and learned that there was less need for that than I had expected.
The survey has provided us with useful feedback on more granular operational aspects of the ministry—types of meals that are preferred, and a desire for greater building accessibility—but as a whole it tells us the ministry is needed and appreciated and that it is offered in a way that recognizes the dignity of our guests. The Friday Food Ministry is a thriving instance within St. Thomas’s of what is called in Catholic social teaching “accompaniment,” described this way by the late Dr. Paul Farmer: “To accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end.”