Baseball remains our National Pastime but watching the Super Bowl is right up there as an annual must-do event. Parties will be breaking out in neighborhoods all over the country and people who haven’t watched a down of football all season will be in place for the big game. It really is a great time to be a football fan, especially if your team is playing in the game, but a really lousy time to be a chicken. In 2012 111 million people watched the game on television and in the process consumed 1.25 billion chicken wings (and we thought turkeys had it bad in November). It’s also a rough time for Americans who are hungry. Many among the 50.1 million Americans who struggle to put food on the table each day won’t be privy to wings and pizza on Sunday. One in every eight people in the world live in a chronic state of undernourishment. That’s a polite way to say they are hungry most of the time. It’s better in America for sure, but as Christians we must be concerned about the hungry no matter where they live, and the 50 million who live among us is a staggeringly high number. Since children feature prominently in this equation we have even more reason to engage the problem in as many ways as possible.
JCBC will celebrate Super Bowl Sunday in a unique way this year. In addition to wearing our favorite team attire and enjoying a fun morning of Christian community, we will seek to impact our larger community with much needed food. By celebrating Soup-er Bowl Sunday we will provide cans of soup to ministries all around the metropolitan area. Due to the crazy weather many of the food closets around town are virtually empty. Hunger tends to go up as the temperatures drop. We can make a real difference by simply bringing a can of soup (or several) to our well-fed church Sunday morning. This will be a demonstration of a missional church mobilizing to meet a need in the name of Christ. And that, my dearly loved church family, is what it is all about!
Michael McCullar
Formations Pastor
Johns Creek Baptist Church