God’s Storehouse holds ribbon cutting for new food pantry building

For 40 years God’s Storehouse has been serving the Nixon community through its food pantry and resale shop at the Nixon Methodist Church — an outgrowth of the vision of the late Virginia and Sidney Wynne, the late Dorothy Richardson and Gladyne Finch.
The one thing the organization lacked until now, however, was a bigger building of its own for the food pantry. On Thursday, Nov. 21, members of the community joined with God’s Storehouse for a ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony for their new facility at 401 N. Franklin Ave., just across the street from where the organization began four decades earlier, where the resale shop still sits.

“We have our new home, and we are grateful for it, and it has allowed us to provide a lot more services than we could before,” said Angela Alexander Sprott, the director for God’s Storehouse. “We can't really do any of this without our generous donors, our partner organizations and all of our volunteers, especially the volunteers that built the new building that we're so grateful for.”

Just a few hours earlier, not only did the pantry serve a record 100 families thanks to the greater capacity they have for food storage in the new building, but partnering with the Nixon Lions Club for the 10th year in a row, they were able to hand out a whopping 60 Thanksgiving turkey dinners with all the fixings in a little more than half an hour!

Sprott made sure to call out and thank everyone who had a hand in the new endeavor, including members of the Nixon Methodist Church building committee; the City of Nixon; the Food Bank of the Golden Crescent; Third Coast Bank; GVEC; Nixon Lions Club; and especially the volunteers who have kept everything going for many years.

She spoke about how she believes her favorite hymn, “Here I Am, Lord,” written by Dan Schutte, seems to describe God’s Storehouse Ministry, with it’s refrain: “Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”

“God's Storehouse food pantry and resale shop has been staffed over the many years by volunteers that have heard God calling and have held his people in their heart,” Sprott said. “You can see the Lord's hand in all that we do. We always hope that our food and our clothes are blessings to our clients and their families.”

Johnny Hewell, a trustee at the Nixon Methodist church who was chairman for the building project, praised God as well as the foresight of the Wynnes, Richardson and Finch to begin a ministry that has done great deeds for 40 years.

Hewell said the building project began about five years ago with talk about the need for a new building and donations that came in eventually totaling about $50,000. It was at that time that “we decided as a group to go ahead and break ground and start and see what happened.”

He said within the next week, the church had received an anonymous $10,000 donation to bring the total to $60,000. Then, Vernon Lambeck made an offer that was the answer to their prayers.

“Vernon came to me and said, ‘I'd like to help y'all with God's Storehouse.’ And I said, ‘Great, because we need someone to hammer and do this other stuff,’” Hewell said. “We walked into our meeting the next night and Vernon gave us a proposal. He said, ‘Here, I'm gonna build you a 1,200-square-foot building for $50,000.”

Hewell said a Power Up grant from GVEC for $20,000 helped fund purchase of the appliances needed for the pantry, while Derek Crockett and Thomason Electric furnished more than $63,000 in labor and all of the electrical materials needed in the building. Hewell also praised the work of Mike Wood and Dennis Ortmann for the work they also put into helping build and furnish the facility.

“We started out with $50,000 or $60,000 and we have now insured the building for over $160,000, so God's been good to us,” Ortmann said. “That's a perfect example of when you're in his will, he will provide whatever you need.”

Finch accepted a plaque on behalf of the founders of the pantry and was asked to cut the ribbon.

“I just want to thank God and all of you who helped put this together, because it had to be a God thing to have lasted over about 40 years,” Finch said. “It was nothing that I did. It was just something that God worked through me and I appreciate the opportunity to do that and the ability to be able to serve the people of Nixon.”