08107
February 11, 2008

The bread of life

PC(USA)-supported soup kitchen serves up food, community to Moscow’s elderly poor

Editor’s note: for informal reflections and more photographs of this Feb. 1-12 visit to PC(USA) missionaries in Russia visit the blog.

by Jerry L. Van Marter
Presbyterian News Service

Pastor Bob Bronkema of Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy and Evelyn Mueller, volunteer coordinator for the German embassy, in the dining room of MPC’s soup kitchen. Photo by Jerry Van Marter

MOSCOW — By 10:30 a.m. the dining room is full for a meal that’s not served until Noon.

“It’s more than a meal — it’s a community here,” says the Rev. Bob Bronkema, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) pastor of the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy (MPC), a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational congregation in the heart of this Russian capital city.

Founded in 1962 by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. — primarily to serve Americans attached to the U.S. Embassy here — the MPC has grown into an international congregation of believers that provides a dizzying array of social ministries from feeding the elderly poor to documenting racist attacks on immigrants and pressing the Russian government to do more to prevent them.

Today the MPC is supported financially by five U.S. denominations — the PC(USA), the American Baptist Churches, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church in America.

Bronkema and his wife, Stacy, also a PC(USA) pastor and their three daughters — Rachel, 11, Naomi, 9, and Bethany, 7 — have been here for just over 18 months. The Bronkemas serve as long-term mission volunteers for the PC(USA). They were originally recruited as full-time mission co-workers, but budget shortfalls forced a reduction in their status.

A cook at MPC’s soup kitchen prepares beets for the daily meal. Photo by Jerry Van Marter

Bob’s ministry focuses on the worship life and social ministries of MPC. Stacy devotes her time to the girls and to MPC’s Christian education programs, including a number of weekly Bible study groups that meet at various times and places around Moscow.

The soup kitchen is emblematic of the many ways MPC has evolved from an inward-looking worshiping group of American expatriates into an international Christian community that follows Jesus Christ into the world to meet the needs of the poor and marginalized.

Every weekday since 1991, a largely volunteer corps of Christians has served a hot midday meal to Moscow’s growing population of impoverished pensioners. Moscow now has the highest cost-of-living of any city in the world, Bob Bronkema explains, “and these pensioners have had their social services slowly taken away.”

Housing costs have quadrupled in the last 10 years, bus passes are no longer free and the government now charges for prescription drugs. “These folk, who must live on pensions of between $180 and $200 a month, have to choose what to spend their pensions on and a lack of food is too often the choice.”

Two hundred pensioners are served here each day. A second soup kitchen — operating in a building that was formerly the site of a notorious adult nightclub — has been established in another part of town and serves mothers and children.

The dignity of these folk are extremely important to MPC. “They do not go through a cafeteria line,” Bronkema says. “They sit down at nicely-set tables and are served by our volunteers and staff.”

Many of the volunteers come from the German Embassy, which is across the street from the soup kitchen. For three-and-a-half years, a group of embassy employees’ spouses have worked with MPC to enhance the soup kitchen ministry.

“We have many volunteers who wish to be involved because we know how difficult life is for pensioners in Moscow,” says German volunteer coordinator Evelyn Mueller. “Every year we also sponsor a Christmas bazaar and part of the proceeds go to the soup kitchen.”

As part of it’s long-standing but now marginal involvement with MPC, the U.S. Embassy here furnishes the Bronkema family with a small but adequate apartment. The German Embassy underwrites a sizable portion of the soup kitchen’s budget.

On this day, two special activities are part of that support — it’s “Birthday Day,” so each pensioner celebrating a birthday this month receives a small bag of gifts, including personal care items, a packet of tea and a bar of chocolate; and it’s the one day each month when each pensioner is given a bag of food staples — rice, noodles, fruit, dried milk, cookies and crackers.

“We know that the soup kitchen only provides a daily meal at lunchtime,” Mueller says, “so these food bags also provide food that these friends can prepare at home on the weekends and days they cannot make it to the soup kitchen.”

The crowded dining room of the MPC soup kitchen in Moscow, where 200 pensioners are served a hot meal each day. Photo by Jerry Van Marter

There are many MPC members and friends — mostly young professionals — who would like to serve but who work during the day, so Bob Bronkema has started a food delivery service that operates in the evenings. “Many people don’t have cars so instead of ‘Meals on Wheels’ we call it ‘Groceries on Foot,’” he says laughingly.

Once a week, volunteers take a bag of groceries to elderly Muscovites who cannot get out regularly to shop or come to the soup kitchen.  Each volunteer is assigned a particular client — “kind of like ‘Adopt a Grandparent,’” Bob Bronkema says.

As with the soup kitchen, MPC’s approach to social ministry involves creating community. “We recently had a 100th birthday party for one of the shut-ins,” Bob Bronkema says. “That wouldn’t have been possible if our volunteer hadn’t established a long-term relationship with the guy.”

A memorial service was recently held for the daughter of one of the soup kitchen regulars who was murdered on Moscow’s mean streets. “Even soup kitchen volunteers who are not Christian were moved,” Bob Bronkema says.

Another soup kitchen regular who suffered for years with a disfiguring growth on his nose — “it made him feel totally worthless and withdrawn,” Bob Bronkema says — recently had surgery to have it removed. The operation was paid for by donations raised by soup kitchen volunteers. “You just cannot believe the change in this guy,” Bob Bronkema says.

“That’s what being the community of Jesus Christ is all about.”