Last February, Govans Presbyterian Church acknowledged that it sits on a former plantation that once enslaved as many as 30 people.

The North Baltimore church’s effort to face up to its racist legacy brought it glowing media coverage.  Pretty much every outlet in town covered the installation of two tall panels in the church’s sanctuary made by a local Black artist to celebrate diversity and embrace marginalized people.

But now, thanks to a different move by the church, Govans Presbyterian is being slammed for taking an important resource away from needy neighbors.

Its leadership in December announced a plan to shut down Soul Kitchen, the free Sunday afternoon meal for the community started 15 years ago and replace it with a community refrigerator.

So horrified was a third-generation Govans member and former church elder that he got onto the church’s normally mild-mannered Facebook page and called excuses for the move “government speak” and “bull.”

“Let’s be real: cold sandwiches from a fridge aren’t the same as hot meals in January. A fridge doesn’t talk,” Doug Gaede declared, adding that he was considering leaving the congregation. “Soul Kitchen is funded, has a huge volunteer pool and has a reputation in the community. Any excuse to shut it down is whitewash.”

The Facebook page was just one of the places where people expressed strong opinions on the matter, sometimes in blunt terms.

Recalling the life stories of the individuals she has encountered as a Soul Kitchen volunteer – people struggling with homelessness, addiction, being undocumented, mental health problems and more – Lisa Mary O’Reilly charged that the church was forsaking them for the worst of reasons.

“The nice white people of Govans don’t want to sit with the poor,” O’Reilly wrote. “It’s a disease that might catch – OMG, run.”

The issue is a raw one for a house of worship that sits on the west side of York Road, one of the starkest racial dividing lines in this historically redlined city, with neighborhoods like Homeland and Guilford on one side and neighborhoods including Govans-Winston and Richnor Springs on the other side.

Some called O’Reilly’s allegation an unfair characterization of a church with deep social justice roots. Others said ending the Sunday meal represents a congregation of haves turning its back on its have-not neighbors and urged the leadership to reconsider.

“The individuals we serve are often marginalized and face numerous challenges daily,” says a petition against the move signed by more than 1,000 people. “Soul Kitchen matters and the people who rely on it deserve better,” wrote one of the signers, a former volunteer.

“Soul Kitchen matters and the people who rely on it deserve better”  – Cady, one of more than 1,000 people who signed a petition to stop the closure of Soul Kitchen.

What had made Soul Kitchen special was not just the food but the face-to-face interactions with people outside of your demographic bubble, Loyola student and petition creator Kenneth Bungalso told The Brew.

“I saw so many kinds of different people,” said Bungalso, who volunteered there for three years. “I’m able to help them out, give them some food, listen to their story, give them some kind of human face, a smile. I’m there as a person, just another human being.”

Session-led, not Carolyn-run

With the holidays approaching and the temperature dropping, many had questions about the end-of-the-year surprise. Why couldn’t Soul Kitchen co-exist with a community fridge? How did Govans Presbyterian leaders explain their decision?

“We love the mission of our current food ministry, Soul Kitchen, but it cannot continue to operate in its current form,” their December 11 announcement said.

A second announcement, also posted on the church website, wasn’t much clearer. Amid the blowback, the church’s governing body (known as its “session”) “reaffirmed” its earlier decision.

“After prayerful reflection,” the church leaders added, they still planned to set up through the Bmore Community Fridge Network, a 24/7 publicly accessible refrigerator stocked with prepared food, produce and pantry staples. Until it was up and running “weekly food distributions will continue.”

To many, this fix was almost more upsetting: a Sunday free meal program, not to be called “Soul Kitchen,” was to temporarily resume in the same space, but it was to be “session-led.”

The program was no longer to be directed by Carolyn Annewich, the local artist who took charge of the kitchen 10 years ago and transformed it from a once-a-month feed with casseroles volunteers brought from home into a professionally produced weekly gourmet meal with white tablecloths and ceramic plates. (By the end, Soul Kitchen was providing about 140 meals every Sunday.)

“You’d think this would be considered a real jewel in Baltimore City’s effort to feed its people”  – McKay Jenkins.

“Regardless of the future of Soul Kitchen, Carolyn deserved better – she’s a living saint,” congregation member Jon Morgan wrote on the church Facebook post.

Moroccan chicken, Korean street noodles, tomatillo soup, salads with fresh vegetables straight from a community garden, local collard greens with smoked turkey legs – dishes like these prepared at her direction are remembered fondly by volunteers and participants alike.

“Oh, man, the food there was five star! I hope they don’t change it,” said Michael, who had been panhandling just up the street fromthe church last weekend when The Brew approached him near a pizza parlor.

Michael explained that he discovered Soul Kitchen last year and had gotten food there many times.

The guiding force behind all this, by all accounts, was Annewich. Unpaid herself, she organized volunteers from local high schools and colleges, secured grant funding, shopped all week and designed meals around donated fresh produce from the Rock Rose Food Justice Project.

Adapting to conditions during Covid, Soul Kitchen made the hot meals available in take-away containers. More recently, people were welcomed to eat the take-away meals inside if they wished to.

“Carolyn combined all our nutritious veggies with the meat and calories she sourced, coordinated all these volunteers and made this fabulous meal once a week,” enthused author McKay Jenkins, who oversees the Rock Rose project. “It’s been this magical place providing nutritious, hot meals in a warm, communal setting in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a lot of that.”

“All this in the cold of the winter, at a time when the federal government is whacking all kinds of support funding for this kind of work,” Jenkins continued. “You’d think this would be considered a real jewel in Baltimore City’s effort to feed its people.”

Church Leaders Explain

The Brew reached out to Rev. Ron Hankins, the church’s interim pastor since August 2024, who is scheduled to leave the position this month.

“We’re not taking away food. We’re trying to actually increase the amount of food that we’re giving to people,” he said. “We’re just providing it in a different format.”

Asked why not let both approaches continue, Hankins didn’t raise cost as the issue. He described a growing schism between congregation members and the Soul Kitchen operation.

(Annewich told The Brew that church funds have covered about half of Soul Kitchen’s roughly $21,000 budget, with the rest coming from private donors and fundraisers put on by groups like the Charm City Bronze Handbell Ensemble and the New Wave Singers of Baltimore, an LGBTQ chorus.)

“Not everybody could participate on Sunday afternoon, cooking and providing meals or food for people,” he said. “Once it became a weekly feeding program, congregants started to fall off, and it all kind of revolved around Carolyn.”

“It’s not a community program. It’s a church mission” –  Rev. Ron Hankins.

“It’s not a community program. It’s a church mission,” he asserted. “It’s owned by the church, and there needs to be people from the church that are committed to it. It can’t be just one person.”

Was this basically a turf battle or personality clash, he was asked. Did he or the session get crosswise with Annewich?

“You’re not going to get me there. I’m not gonna go there,” he said.

A person who sits on the 10-member session also demurred when asked to spell out what he called the “management/leadership problems” behind the decision.

“I’m simply not going to go into the personal stuff,” said David Hornbeck, a former Maryland State Superintendent of Schools.

Hornbeck did speak of “systemic issues” that he said resulted in Annewich’s operation “bumping up against” other church activities.

“With the kitchen in the middle of the church, there are substantial logistical issues since space all around it touched on the work of multiple other parts of the church’s work,” he said. “Significant collaboration was really necessary.”

Allegations that Govans shuns the poor and minorities “are patently ridiculous,” he said, pointing to the church’s efforts to acknowledge its racial history with its Racial Justice Ministry and its participation in a reparations project to include payments to six historically Black Presbyterian churches.

“We were impressed with the fact that a refrigerator is 24/7 – not one hour on a Sunday afternoon,” he remarked, predicting that Govans Presbyterian’s refrigerator will serve three times the meals that Soul Kitchen did.

Led by its “new session-led Food Ministry Committee,” church leaders promised in their announcement, Govans Presbyterian would make more  changes that would “expand and re-imagine” its efforts to help battle food insecurity.

So Much Need

Annewich remains bitter about how her project was shut down, but hopes for the community’s sake that the church’s new efforts to feed people succeed. “There is just so much need here,” she said.

It took The Brew less than a minute on a recent Sunday afternoon to encounter an individual using the community fridge that has already existed, about a half a mile from Govans Presbyterian, off York Road on Notre Dame Lane.

“I come here sometimes to get food for our family,” said Dominic Brown, an unemployed 32-year-old who found a plastic container labeled Lentil Soup with Sausage and placed it in the reusable shopping bag he brought.

Brown lives with his mother in the nearby Winston neighborhood and brings home fridge food occasionally to supplement what they are able to purchase with SNAP (food stamps).

Annewich said she and her volunteers got to know people like Brown who came to Soul Kitchen – remembering who had health problems or recently experienced a death in the family and whose birthday was coming up.

A congregation member herself, Annewich said she doesn’t understand why she was ousted except to point to personality and control issues.

“Everyone was welcome, but a lot of these people who were apparently criticizing me never showed up,” she said, noting that Hornbeck and Hankins never came to a Sunday Soul Kitchen.

If they had, she said, they would have experienced a variety of cuisines (American, Southern, Latin, Thai, North African) and a broad cross-section of the community that came to help (Boy Scout troops, senior citizens, non-Presbyterian church groups and members of local mosques.)

They would then have understood her strong feelings about how Soul Kitchen was to be run.

“For me, cooking someone a really good meal and giving it to them – I don’t know how much more you can show love and respect to a person than by doing that,” she said.