Turkey dinner with all the trimmings will again take center stage as Crawford Street United Methodist Church holds its annual turkey dinner and bake sale on Nov. 9 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the church.

Dinners are $15 and available for dine-in or takeout. The menu is turkey with dressing and gravy, corn pudding, green beans, rolls and an assortment of pies for dessert. Tickets are available at the church office.

“This year, we’re having a baked goods sale and a craft items sale,” said Sally Green, one of the dinner organizers.
She said people getting takeout meals should park in the church parking lot or along the curb and walk into the church to pick up their meals in Floral Hall. Meals will not be brought to the curb.

People dining in will go to Wesley Hall. They can park in the church parking lot and walk into the gymnasium area.

“We will have tables set up in there that they can go through a line and pick up their trays, their plates of food and go sit in the gym area, which will be decorated, and we’ll have tables and chairs and drinks in there,” Green said.

Green said Crawford Street has hosted the dinner since 1931.

“That’s 92 years; we’re not quite 100, but we’re getting close,” she said. “It’s the United Methodist Women at Crawford Street who sponsor this every year, but it does take a church-wide effort to make it happen. You have a lot more than just that group working on it, but they’re the ones in charge.”

“We have lots of men who volunteer to bus tables and wash dishes and help with the food that gets dropped off,” she said. “They carry pots of green beans and help carve turkeys. We put them all to work.”

The first dinner, she said, “Actually started as a brown bag lunch with turkey sandwiches in 1931, and they sold tickets for it. It’s grown from that into 1,000. We sell 1,000 tickets with the dine-in and takeout and the money that is raised goes for local missions as well as worldwide missions.”

In the past, money raised by the dinner has been used to buy mosquito nets for people in Africa and cows and goats for people in impoverished countries through Heifer Project International, a program based in Arkansas.

The annual event has also raised funds used to drill water wells in South American and Central American countries like Honduras and Mexico and supported mission teams from several local churches to go and work in those countries.

Locally, the money supports Grace Christian Counseling Center; Service Over Self, a summer youth ministry where youth work in the community repairing or improving homes; the Community Storehouse Food Pantry; Good Shepherd Community Center and Haven House Family Shelter.

The dinner was suspended in 2020 out of concern for the COVID-19 pandemic, and returned in 2021.