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KOLUMN Magazine
“We’re Not Going to Let Folks Go Hungry”
“We’re Not Going to Let Folks Go Hungry”
How Black clergy became first responders during America’s latest government shutdown
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On a recent Sunday in Dallas, as the choir at Concord Church eased from praise into prayer, about 200 federal workers stepped nervously toward the altar. Many had gone more than a month without a paycheck. The church had asked them, quietly, to add their names to a prayer list.
Then Pastor Bryan Carter told them why.
Concord had raised $400,000. Each furloughed worker would leave with a $2,000 check — enough to cover a mortgage payment, keep the lights on, or refill a fridge that had started to look like the shutdown itself: empty.
“We want you to know your church loves you,” he told them, as tears rolled and applause broke out.
Scenes like this have played out across the country during the record-long federal government shutdown that stretched from October into November 2025, halting paychecks, freezing federal food assistance, and throwing the country’s most vulnerable households into crisis.
And once again, Black clergy and Black churches have been among the first — and most visible — institutions to fill the void.
A political crisis, a spiritual emergency
This is the first federal shutdown in six years and now the longest in U.S. history, triggered on Oct. 1 when negotiations between congressional Democrats and Republicans collapsed over health-care funding.
What began as a Washington stalemate quickly became a kitchen-table emergency. Federal agencies furloughed thousands of workers; others were forced to work without pay. Programs like SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamp Program) and WIC staggered forward on contingency dollars while officials quietly warned states that November benefits might not arrive at all.
Those warnings hit Black America with particular force. In 2024, roughly 41.7 million people in 22.2 million households relied on SNAP; about 26 percent of those households identified as Black — an estimated 5.8 million Black households. Black households already faced food insecurity at nearly twice the U.S. average — 22 percent versus 13.5 percent overall.
So when the shutdown cut off paychecks and threatened food aid, the impact was concentrated in neighborhoods that are both heavily Black and already on edge economically.
“Government inaction is not a victimless delay; it’s a direct hit to the communities we serve,” the Urban League of Greater Philadelphia warned in an October statement issued jointly with the Black Clergy of Philadelphia. Their region alone, they noted, has more than 800,000 SNAP recipients at risk of losing benefits — an “unprecedented situation” that would push families straight into the arms of the charitable food network.
In other words: if the government closed its kitchen, churches would be left to cook.
The Black church as first responder
Well before SNAP dollars started wobbling, many Black pastors were reading the political tea leaves — and quietly pivoting their ministries.
In Lithonia, Georgia, the Rev. Dr. Jamal-Harrison Bryant stood before New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and did something unusual for a megachurch pastor: he postponed “Giving Sunday,” a special offering typically devoted to paying down church debt. Holding it while his congregants were facing a crisis, he said, “would be inappropriate.” He promised not to revive it until the shutdown ended and people were back to work with SNAP restored.
Instead, Bryant opened the church’s food ministry, The King’s Table, a few days earlier than usual — and was stunned when 120 people showed up without any publicity. Every one, he later learned, was an FBI agent who suddenly didn’t have enough food for their families.
Normally, the King’s Table prepares food for 1,000 to 1,500 people. This fall, Bryant says they’re planning for 2,000 each week and bracing for a food budget that may swell by as much as $175,000 as the shutdown’s effects ripple through metro Atlanta.
Across the country, similar stories have unfolded.
- Virginia Beach, VA. – Pastors Robert and Wendy Spady of Open Altar Ministries have seen lines for their “pull-up pantry” stretch a quarter-mile down the road. Before the shutdown, they typically served 50 to 80 families each week; demand has surged so sharply that their once-long inventory list has been “cut down significantly,” they say, even as they scramble to source extra meat and staples.
- Chicago, IL. – At St. Sabina, the iconic South Side Catholic parish known for its anti-violence work, Father Michael Pfleger reported a record day at the church pantry — 242 individuals and “still a line outside.” Nearby, St. Moses the Black Parish now serves 400–500 families each week.
- Baltimore, MD– House of Prayer Faith Center has advertised free food, prayer, and live music at shutdown-era distributions, while Southern Baptist Church is stocking up on Thanksgiving dinner kits for furloughed workers, SNAP recipients, seniors, and families.
- Houston, Texas – Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a historic Black congregation, has set a goal of collecting 30,000 cans in the coming weeks to keep pace with soaring need.
“These churches are operating like emergency management agencies, but with donated money and volunteers,” says Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a veteran faith leader and founder of the Skinner Leadership Institute. She calls it a continuation of a long tradition in which Black churches “feed the hungry and care for the least of these” when public safety nets fail.
But she’s blunt about the cost: “Charity cannot replace responsibility. Government exists to protect and serve, not to neglect.”
When food aid stopped, churches opened the cupboards
The shutdown’s most alarming twist came in late October, when it became clear that SNAP benefits — which typically arrive at the start of the month — would not be issued on Nov. 1 if the impasse continued. “For the first time in history SNAP will be interrupted,” one analysis warned, noting that families in already food-insecure neighborhoods would face “even greater barriers to healthy food.”
Word In Black, a digital news collaborative rooted in the legacy of the Black press, reported that more than 60 percent of Black churches already provide some form of food assistance — pantries, hot meals, or distribution partnerships — and many were bracing for what one pastor described as “a tsunami of need.”
By the time a federal judge ordered the government to tap emergency funds to keep SNAP afloat temporarily, demand had already spiked.
In Dallas, Concord Church’s food pantry served roughly 400 families in a single week — about as many as they would normally serve in an entire month.
And in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, Black clergy were quietly partnering with secular nonprofits such as World Vision, Minnie’s Food Pantry in Texas, and World Central Kitchen, which redeployed its disaster-relief model to feed furloughed workers and low-income families.
World Central Kitchen had tried something similar during the 2018–2019 shutdown with its #ChefsForFeds campaign, serving more than 100,000 meals. This time, Black churches were often the on-the-ground hosts: providing kitchen space, volunteers, and the moral authority to assure wary families that the help was real and free.
“People trust when they come into a church, the church can help,” Bishop Matthew Heyd of the Episcopal Diocese of New York told Episcopal News Service, as his diocese appealed for donations to fund emergency grocery cards and food programs.
Beyond food: cash, loans and quiet advocacy
Not every ministry response involved food. For many congregants, the most immediate crisis was cash.
In northern Virginia, Grace Church — a diverse megachurch in the Washington D.C. exurbs — offered $500 emergency loan checks to members with urgent needs, even as its own finances wobbled. Other houses of worship created informal loan funds, tapped benevolence budgets, or turned over special offerings entirely to furloughed members.
National Baptist Convention USA, one of the largest Black Baptist bodies, encouraged member churches to step up assistance for families “hit hard by the shutdown,” according to a statement shared on social media.
In Philadelphia, the Black Clergy of Philadelphia stood alongside the Urban League to demand an end to the shutdown and passage of Pennsylvania’s delayed state budget, framing the debate not simply as a fight over numbers but as a moral test.
And while most churches avoided overtly partisan language, some leaders were explicit about the ethics of using hunger as leverage. Williams-Skinner described the shutdown as a “moral failure” that “turns hunger and hardship into bargaining chips,” urging Christians to contact members of Congress and insist that food aid never again be used as a negotiating tool.
These responses echo a broader tradition documented by major outlets such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, which have chronicled how churches — especially Black congregations — have often stepped into gaps left by government, whether in the wake of hurricanes, mass shootings, or earlier shutdowns. In a 2019 Guardian column written during that year’s closure, one federal worker described free dinners at a church kitchen in Montclair, N.J., as a small but potent symbol of solidarity in a time of state failure.
A long memory: what 2019 taught Black churches
For many Black clergy, this shutdown isn’t their first.
The 2018–2019 closure — then the longest on record — hit Black federal workers and contractors hard, particularly in Washington, D.C., where Black residents make up a sizable share of the federal workforce. That shutdown spurred pop-up food distributions, free meals at churches, and donations from celebrities and sororities aimed at furloughed employees and SNAP recipients.
Some of the churches feeding people in 2025 built their current systems in that earlier crisis. Detroit’s Commonwealth of Faith Church, for example, now runs a robust feeding ministry that began during the COVID-19 pandemic and has distributed tens of millions of pounds of groceries. When this year’s shutdown furloughed 57 members — a third of its 350 congregants are federal workers — a $50,000 grant helped them ramp up distribution even as giving from furloughed members dipped.
“Food insecurity is something our church has always cared about, whether or not people can eat,” the church’s pastor, Torion Bridges, told Baptist Press.
That mix of lived experience and institutional memory meant that when the 2025 shutdown loomed, many Black pastors didn’t wait for official announcements. They stocked pantries, called food banks, convened deacons and trustees, and, in some cases, suspended capital-campaign Sundays in favor of emergency relief.
The cost of always stepping up
Yet there is a danger in how seamlessly Black churches slip into the role of first responder: it can let government off the hook.
“Every day this is happening,” Concord’s Bryan Carter said after his church’s $400,000 surprise made national news. “This happened for us in this moment, but it is happening every single day by churches doing good work. Many times it’s not seen.”
Carter’s point is double-edged. On one hand, the quiet, daily work of Black churches — food pantries, mutual aid, eviction prevention, tutoring — rarely attracts the cameras that showed up when 200 people received $2,000 checks. On the other hand, politicians of both parties have come to depend on that unseen labor.
Research from groups like Feeding America and USDA makes clear that food pantries cannot meet national need without robust public programs; even now, charitable food accounts for only a fraction of the calories consumed by low-income households.
Faith leaders know this. That’s why so many are pairing charity with advocacy: hosting voter-registration drives, joining coalitions that lobby for stronger safety-net funding, and issuing public statements when Congress toys with shutdowns.
But the strain is real. A Religion News Service report produced with NPR described pastors in the D.C. area grappling not only with congregants’ financial stress but with their own: churches that rely heavily on federal workers’ tithes suddenly face budget shortfalls while being asked to do more.
For Black clergy, that tension is heightened by history. For generations, the Black church has functioned as banker, counselor, social-service agency, political headquarters, and spiritual home. It is expected to do all of that — and more — even as its own resources are stretched thin.
After the checks arrive
With a stopgap funding bill now signed and federal agencies racing to issue back pay, some of the most immediate pressure is starting to ease. The Trump administration says workers will receive missed paychecks by around Nov. 19, in staggered waves.
But for families who turned to churches when the SNAP deposits vanished and the paycheck clock stopped, the crisis won’t end the moment money hits their accounts.
Back rent and utility balances linger. Savings, if there were any, are gone. The trauma of wondering how to feed a household — especially for parents who lined up at church pantries for the first time in their lives — doesn’t evaporate with the swipe of a debit card.
Black clergy know this. Many say they plan to keep expanded food distributions going through Thanksgiving and into the winter, even now that the government has technically reopened.
At New Birth outside Atlanta, Bryant has pledged that every Tuesday offering will continue to fund The King’s Table as long as the need persists. In Dallas, Concord’s pantry is preparing for another month of elevated demand. In Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and dozens of smaller cities and towns, church basements and fellowship halls remain stacked with boxes and pallets of food.
Because for all the deserved attention to dramatic one-day gestures — $2,000 checks, surprise gas cards, celebrity donations — the real story of this shutdown is quieter: pastors preaching hope on Sunday and sorting cans on Monday; deacons filling out emergency-aid forms; ushers directing people not to pews but to pantry lines.
The shutdown has exposed, once again, how fragile life can be for families whose livelihoods depend on distant political negotiations. It has also reminded the country of something Black America has long known: when government fails, the Black church does not.
The question now is whether the nation will treat that as a reason to keep leaning on Black clergy — or a wake-up call to build a safety net sturdy enough that churches can return to what they were never meant to abandon: caring for souls, not replacing the state.