Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church

No one in our community should go hungry.  Our food pantry serves as a welcoming space where anyone can receive support without judgement.  We are ready to share with anyone needing extra support.  No appointment is needed. If you or someone you know is in need of groceries, please visit us.

We try to keep our shelves stocked with canned goods, rice, beans, crackers, granola bars, cereal and other items.  We also provide diapers, baby wipes and feminine products.  Our pantry is stocked completely with donations.  We appreciate anything you are called to share with the food pantry. On each day we are open, we serve approximately 50 shoppers, and our services reach an estimated 225 individuals.   It takes many cans of corn or tuna to keep us stocked.

Our pantry is open on the 2^nd and 4^th Thursdays of each month from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.  We believe the pantry embodies the church’s commitment to service and compassion.

Grace Abounds Food Pantry recently adopted the following Mission Statement.

Grace Abounds Food Pantry is guided by faith to share God’s abundance with our neighbors, community members, families, and all those in need.

We pledge to:

• Be a welcoming environment for those entering our food pantry.
• Be a low barrier, safe place.
• Provide food and other items and share it with abundance and grace.
• Serve with compassion, respect and hope.

Please watch the church newsletter or the Sunday brief to see our needs.  Look at our shelves and see if you would like to help with any items. There will be a bin in the Narthex each Sunday for supplies.  We are so appreciative of whatever you can provide to help ensure our shelves are full.

• The land that the church is on today on Merrimon Ave was land along a main thoroughfare of trade and travel for the people we know as the Cherokee.
• Merrimon Avenue and Broadway-Lexington Ave were both trails the indigenous communities created and used.
• Not far from where the church sits, At the top of the hill between Merrimon Ave and Lexington is an ancient Cherokee gravesite.
• The Cherokee didn’t believe in owning land—much different than the views of the European colonizers who took it from them and brought the concept of ownership of land.
• This church sits in the City of Asheville named in 1797 after NC Governor Samuel Ashe, who never lived here but who enslaved many people to accumulate his wealth and social and political capital in this state.
• Merrimon Avenue is the name of a man who not only enslaved people to generate profit that they did not share in and that they were held captive to secure for his heirs and not for theirs, but his life’s work was to defend and shore up the institution of slavery in order to protect the economic interests of white people. Augustus Summerfield Merrimon (1830-1892), U.S. Senator and Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote, “Slavery has certainly existed from the earliest times down to the present, and it would seem that it is, in one sense, of divine appointment.”
• By the 1850s, this land was taken and claimed by a white slave owner, John B. Whiteside, who was an organizing member of the First Presbyterian Church in Asheville.
•  When the Presbytery purchased the land in the 1950s, our newly formed Grace Covenant Church benefited from the unjust economic benefits for white neighborhoods created by redlining.
• Let us remember the history of this land and remember that we are committed to the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery that authorized the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of people for the economic gain of those in power. And all that Christianity was appropriated as a way to authorize the violence.
• This community of faith will not tire in our commitment to healing those deep wounds.
• We acknowledge our complicated and painful history on this land and as Christians in a denomination deeply formed by whiteness.

You can join us in-person or online for Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church worship on Sundays at 10:00 am.

(Previous worship services and devotionals are also available at this link.)

Email prayer@gcpcusa.org

Grace Covenant uses an online membership platform called Realm. This system offers ways to connect with each other and support your involvement in our church.

Click HERE to login to Realm.

• Faith 4 Justice Asheville – People of Faith, Provoking Justice, Practicing Mutual Liberation
• SOS – Saving Our Selves – Creating alternatives to unjust systems. What they don’t teach you in school.

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