Glen Ellyn church packs millionth meal for hungry children

Sometime before this weekend is over, volunteers at Glen Ellyn Bible Church will have hit a milestone four years in the making: They will have packed one million meals for Feed My Starving Children.

When the church first hosted a MobilePack event in 2013, organizers didn't have a goal like that in mind. They just hoped to give people the chance to help hungry children in Haiti, Somalia and nearly 70 other impoverished countries where Minnesota-based Feed My Starving Children distributes meals.

Working with supplies from the charity, volunteers set to work on Friday measuring out portions of rice, vegetables, soy and vitamins, and packing them into individual meals designed to provided much-needed nutrition for the recipients. Organizers were anticipating about 1,000 volunteers would work in shifts Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The goal for this weekend, care and outreach pastor John Foster said, was to pack nearly 280,000 meals and collect about $60,000 in donations to cover the cost of those meals. Even before the packing started, the church had raised $50,000.

And somewhere along the way, one of those 280,000 packs of nutrition became Glen Ellyn Bible Church's millionth showing of compassion for hungry children.