Depending on Fried Pies and Donuts

My family moved a few times while I was growing up. Each time we found our familiar tribe in a small local church congregation. Today we would say we found community and “did life” together. But these ties were stronger than community. They were family. And we really did life together. I realize now that the women in those churches were not only my spiritual mammas, but my first role models of grit, hard work, and economic wonder. They kept our churches afloat.

My first church was in the Texas panhandle in a little town named Dumas. The ladies axillary augmented the church budget by selling fried pies every week. My mom joined maybe a dozen other women on Friday morning to make the famous fried pies of the Dumas Pentecostal Church. One group cooked up fruit filling, while another mixed and rolled out the pie dough in little circles. Another group spooned in the fruit filling and folded the dough over into half-moons. The last few women in the assembly line mashed a fork to crimp the edges before dropping each pie into vats of hot grease. 

Our church depended on those fried pies.

When I was almost four, we moved to south Texas and found family again in an even smaller congregation. The women in the Wharton church paid the utility bills by selling fresh glazed donuts.  There were four of them, so my mom made the fifth member of the donut team. Three of the five women worked outside the home which was a little unusual in the mid-sixties. It meant they had to make the donuts outside of work hours. So they met in the church annex early on Thursday mornings before work to mix the yeast dough in large galvanized metal tubs. To call the room a kitchen might be an overstatement. They had a stove and a sink and later my parents donated their old refrigerator. But the women ‘made do.’

They covered the dough with tea towels and left the yeast to do its work through the day. Thursday evenings after work they came back to fry and glaze the donuts. They threaded several donuts at a time on long wooden dowels and wiggled them into large pans of popping hot grease. They used the dowels for turning, retrieving and dunking the donuts into large bins of icing. At last they suspended the dowels while the excess icing dripped off. 

I can still smell the grease and the powdered sugar. On Friday mornings my mom would load me in the car with several white sacks of donuts and make her rounds to the businesses who were her regular customers. 

Sometimes I got to eat one, but only one, because our church depended on those glazed donuts.

The practice of women supporting the Lord’s work began with the earliest followers of Jesus Christ.

                Many women were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. [Matthew 27:55, NIV]

As a result, many of them believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. [Acts 17:12, NIV]

Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord. Greet my dear friend Persis, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord. [Romans 16:12, NIV]

Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, … [Philippians 4:3, NIV]

I honor the New Testament women who followed Christ.

I honor the women who held up the churches of my childhood with fried pies and donuts.

I honor the women of the faith today who write and preach and serve and give with generosity.

Generations of women putting action behind their faith.

They follow. They believe. They work. They contend. For a gospel too precious to keep to themselves.

SomethingAbout Him

Sharing glimpses of God's presence

through the new normals of our pretty normal lives.

Bobbi Mooney