Saturday, May 28, 2016

Seattle Jesus Pizza Lunches, like Middleton's Jesus Lunch, taps teen appetites and naive willingness to be exploited.

The real argument against this new wave of adult exploitation of our kids with "Jesus food," has everything to do with unauthorized individuals accessing our kids under the care of our public schools. 

That said, Seattle had their own problem, which now seems to be over with a local church agreeing to change their free pizza's lunches to an after school event. In this case, union cafeteria employees saw lunch purchases decline, in the face of free low nutrition pizza. The fact that a local church has more invested in the community than a few wealthy families threatening lawsuits seems to have made all the difference here. Still, school food could use a little boost in culinary preparation:
SEATTLE: A school cafeteria workers union is threatening a Seattle church over free pizza that parishioners are distributing to students at three local high schools during lunch time. Once a week for several months, youth pastor Nick Steinloski and other volunteers with Bethany Community Church in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood have delivered pizzas to students during lunch time just off campus at three high schools – Nathan Hale, Ingraham, and Rooselvelt, KOMO reports. The union accused the church of luring students in with the pizza to force feed them religion.

Church leaders received permission for the giveaway, which is possible in part because of the school have an open campus … “It takes about 10 minutes to get rid of 40 large pizzas. We are not telling them a Bible story before they get pizza.”

Regardless, International Union of Operating Engineers business manager Dave Westberg contends the pizza giveaway is hurting food sales in the school cafeterias … “the latest information is that they are serving @ 750 students a week Domino’s (high fat, empty calorie) pizza from boxes out of the trunk of a car near Ingraham, Hale and Roosevelt schools.

Youth pastor Nick Steinloski said, “They said we were taking away a job, hours from employees at school in the kitchens because kids weren’t buying lunch.”
Middleton Mentioned: The article gets one thing wrong, Jesus lunch is not a "church" sponsored event, it's an in your face "religious freedom" excuse by zealots with lots money to throw away.
The situation in Seattle isn’t the first squabble ... At Wisconsin’s Middleton High School, free church-sponsored “Jesus Pizza” lunches at a local park have swelled to as many as 900 students in recent months as school officials there have repeatedly, unsuccessfully attempted to stop the giveaway, EAGnews reports.

“While we were sharing our message, which was about three minutes long, they started chanting ‘keep Jesus in the church.’ The kids didn’t retaliate. Then some of the protesters walked through with signs, heckling the kids, but they didn’t respond – they just kept eating,” parent volunteer Melissa Helbach said of a May 10 confrontation. “All of us volunteers were so impressed. It was the power of the Holy Spirit – it was a really cool thing to see.”

In Seattle, Steinloski agreed to move the event to after school to eliminate the lunch time conflict. At least one student who spoke with KOKO believes the cafeteria workers union would be better off focusing on improving their own product than limiting students’ options.

“If they would cook it a little better, then they would have students up there eating, you know what I’m saying?” Nathan Hale junior Tajon Williams said.

No comments:

Post a Comment