The Food Pantry That Tore Down Its Wall

For eleven years, First Baptist of Decatur, Georgia, ran its food pantry from a side entrance. Families lined up in the alley behind the church, out of sight from the congregation arriving for Wednesday night Bible study. A cinder block wall separated the two groups — the fed and the hungry, the worshipers and the waiting. In 2019, a new deacon named Marcus Whitfield walked the alley one January evening and saw a mother holding a sleeping toddler in seventeen-degree cold.…