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Soup for the soul: How a farmers market soup booth ministers to Montgomery County

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Cristin Cooper’s “congregation” changes week by week, not because the congregation is volatile or unstable. It just depends on who stops by her stand on a given Sunday at the Olney Farmers Market in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The folks stopping by her stand aren’t united around a Methodist hymn or theology. Instead, they are united by soup.

Cooper is an appointed minister to Coop’s Soups, an extension ministry of Fresh Expressions, which she independently founded as a dinner church gathering with soup at the center in 2018. Fresh Expressions is a United Methodist movement to form communities in places and with people commonly neglected by the traditional church. Those communities take shape in a variety of places, but in Cooper’s case, the group took form at the farmers market to sell soup and the kitchen to make it.

She decided to plunge into a soup business and ministry after she felt called by the Holy Spirit.

“One of the ways I discern the Holy Spirit’s guidance is through things like repetition from outside people,” Cooper said. “After the sixth or seventh time, I was like ‘I feel like this is God, not just a compliment.’ I started to look into it, and really did turn out to be God because, when I started to look into what it takes to start a soup business, I just experienced open door after open door.”

“Nothing was complicated,” she added, explaining that every barrier seemed to put her right in front of a person who could help her navigate the challenge.

That included getting cold-called by a local pastor, seeing if she needed an industrial kitchen to prepare larger quantities of soup. Another local farmer agreed to give produce for free if she volunteered on the farm.

By 2019, Cooper’s ministry started taking shape.

A carrot soup-filled childhood

Cooper first got started in the soup game by watching and helping her mother prepare soup for meals. She recalled fondly her mom making carrot soup. The meal at her wedding rehearsal dinner? Three big pots of soup.

But to Cooper, soup also offered a level of accessibility and flexibility that other meals don’t quite have. She explained it’s easy to cook up some additional vegetables if another person or two unexpectedly joins a dinner, and soup ingredients can be extremely flexible to a large number of dietary restrictions. Even now, in the name of building community, Coop’s Soups are all gluten-free and vegan recipes.

“If we’re going to care about our neighbors, it’s incredibly nourishing, it’s an easier entree to make gluten-free and vegan, and to think about the people that might not be able to eat this. When we did the dinner church, we were thinking, what are the barriers to being able to enjoy this food, and allergies were one of them.”

For a year and a half, Cooper struck out on her own with Coop’s Soups, meeting a wide array of people at the farmers market. By May 2020, Cooper began the process of getting appointed by the United Methodist Church to Coop’s Soups as a Fresh Expression ministry.

Now, Cooper is at the Olney Farms Market every Sunday, from Mother’s Day to Christmas.

“The farmers market is where we literally practice treating every single person that comes up to our booth as we would like to be treated, as bearers of God’s image, as neighbors made in the image of God,” she said. “In that encounter with our neighbors, we recognize that God is inviting us into deeper intimacy with God’s love in that encounter.”

Growing a good problem

Those encounters have grown consistent, too. Through her presence at her soup stand, Cooper has been able to connect with people weekly as a neighbor about the highs and lows of life, from watching children grow and thrive to seeing the health struggles of parents.

Her soup stand also offers the ability to meet a diverse group of people, inviting all types of people to come to the stand and be treated with dignity as a child of God, she said. Many people, too, regularly shop at the farmers market, and some of those regulars at the stand have crossed the threshold to become dear friends and family of Cooper.

“These customers are my babysitters; these customers help me with my garden,” she said. “When my mom visits, she stays with a retired couple that started out as soup customers. I have officiated the marriage of my soup customers.”

“We take a posture of slowing down and becoming aware of the presence of God in front of us, and in the encounter with our neighbor at our booth, that’s an encounter with God’s grace,” she added.

Five years in, Cooper’s ministry has expanded beyond the farmers' market as well. Those same regular customers wanted to help her make her soups, and Cooper explained she wanted each facet of the process to bring people together, from kitchen to market.

Duke Divinity School even provided Coop’s Soups with a grant to have volunteers make soup once a month that went directly to a food center to help neighbors fighting food insecurity. All but one family of volunteers are non-church-goers or come from a different religious tradition, yet they are united in their love of soup and neighbors.

Now, a good problem is taking shape. Volunteers have created their own community, so they keep coming back and filling up the limited slots. One couple even had everyone over to their house for a picnic. Cooper said she is excited to tackle the problem of limited supply and high demand, a problem she views as a success.

She hopes to tackle that this fall, but in the meantime, she has a key piece of wisdom for her volunteers.

“It is just as important that you chop an onion as it is that you talk to your neighbor,” Cooper said. “It’s not just about how much soup we make. Yes, that matters, but it’s about how we treat one another in this space.”

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