This year, Tim Cherry's College and Career Sunday School class played a joke on everyone by bringing all their food in on Souper Bowl Sunday and stacking it up in their classroom door. They posted a note on the door saying that the class would have to meet in the sanctuary, because there was no room for anyone in the room! Humorously, several people in the church actually believed that the entire room was full of food; in reality, though, the food was only in the doorway. Tim Cherry's class won last year's Souper Bowl; they came in 2nd place this year.
To show you how competitive our little contest has become... One of the rules for the Souper Bowl is that if we find expired food in your class's donations, the class is penalized 5 points for each expired food item. To make it harder for Tim Cherry's class to win this year, anonymous people from the church "planted" expired cans of vegetables in Tim's collection box several weeks ago! Poor Tim was the first "coach" (that's what we call our SS teachers during the Souper Bowl) in the history of sports to ever have a negative score at one point, because of all the expired food he had been sabotaged with!
Below is a picture of Kathy and I counting on Sunday morning (Kim Dean also counted, but she is not pictured here). My head was spinning by the time we counted all those boxes and jars and cans! When I began the Souper Bowl campaign last year, I had hoped to get a couple of hundred of food items for the pantry. This year, we accumulated 3,306 items of food in four weeks: AMAZING!!!!
Larry Harrell's Seniors Sunday School class won this year's Souper Bowl. They were SOOOO excited. Here was Larry making his acceptance speech infront of the congregation at the end of the worship service.
This is me with the winning Sunday School class. They win a trophy that they can keep in their class all year, and they win a large breakfast (prepared by yours truly!) next Sunday morning. They don't know it yet, but their classroom will be decorated to the hilt with balloons and streamers, a congratulations banner, and even little football confetti when they come in Sunday morning!
To show you how 'into' this competition our SS classes get, Larry's class has requested a smattering of "cherry" pastries for their breakfast Sunday: cherry strudels, cherry danishes, etc., to gloat over Tim Cherry's College and Career class that they lost this year. (ha-ha)