Faithbridge United Methodist Church in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, looks a bit like a mountain lodge. Large timber beams support the pediment on the small church’s otherwise plain and unassuming facade. The busy Middle Fork of the New River, the site of a rubber-duck race each summer, runs next to the campus. Faithbridge’s nonprofit partner, Casting Bread food pantry and cafe, occupies the same hillside. I recently visited on a warm, sunny March day, when Casting Bread board members were preparing a hot dog cart for its maiden outing. An outsider seeing the balloons and smiles would have had little indication of the destruction that Hurricane Helene had visited on the church when it assailed western North Carolina barely six months ago, killing over 100 people, destroying thousands of homes, and causing nearly $60 billion in damage.
Founded in 2006, Casting Bread serves everyone regardless of who they are, where they’re from, or what they believe. Although a distinct entity from Faithbridge, Casting Bread partners closely with the church and shares its campus. It is part of what researchers from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and Partnership for Sacred Spaces have called the “economic halo effect” of Methodist churches in rural North Carolina, where the denomination’s charities and other social services have an outsize impact on their surrounding communities. Especially after the devastation of Hurricane Helene last autumn, Casting Bread’s mission to feed the hungry is more vital than ever.
In keeping with the spring atmosphere of renewal, the hot dog cart was being repurposed. For the first time since the hurricane had flooded the building in September, destroying kitchen equipment and causing irreparable structural water damage, Casting Bread Cafe had been reimagined for the time being as the smaller, portable “Casting Bread Cantina,” which allows them to serve food pantry clients a hot meal at outdoor picnic tables next to the church.
“It’s hard to shop when you’re hungry,” said Casting Bread board chair Jason Wood, 33. He acquired the cart before the storm, originally envisioning a mobile Casting Bread Cafe that could set up at a local park. “The tourists are pushing people that are on the margins even further out,” he said. “I live in Blowing Rock and I don’t have enough money to buy food in Blowing Rock.” Wood said he is uninterested in an all-or-nothing approach to alleviating poverty. “My focus has been on the ones who are on that line of, ‘Can I give you enough help?’” There are those who can perhaps afford groceries, he said, but who could instead use that $300 for something else; or those who, given a bit of help, could spend time with their families rather than work overtime to feed them.
Casting Bread’s acting Executive Director Alac Wall observed that since Hurricane Helene, she has seen an increase in clients in the types of situations Wood described. “You see mountain folk born and bred here,” she said. “You’ve also seen people that had careers that no longer have them, or businesses that they lost their business. It seems to be a mix of people now.”
“You realize that oftentimes we’re just one disaster away from food insecurity,” said Wall, who can empathize with her clients’ post-hurricane struggles to some extent. A single mother, she lost her home in the hurricane. At one point during the storm, she spent the night sitting in a stairwell with her two children, rather than risk the basement flooding at the friend’s house where they had fled, and where a tree threatened to fall on the roof. She owns a cleaning business sustained by the region’s Airbnb and vacation rental economy. “Several of my vacation rentals were total losses,” she said.
Wall’s loss gets to the inequality of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “A lot of folks don’t realize that two miles outside of this town, those videos from Diane Sawyer are still here,” he said, referring to a 2009 Sawyer documentary A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, about Appalachian child poverty that revealed trash-strewn yards, exposed insulation panels, and ramshackle trailers. “If you go any direction, in five miles you’ll see those houses.”
Wood summarized the paradox neatly: “My hometown is being squeezed because of the college, because of the skiing,” he said. “And that’s fine, I mean that’s just progress. People find a good spot and they start to move in. But if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t have the money that we need to feed all these people.”
Present American perceptions of Appalachia date back to the 19th century. A positive, if paternalistic view, sees residents of western North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee are quaint throwbacks: living fossils who preserve British folkways in their music and dialect. More negatively, Appalachia’s rough mountain geography isolates its residents from their industrialized countrymen, making them seem clannish, backward, and kind of scary to outsiders. Even within North Carolina, everything to the west of Charlotte can feel remote. My first attempted visit to Casting Bread was canceled the week before due to snow in Blowing Rock, whereas where I live, in the eastern half of the state, life went on, 50 degrees and sunny.
Although today Blowing Rock is a touristy area of western North Carolina, it once belonged to the state’s “Lost Provinces,” so-called in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for lack of railroad or highway access. In 1915, Watauga County, where Blowing Rock is located, was still transporting goods via covered wagon. A North Carolina state highway system was not established until 1921, four years after neighboring Virginia, and when Congress passed the Appalachian Region Development Act in 1965, Watauga County was not on North Carolina’s priority list for expanded highway access. “Western North Carolina owes practically all of its progress since 1921 to its roads and schools,” asserted a 1973 book on the region since the Civil War. “But the mountain region has always been discriminated against by the legislature because lawmakers from the east have dominated the state government.”
There were fewer than 1,000 Methodists in North Carolina at the time of the country’s founding in 1776. At the dawn of the Civil War less than a century later, they numbered nearly 60,000. “They are really pioneers in religion,” wrote the daughter of a North Carolina plantation owner in 1829. “In these parts we should live without the Gospel sound were it not for the Methodists.”
Rough terrain is partly why 19th-century Methodist missionaries originally gained a foothold in western North Carolina. The area’s German and Scotch-Irish immigrants were Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, Moravian, or Reformed—but the Presbyterians, who did not conduct missionary activities in the region until the late 19th century, lost ground to more enterprising denominations like the Methodists. Indeed, there is an instance of a Presbyterian minister in Asheville advising a far-flung congregation to hunker down at the local Methodist church, established in 1840, until a Presbyterian minister should present himself. Starting in the late-18th century, “circuit riding” Methodist ministers visited mountain congregations that the pioneering Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury had established previously. These rugged young men convened services in private homes, log cabins, and schools, traveling the length and breadth of western North Carolina to share the gospel. In between these “appointments,” as they were called, lay leaders would keep things going. After a few months, a circuit rider could settle down and establish a permanent location, secure in the knowledge that he had advanced Methodism in the region. It was a well-organized operation, with elders overseeing the various circuits that made up administrative units known as districts, which were overseen in turn by bishops.
Initially a movement within Anglicanism, Methodism emphasized personal holiness and inner piety over outward ritual and tradition. The two flavors of English Protestantism began to see a class split in North Carolina throughout the early 19th century, with Methodism emerging as the working-class, socially progressive faith, and Anglicanism as the choice for the more religiously and politically conservative; those who preferred a more democratic congregational structure stuck with the Baptists. Debates over slavery in the runup to the Civil War caused a denominational split between North and South that lasted until 1939, with the abolitionist branch developing a following among respectable liberal elites. Along with establishing schools and campaigning against public intoxication and liquor sales, Methodists became influential in North Carolina.
When different branches of Methodism consolidated into the United Methodist Church in 1968, they continued the church’s legacy of social support. Today, rural United Methodist churches account for nearly $100 million in economic impact in North Carolina each year, supporting local jobs and businesses and serving as hubs for the wider community, often providing referrals to other forms of support.
There are around 347,000 UMC members in North Carolina today. The 2022 report on the rural Methodist halo effect in the state surveyed 87 out of 1,283 rural churches throughout the state, and found that those churches today offer everything from the kind of direct assistance that Casting Bread provides, to serving as meeting places for other types of community support programs. The day of Casting Bread Cantina’s debut, for example, Faithbridge was hosting a parenting class next door.
“That’s kind of one of the nice things about the Methodist Church, is it’s this part of a larger denomination,” said Katie Zinger of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. “They have a lot of infrastructure in place to kind of probably even help support some of these rural churches beyond what they would be able to do on their own.” The UMC is divided into five regional jurisdictions, which are composed of over 50 conferences, which are further divided into districts. Faithbridge belongs to the Appalachian district, part of the UMC’s Western North Carolina District.
To rebuild from the storm damage to the church and to build a new home for Casting Bread, Faithbridge Pastor Ben Carson said he first had to coordinate with the district to approve his building committee. Now, with that underway, he said he is looking at an 18-month timeline from start to finish, to fundraise and to rebuild.
“We’re in the business of saving souls,” Carson said. “But saving souls doesn’t just mean like, you say a prayer and you’re good to go.” He has a broader definition of salvation that includes the here and now. “It’s wholeness,” he said. “Are your relationships broken with the economic system? Are your relationships broken with your family system. Are your relationships broken with your religious system?”
Seventy-nine percent of beneficiaries of UMC programs are not congregation members. At Casting Bread, former client-turned-staff member Diann Miller, 73, said it doesn’t matter where people come from when they turn to her for help. She has been with Casting Bread since 2007, a year after it began as a single shelf in a cupboard.
“I love my clients,” she said. Miller knows many of them by name and dietary restriction, keeping certain items aside depending on their needs. Casting Bread operates on a self-select model, in which clients can select for themselves what they need and want for themselves and their families. “That’s what I like about our little market,” she said. “Client choice.”
Although born in the area, Miller is not a member at Faithbridge. “I’m one of the most Southern Baptists,” she said. “But it’s like I told [Pastor] Benjamin and everybody else is that, you know, there’s only one Lord and He’s not going to look at us one day and say, well, now you Methodist, you go down here, and you Baptist, you go over there. We’re all going to be standing in judgment together.”
Miller told me about a woman she knows whose body was found days after she was washed away by flood waters while trying to rescue her dog during the hurricane. She said even now, body parts are still being brought to the local hospital. Although her house didn’t sustain much damage, she was trapped there for four days until there were roads cleared for travel. Then, she said she and her husband went out in his truck distributing generators that churches were making available to residents without power.
When they saw the damage done to Casting Bread, “we all cried lots of tears, lots of tears,” Wall said. “We stood here and really didn’t know if we had a future at all.”
Everyone with whom I spoke had been touched in some capacity by the hurricane, but they didn’t seem like people touched by tragedy. They smiled. A lot. Carson had sounded cheerful on the phone, speaking calmly about recovering from the storm. It wasn’t until I arrived at his church in person that I learned from volunteers that he had himself been sucked into a storm drain during the storm and miraculously survived.
Miller said she wanted people to know “how strong, how loving that our whole Watauga County is. We’re just country people, you know, nothing fancy. But that’s what we do. We help our neighbor.” They are not, she said, “just some hillbillies.”
“The fact that we have this new collaboration and this new canteen and that we were able to pivot,” said Wall, “is a testament to our resilience and just hope.”
Alexia Brewer, founder of Greeks for Good, is the collaboration in question. Wearing a blue shirt with “OPAlicious” written across the front, she provided the food for Casting Bread Cantina’s inaugural lunch.
Brewer owns a Greek restaurant with her husband in nearby Boone, North Carolina. She founded Greeks for Good as a nonprofit to expand her restaurant’s reach as they helped feed those affected after Hurricane Helene. She leverages community networks and travels to Greek cultural festivals around the state and, soon, the country to garner interest and raise funds for her mission. Although Greek Orthodox herself, she sees no issue with working with a UMC-aligned charity.
UMC conferences in the state have lost churches in recent years due to a denominational split over the issue of recognizing same-sex marriage, but religious and political differences are virtually nonexistent at the Casting Bread Cantina.
“Forget the politics and forget all that,” Brewer said. “We have other work to do.”
The UMC is far from the only faith group assisting in recovery. The storm damaged 8,000 of western North Carolina’s private roads and bridges, many of which are crucial for residents to access vital services. “Bridging Together” is a privately funded collaboration between Lutheran Disaster Response and Mennonite Disaster Service to rebuild and repair these damaged private roads and bridges.
So far, Casting Bread has been largely unaffected by federal cuts to aid programs, which have affected other faith-based organizations. Community networks support Casting Bread, from their dedicated volunteers to the local grocery store chains that supply them weekly, and the donations that have allowed them to look forward to a new building.
“It’s just something else,” said staff member Diann Miller. “The feeling that you get from just knowing that you’re feeding God’s people. It’s worth everything.”
Regina Hood is a Casting Bread volunteer and Faithbridge member. Before she headed to lunch, Hood stood and talked to me in front of a car filled with groceries and covered with decals celebrating Pride and the local PBS radio affiliate. “Casting Bread is a family,” she said. “It’s a very open-minded church. We’re all about love, love without limits.”
