A Dinner Honoring Our Pastor and his Wife

True ministers of the Gospel of Christ don’t always have it easy and many times they are under appreciated. My son Zachary and his wife decided our church should have a Pastor Appreciation day for our pastor who has been our shepherd for so many years.

Zachary and Hannah – the planners

Hannah did a beautiful job on the decorations. She bought some things, had some decor of her own and then used items of mine. With all of it, she was able to come up with 9 different centerpieces and they looked beautiful.

We couldn’t have the event outdoors because it was too windy and the temperatures had dropped. So we had to move all of my living room furniture outside and set up in my living room as well as kitchen. These were the tables we set up in the living room the night before the event..

All 9 of the centerpieces.

We decided to mix things up a bit. We served the food from our library. We pushed the kids’ school desks up against the wall. This picture shows 3 of the desks but we had 1 more that was on the opposite side which held the salad and rolls.

The menu was:

Chicken Marsala

Italian Rolls

Mashed Potatoes

Green Beans

Olive Garden Salad

Another odd thing we did was to serve the drinks in my entry way on the bureau.

Because my house is really too small to have almost 70 people seated, the food set-up worked out really well. Less congestion in the kitchen since we had tables in there.  We did serve the many different desserts the ladies brought from the kitchen, along with coffee.

Serving food in unusual places is an idea I picked up from both Martha Stewart and Alexandra Stoddard. I’ve always been intrigued with the idea but have never done it for a crowd until yesterday.

We have a married couple in our church that likes to make and decorate unusual cakes and they always come up with something amazing. Yesterday was no different.

Check out this entirely edible cake – a Bible and a Spoken Word book (totally edible, can you believe?!). The only non-edible item on this cake is the wire rimmed glasses.

It was a surprise dinner. When our pastor and his wife walked in we all started singing, “Thank You for Giving to the Lord.”

There were speeches, a special song by Russell and Hannah about pastors and they were given gifts – one was a photo book filled with pictures of each family in the church along with letters saying why we so appreciated our pastor.

It was a lovely day.

Here’s our little church group, minus a few.

This was the first time we’ve ever had anything like this for our pastor. It was a very special day and meant so much to him and his wife. I’m glad my son and daughter-in-law had the vision to do this.