Students gather for free food, conversation at annual Fall Faith Festival

Published Nov 16, 2017

Students line up between classes to grab a quick cup of soup and some fresh bread, served by members of different religious organizations on campus.

As Thanksgiving approaches, students were treated to free comfort food and offers of emotional comfort as TCU’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (RSL) hosted their Annual Fall Faith Festival.

Set up in front of the Founders Statue, 23 individual student religious organizations joined together to serve free soup, chili, fresh bread, cookies and drinks to the TCU community.

Students involved with different religious organizations on campus serve soup to those passing by Founders Statue for a quick lunch.

“Different communities at TCU, different organizations, we are all vested in serving students,” Rev. Angela Kaufman, Minister to the University, said. “We all come with the same values- that sometimes you feed the body, sometimes you feed the mind, sometimes you feed the heart, but we are here to take care of one another.”

Senior mechanical engineer and mathematics double major Lindsey Elliott volunteered to help fellow students relax.

“It’s just a good way to get people to unwind between classes or to get lunch if they didn’t have lunch plans or they are rushing between meetings,” Elliott said.

More importantly, Elliot, a member of TCU Catholic Campus Ministry, said she wanted to make sure students felt like they had a community that supports them and that they feel loved with all that is going on in the world right now.

Ron Bunyard, with TCU’s International Christian Fellowship, echoed this idea of wanting to provide a sense of religious community.

“The goal is simply to make an awareness to all the students that there are faith organizations on campus, ” Buyard said. “That there is a group of people who want to love and serve and care for the students from a spiritual component.”

Many students were surprised but grateful for the free meal.

“We just came out of class and stopped by and saw some soup,” said sophomore child development major Sarah McRoskey. “It is very nice to see things like this; I do like it.”

In preparation for the event, RSL ordered enough soup to feed between 350 and 400, thinking this would last around two hours. To their surprise, they ended up running out completely by around 12:30 p.m., only an hour after the event began.

Kaufman said this is great news and means that next year they will hopefully order twice the amount of food to serve even more of the TCU community.