The home for miracles

Kari Kelli, a recovering meth addict, remembers the days when she’d help load 25 bags of 12-bean Disciple Soup mix into the back of Jan Bowes Martinez’s Suburban and wonder how in the world they’d ever sell.

Now, eight years later, Christ Kitchen has moved out of a battered church fellowship hall and into a clean, shiny commercial building. The kitchen has become a nonprofit business that changes women’s lives as it produces an inventory of approximately 4,600 food mixes and gifts. Now Christ Kitchen sells its products not only to customers scattered across town at church bazaars and women’s groups, but to shoppers who stroll right into its new facility, a former Taco Time restaurant on North Monroe.

“It’s nothing short of a miracle,” says Kelli, 37, now the kitchen’s office manager.

So is the transformation in her own life. After serving time in jail and losing her children nine years ago, Kelli finally came clean. She started working at Christ Kitchen simply because she needed the money it paid to cover her rent at a clean and sober building downtown.

Eventually, Kelli studied at a Bible college, began working at a local drug and alcohol treatment center and got her children back. In Martinez’s example, she found a new way to live.

“My life was shattered and broken,” Kelli says, “and she taught me how to love.”

Christ Kitchen began when Martinez, a former Spokane psychotherapist, dreamed up a way to persuade poor and homeless women to attend a weekly Bible study at a West Central Neighborhood church.

“I’ll bet they’d come if we paid them,” she said one day.

The idea started simply. Martinez recruited women to assemble dried soup mixes each Thursday morning, paying them minimum wage and presenting prayers and Bible discussion.

She’d cook a pot of soup for the women to share for lunch.

Before long, volunteers, inspired by Martinez’s vision, pitched in to bring lasagnas and turkey dinners to feed the women.

“That was the one hot meal I knew I could eat each week,” Kelli says.

Last week, under Kelli’s supervision, a group of nine women sliced graham crackers and piped white frosting to construct miniature gingerbread houses. They plan to build 1,000 of them this month for a Christ Kitchen fundraiser at the Davenport Hotel in December.

Fundraising has become an important new goal for this nonprofit business. It’s now open six days a week.

Christ Kitchen and its companion program, Christ Clinic, bought the property for $372,000. They plan to launch a $2 million capital campaign to build a new home for the clinic behind the kitchen.

Martinez, a short, wiry woman with blond curls and intense blue eyes, generates the relentless energy that drives this project. Now she’s cooking up plans to expand the kitchen’s business into selling prepared take-out food, adding a catering service and perhaps even opening a restaurant.

“Jan’s an amazing, amazing lady,” Kelli says. “I think she’s the Mother Teresa of our era. … The love of God just emanates from her.”

Martinez turned to Christianity to heal the pain of a rape she experienced as a young woman. She believes faith can help bring peace to the chaotic lives of Spokane’s poorest women, too.

On Tuesday the women at the kitchen described living with mental illness, heroin addiction and the anguish of a daughter’s prison sentence for murder.

“This place feels like home,” says 26-year-old Connie Scott. “I feel safe.

“It’s like our own little family.”

Christ Kitchen workers told similar stories several years ago on the day that a confident, well-spoken visitor interrupted their Bible study at Westminster Presbyterian Church to ask about the program. Martinez didn’t know who she was, but when the woman stood up to offer a beautiful, commanding prayer, Christ Kitchen’s founder and director thought, “This woman has prayed before. Who is this?”

Before she left, the visitor asked Martinez what Christ Kitchen needed. As always, she answered, “A commercial kitchen.”

“Well, I think we can get that for you,” the mystery woman said.

Martinez later found out their visitor had been the moderator of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) at the time, the Rev. Susan Andrews (“It meant she’s the head dog of all Presbyterians across the country,” Martinez explains).

Andrews helped Martinez get an application for a grant from the national Presbyterian Women’s group and even wrote a letter in support. The kitchen wound up receiving $221,000, which helped finance the move to the former Taco Time.

Similarly, Christ Clinic, which offers health care to the working poor who lack health insurance, has found a few generous benefactors.

“I don’t know anything about raising money,” Martinez says. “It just walks in the door.”

But that doesn’t prevent Christ Kitchen’s new mortgage and utility bills from looming as a major concern.

Martinez has limited the number of women she’s hiring for this season to around 35. Most of them make minimum wage, $7.63 an hour, and work just a few hours a week.

“Now,” Martinez says, “we need a few more saints to help us.”

This fall the women of Christ Kitchen assemble packages of Joyous Gingersnaps and Blue Corn Bread of Life in a spacious store with freshly painted white walls and a kitchen with a commercial oven and a walk-in cooler. They contrast it to the old church kitchen they rented before.

No longer must they head out to a locked shed behind the church to drag in 50-pound bags of flour or scurry to pick up every trace of their projects at the end of a work session to leave the kitchen clear for the Boy Scouts or a church meeting.

Poor women, Martinez says, become accustomed to shabby surroundings, to battered sofas and worn paneling, to scuffed linoleum floors and dingy lighting.

When the Christ Kitchen women helped move into the new building earlier this fall, they looked around in amazement.

“It’s so pretty,” they told her. “It sparkles.”

This month, Christ Kitchen’s business picks up as customers buy its gift baskets and its cookie, drink and snack mixes as Christmas presents. Martinez stocks tables at holiday bazaars and even a booth at River Park Square near Boehm’s in December.

Last year they sold $93,000 worth of products. Surrounded by boxes of Worthy White Chip and Macadamia Nut Cookies and Heavenly Cocoa mixes on Tuesday, Kelli anticipates more growth ahead.

“This next year,” she says, “is going to be a real interesting year – to see where we go and what God’s going to do.”