The church I attend, the Dayton Vineyard, has grown over the past 12 or so years I’ve been there. It’s gone from about 300 people back then to well over 2500 people on a given weekend. On top of that growth, the church was recently given a new location just north of downtown Dayton, Ohio.

The new spot started having services last fall, and it’s gone from about 30 people to 150 or more. I’d heard people talking about doing something to kick off the new location, and I thought it would be great to have a real barbecue there.

Keep in mind a couple of things about the Dayton Vineyard. The first is that we used to have block parties in different areas in Dayton called BBQ Dayton. The second is that our tagline is ‘A Pretty Good Church’, implying that we’re not perfect, but we try to be at least pretty good. So I combined the two into my idea and called it ‘A Pretty Good BBQ’.

Typically at a BBQ Dayton, burgers and hot dogs would be grilled and served, for free, to any that showed up. Someone had the idea to do to the same at the Dayton campus, but I said I thought we should do real barbecue instead of burgers and dogs. The first response I got was that burgers and dogs were good enough.

That kind of got to me a bit, and I kept hearing this still, small voice tell me that I shouldn’t serve others with ‘good enough’… I should serve with my best. And my best, for that sort of situation, was not only to cook barbecue, but to put out word to others to see if I could get help cooking barbecue.

So a few months ago, I put word out on the BBQ Brethren site that I wanted to do this thing. Included in it was not only travel to Dayton paid for by the cooks, but that I was also going to ask them to pay for a share of the meat we were going to cook then give away. Yes, I said give away.

I got responses that really amazed me. Clark came all the way down from Wisconsin, with Jeff from Chicago in tow; Steve and Mike came down from Michigan; Neil came from Chillicothe, Ohio; Bob from Westerville, Ohio; and Pat and Jeff were both local church members. Rick was local, too, and came by to keep morale going by cooking on his medium and mini big green eggs.

They all showed up on Saturday, May 17, to set up. Prior to that, Bob helped procure 500 pounds of meat that was delivered to the church for us. That’s 500 pounds! 200 pounds of beef brisket and 300 pounds of pork shoulder.

During the day, I got 50 wings from Chicken Louie, a local joint near the church. Clay was the cook, and was more than happy to help us out, making sure the wings were ready. Later, beef ribs were served, along with pizza and cherry pie filled puff pastries. It was quite a spread for the cooks!

The guys got set up during the afternoon, and we had a couple side competitions going on. The first was for ABT’s, or stuffed, smoked peppers. Only a few entries actually made it to judging, and yours truly took the honors! On Sunday morning, we also had a fatty (stuffed, smoked sausage) competition, with Neil taking the title here.

As we got near noon, the guys all had competition style turn in boxes, and put both pork and brisket in them to be judged by Mr. White, who used to run several kitchens at local restaurants.

After judging all the entries, the winner was the Vineyard’s own Pat Caudill of Patrick’s BBQ! Congrats to Pat, but the big event was already going, which was the serving of barbecue to people that showed up.

In under 45 minutes, 1400 cans/bottles of pop/water were served, and 1250 pulled pork and brisket sandwiches were served. It was an amazing day, seeing people enjoying themselves. To top off the weekend, the Vineyard had a record showing at their next free breakfast the next Thursday.

The whole idea was to serve people where they are, with a smile, showing them God loves them. And any real barbecuer knows God loves barbecue! (read Leviticus)

I want to thank all the people that helped with the event, the first of hopefully many, especially Steve Bowen, the pastor in charge of outreach, that helped with the meat, the site, the organization and the volunteers. We’ll make changes next year to make it even better. I’d have more shots of sandwiches, etc… But I was pretty busy at the time!