Church offers holiday gifts of food

Life Church is delivering a thousand bags of food to families in need this weekend.

By Allyson Ballard • December 12, 2025 1:30 am

A church in Oak Harbor is spreading holiday spirit on the road this weekend.

Life Church raised just under $43,000 to spend on bringing groceries straight to the doors of families in need this holiday season. Thursday, 133 volunteers gathered to assemble a thousand bags of food and drink to be distributed to homes throughout Whidbey on Sunday, as well as delivered to doorsteps in Anacortes and La Conner.

The effort is part of the church’s annual Christmas Cheer Outreach program, which Pastor Josh Hubbard said began fairly recently as a way to give back to the community.

“We just really love people. That’s it. We love people, and we don’t want to just be inside these four walls saying that we do. We want to be outside actually doing it,” he said.

Life Church raised the money to purchase groceries from places like WinCo Foods in Bellingham and Costco in Burlington, and to obtain U-Haul trucks and reusable bags to transport the donations.

Alyssa Redding, office coordinator at the church, said a list of potential recipient families is created by “going through the housing authorities” in each delivery region. A tag is placed on the door of each home set to receive a bag, and a week later, a convoy of vehicles makes the deliveries.

Hubbard and Redding said the number of delivered bags has steadily grown from 400 the first year, to 600, 800 and then a thousand the last two years.

Witnessing the deliveries firsthand is a special experience, and Hubbard called the church’s ability to come to its people a “big deal.”

“We’ve had so many instances where people — we may be the first people they’ve seen all year long, or they just didn’t know that somebody cared,” Hubbard said. “So to knock on the door and see them face-to-face, that’s a pretty magnificent moment.”