‘An hour of peace and good food.’ Don Murfin simply wants to feed people for free
Kitchens fire up early. Doors unlatch. Hosts set out tables and chairs for guests who may -- or may not -- bring something to share. Folks who haven’t seen each other in days, months or even years share stories and plans over a warm meal someone spent untold hours preparing.
For many, Thanksgiving is a holiday. For Don Murfin it’s a purpose.
“The Community Cafe is kind of like going home to mom for people,” Murfin said. “We treat everybody with love. We get to know them. If they come back a second time, we talk to them and welcome them back by name.”
Murfin, founder and head chef of The Community Cafe since it began more than a dozen years ago, recently announced he’ll retire at year’s end.
The free meal sites will continue. Just not with the man who started them. The man who organized more free meals than there are people in the communities being served.
“I’ve been doing that for quite a long time and to be very candid,” Murfin said, “I’m getting tired.”
A door prize led to opened doors
Don and Linda Murfin moved to South Carolina in 2008. They found a church, tried civic groups. Murfin won a door prize in November 2008 from a Christian chamber of commerce meeting. The prize was an hour with a life coach.
“And I thought that would be great,” Murfin said. “Because she could help me figure out what I might like to do. I had all kinds of crazy ideas.”
About the same time, Kenny Ashley served as one of several pastors at then River Hills Community Church in Lake Wylie -- now Community Church at Lake Wylie. Worship leader Kevin Gray asked Ashley what he would do if money wasn’t limited.
“I said, I would build a cafe and feed people for free,” Ashley said. “If they made a donation, fine. If not, everybody would come in and eat and fellowship around a table to enjoy an hour of peace and good food.”
The conversation became a call for volunteers in the church bulletin. It would start in January of 2009, amid a national recession.
“Right in the middle of the bail out for banks that were too big to fail,” Ashley said. “People were having a difficult time financially. Some lost most of their savings.”
Murfin saw the bulletin after, unbeknownst, telling the life coach he’d long wanted to open a kitchen to help people in need.
“I saw that and I said, OK Lord, you’re talking to me here,” Murfin said.
At a Christmas party in 2008, Murfin asked if he could help.
“I said, ‘no,’” Ashley said. “You cannot help with the soup kitchen. You can run the soup kitchen. And the rest is history.”
Murfin crunched numbers. He figured a cafe could feed folks for a dollar per meal. Murfin recalls the senior pastor at that time saying Murfin could give it a shot for a few months.
“I thought, If that’s the way you think, I’m not your person,” Murfin said. “Things like that are doomed to failure. If you’re really interested in it, I’ll do it.”
More than half million meals served
The Community Cafe might sound like a soup kitchen, but it started as a gathering table.
Guests who could buy a meal from any restaurant in Lake Wylie sat down with people who’d lost jobs. Business and church leaders stopped in for meals. There was soup, but also sandwiches and desserts, pasta and other dishes. The cafe served about 25,000 meals that first year.
Other churches contacted Murfin.
Bethlehem Baptist Church in Fort Mill opened the second location in 2011. More Fort Mill sites would follow at Fort Mill Community Bible Church, then its current Sisk Memorial Baptist Church in 2016. The cafe in Lake Wylie moved to Lake Wylie Christian Assembly. Another opened at Lake Wylie Lutheran Church near Tega Cay.
“And they all continued to grow and grow and grow,” Murfin said. “And as you can see here, we have people who come in and sit down, and they like to fellowship. They enjoy the food, they can take some home and that really, really helps folks.”
Dine-in wasn’t enough.
“We decided, after talking to a lot of folks that there are a lot of people can’t come to us,” Murfin said. “We ended up buying a food truck and started driving the truck around to small communities and we just serve the food out of the truck.”
All that expansion, the food truck and meals came without any charge for any meal.
Grocery stores and local businesses lined up to help. Nonprofits helped as word got out, earning Murfin the top AARP volunteer award in 2016 and the highest community service award given in South Carolina, the Silver Crescent, a year later.
“He’s dedicated a good eight years of his life to making this happen, to growing it,” S.C. Rep. Raye Felder said when she presented Murfin the 2017 award during a cafe lunch service. “You could definitely see, it’s a ministry not only from the volunteers that get together and do the work, but also the people who actually benefit from the hot meals.”
A cup of the signature beef barley soup marked meal No. 100,000 in 2014. Just three years later, the cafe served its quarter-millionth meal. While the COVID-19 pandemic closed cafe sites for some time, it didn’t curb need. The pandemic actually spiked meal production.
“There were really a huge number of people that needed food and during that time,” Murfin said. “We more than doubled the amount of food that we were putting up.”
At one point the cafe made and delivered about 6,000 meals per week.
In late 2020 the cafe hit the 500,000 meal mark — half a million free meals — while largely serving shut-ins. To date, cafe sites have served about 550,000 free meals.
‘A God thing’
Mary Rasmussen started volunteering with the cafe about a decade ago. During COVID, Rasmussen saw people struggling to find everything from toilet paper to meat.
“We decided on doing a fundraiser,” Rasmussen said. “We called it toilet paper and tampons. I didn’t tell Don. I used his address as a drop off location and suddenly Don and Linda had cases of tampons and toilet paper at their door.”
Don called. He asked if Rasmussen started another fundraiser and how long it would last. He didn’t ask why.
“About a week later I came by with a couple of trucks to haul away all the goods,” Rasmussen said. “I asked Don to take a picture with everything. He blushed and happily obliged.”
Charities that involve government funding often have guidelines and requirements. Because Murfin’s group operates on donations, he doesn’t have to ask questions.
“People can take home whatever they want,” Murfin said. “We’ll have it ready for you when you leave. And if you need some help getting it to your car. Well, we’ll do that too.”
Early on, cafe volunteers approached Murfin quietly if someone asked for, say, a dozen meals.
“I said well, yes, it’s OK,” Murfin said. “Did you ask if they needed more? Because they say, well, you don’t know where it goes. I said ‘I don’t care where it’s going. That’s a God thing.’ I’m here to make good food and pass it off to people that want to eat it.”
The giving attitude proved contagious.
From the hundreds of volunteers who kept cafes running all these years to the businesses that step in and donate for a new freezer or food truck, to the the big donation from people just passing through at a time when the cafe needs it most.
“The act of feeding or sharing food with someone in need is the most basic and profound act of kindness anyone can offer,” read a note the cafe received from a couple traveling from Minnesota to Florida a few years back, that came with $1,000.
Ashley saw that donations of styrofoam cups and spoons, bread and other items kept coming.
“God supplied every need the cafe ever had,” Ashley said.
Retirement and the future
Murfin is almost 80 years old. He’s synonymous with the free meal service that operates across York County through churches and a food truck. Yet he’s been consistent throughout, the cafe isn’t about him.
“It’s a God thing,” Murfin said. “The Lord is the main person within the Community Cafe and that’s why it has worked so well. He is in control. And it is amazing, what he has done for us.”
Which brings him to retirement.
“Some people say I shouldn’t, others say it’s about time,” Murfin said. “For me, I am just worn out.”
Sous chef Constantine Mitsopoulos will take over the food side. Murfin continues work to turn over the nonprofit, bookkeeping side. The room at his home that’s been commandeered all these years for cafe work will get new life.
So will Murfin’s schedule.
“My dear wife has a list of things that she wants me to do,” he said. “But basically for a while I’m just not going to do a whole heck of a lot of anything.”
If anyone has earned the break, Ashley said, it’s Murfin.
“I don’t have the paper to list all the things God has done through Don and Linda Murfin and the Community Cafe,” Ashley said. “I just know the Lord has been glorified, people have been fed and encouraged, and the spiritual water level of our communities has risen greatly over the last 13 years.”
This story was originally published November 24, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
