Baptist Campus Ministry is showing its teacher appreciation with their annual spring semester lunch delivery.

For around the past six years, BCM has prepared a free home-cooked lunch for Marshall’s professors that are hand-delivered. Lunch consists of homemade pepperoni rolls, courtesy of Olivia Goodman, the woman’s discipleship and music coordinator of BCM, and homemade cookies made by BCM volunteers.

This year, Jacob Eastman, a junior business management and creative writing double major, and Zack Simpson, a sophomore marketing major, stepped up to lead the ministry.

This is Eastman’s second year being responsible for the lunch deliveries and he is training Simpson so there will always be someone in the group who has done the ministry.

“The main part of this is us at BCM wanting to really just serve those who every single day serve us,” Eastman said. “Their job is to educate us and they do. It’s not any easy job. They give so much and we just desire to say thank you.”

Typically, the invitations to sign up for the lunch service are passed to professors through a campus-wide newsletter, but that didn’t happen this year. Due miscommunication, the invitations did not get sent out in time for professors to register, and instead the BCM students personally emailed their professors to invite them to lunch.

“I think the idea of getting a personalized ‘just for you’ from a student you know or may know, that really made it more of what it was, a way to say thank you to the professors,” Eastman said.

Despite the mix-up, they were still able to serve around 50 professors, as they do every year. They plan on evaluating this new system to see how they can improve the personal aspects next year. Every year professors look forward to the delivery, according to Eastman and Simpson.

“I have already spoken to professors who have been a part of the lunch in years past and they’re excited about the pepperoni rolls, about that lunch. They’re like ‘oh, are you guys making peperoni rolls again?’” Simpson said. “I think a lot of professors have that attitude of looking forward to it. It’s become such a tradition now that they know that they can expect this, that they’re looking forward to it.”

Simpson and Eastman are looking into ways to broaden the menu by maybe including a vegetarian option to get more professors able to sign up.

Karenann Flouhouse can be contacted at [email protected].