It’s enough to make a baked-bean traditionalist down a double shot of ketchup. The folks at the New Sharon Congregational Church have married the classic Maine baked-bean supper with the idea of Chinese take-out — and they’ve been raking in the cash ever since.

“Oh, my, yes, it does seem to have gone over rather well,” allows Mary Harris, a member of the church guild and, with her husband, Alvin, a dedicated slaw maker. “I was in a restaurant in Norridgewock last week and a complete stranger came up to me and made a reservation for next month’s sale.”

Harris says the idea came up last summer when the ladies of the guild were discussing moneymaking strategies to help the tiny church, where “if we have twenty people in the pews on a Sunday we get excited.” The guild itself has a core membership that can be counted on the fingers of two hands, with a few digits left over. The prospect of putting on a full-blown, sit-down, baked-bean supper was too daunting to consider, “but someone mentioned doing a baked-bean take-out,” she recalls.

The concept itself is no stranger to Maine. Many schools, for example, have pizza take-out fund-raisers. But applying the idea to baked beans, a food so hallowed that at one time North Woods lumberjacks demanded specific types of beans as part of their employment contracts, seems, well, almost sacrilegious.

Which didn’t stop the ladies of New Sharon. They organized bean chefs and pie bakers and slaw slicers and put out the word. “We decided to test it the first month, September, by making twenty-four meals,” Harris recalls. “We sold out by nine o’clock Friday morning. We didn’t realize the demand.”

In October the ladies produced forty meals — a quart of homemade beans, a loaf of brown bread or a half-dozen rolls, a pint of coleslaw, and a nine-inch pie, all for twelve dollars — and sold out again. By November the guild was selling out of Saturday night beans by Thursday afternoon, “and I had thirty reservations for December,” Harris says.

Harris admits there were some fears that the take-out meals would spoil the community spirit and socializing that are hallmarks of traditional church suppers. “But what we’ve found is that there’s a lot of conversation just among the people who are picking up their meals that day,” she says.

And the price can’t be beat. “We have one young mother with three children who comes in every month,” Harris notes. “She says it’s cheaper than taking the kids to McDonald’s — and better for them, too.”

No reports yet on what the gambit has done for attendance at church on Sunday morning.

(Published January 2004)