One of Wichita’s most popular and longest running church dinners won’t happen this year
A popular church dinner that’s an 85-year tradition in Wichita is skipping its 86th year.
The annual St. George Lebanese Dinner and Food Sale, an October tradition that usually draws around 5,700 people to the cathedral at 7515 E. 13th St., won’t happen this year, said Adriene Rathbun, one of the dinner’s longtime volunteers and a former chair of the event.
The church recently completed a big remodel, which resulted in upgrades to its sanctuary and to the church hall where the dinner is always staged, and its priest — Father Paul O’Callaghan — decided it would be best to hold off on staging the dinner for a year, she said.
But fans of the event should not worry. The congregation plans to bring the dinner back next year and to continue it as an annual event.
“This is a one-off deal,” she said of the skip. “It’s probably not going to happen again.”
The dinner, which takes hundreds of church volunteers several months to prepare, is always a two-day event and offers pre-set meals that include traditional Lebanese dishes like cabbage rolls, kibba, and ruz and yuknee. It typically happens the second weekend in October, and in most years, the publicity committee would have been advertising it for weeks already.
Rathbun said that church members have expressed both disappointment and relief that the dinner won’t happen this year. They love putting it together, but it’s a lot of work.
The dinner has skipped a year at least once in the past, she said, so the move is not unprecedented. The church has started to receive calls from people who have made attending the dinner part of their fall tradition and are wondering why they can’t find information about it.
“I’ve heard from multiple people who’ve said, ‘My friend always comes into town for that every year,’” she said.
This story was originally published September 24, 2019 at 10:12 AM.
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