GARDEN GROVE : Christmas Cookies Baked for Inmates

Members of Crystal Cathedral have baked 180,000 cookies for inmates at state correctional institutions in Chino and Norco as part of the prison ministry of the church.

They are putting final touches on the Christmas gift packages at a church warehouse in Anaheim.

For nine years, trucking business owner Taylor Duncan has driven from his home in Atlanta to Garden Grove each December to load the packages, which he deliveries to the prisons without charge. He will take the first of three truckloads today.

Included in the gift packages, in addition to a dozen cookies for each recipient, are handwritten Christmas cards from preschool children from the Crystal Cathedral Ministries, a letter from the congregation, “The Presence”--a religious book by co-pastor Bruce Larson, a Bible and a calendar with inspirational pictures and verses.

“Prisoners have come to our Sunday school classes and tell us what a good influence this has been on their lives,” said church member Bob Morrison of Garden Grove. “You never know what (kind of) influence we have. That’s what keeps us baking.”

With his wife, Louise, Morrison helped to bake 300 chocolate chip cookies this year, he said. Pastor Ray Van Beek, who has directed Crystal Cathedral’s prison ministry for six years, said the gifts seem to make a heartfelt impression, even on murderers and hardened criminals.

“The children write cards like, ‘Hi, my name is Cindy. I’m 8 years old and in the second grade. God loves you and so do I.’

“I’ve seen it bring tears to the eyes of the big old strong guys,” Van Beek said. Children in the church’s preschool start work on the cards each February.

Ellen Stirrett of Los Angeles may be the top cookie maker this year, he said, having baked 6,840. A blind woman baked 2,400 cookies last year. But illness prevented her from participating this time, he said.

The greatest cookie output, however, comes from church members who take part in cookie baking bees in church kitchens, which whip up 18,000 cookies in a day, he said.

Duncan, 55, who will make the deliveries to the institutions in his tractor-trailer truck, said he became involved after hearing about the prison gift program while watching the Crystal Cathedral’s “Hour of Power” program on television. “I felt I had to do something for someone else. I thought that this was the chance for me and my truck,” he said.

The prison ministries program was started by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller 11 years ago.