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The Jubilee Cafe at the downtown Lawrence First United Methodist Church is once again serving free breakfasts twice a week to hungry morning guests.

Colleen Boley, media manager for the church, said the cafe reopened Aug. 29. It now serves free breakfasts from 7 to 8 a.m. on Tuesday and Friday at the Lawrence First UMC, 946 Vermont St.

Lawrence First UMC has offered the cafe since at least 1994 in collaboration with student volunteers from the University of Kansas Center for Community Outreach, Boley said. The church closed the cafe in mid-May, she said.

“It’s not something we usually do,” Boley said. “It was closed because we were having trouble getting enough volunteers. With the KU students gone for the summer, we weren’t sure we would have enough to sustain it.”

The closing had the positive effect of recommitting the congregation to the cafe, said church member Aileen Ball.

“When we had to suspend the cafe, we heard a lot of outcry,” she said. “We realized people care about it.”

Ball was tasked with redesigning the cafe to make it sustainable. That was accomplished through the congregation’s reinvestment in the cafe through the hiring of its first staff person.

“We realized it was too much to leave simply to volunteers,” she said. “We invested in hiring a director, someone with a commercial cooking background who could connect with guests.”

The congregation also committed to rely less on KU student volunteers, Ball said. That requires members to volunteer more often to prepare food, wait tables and clean.

The concept always was for the cafe to be just that — a cafe where guests could be seated at tables and order food from a wait staff. With a chronic shortage of volunteers before the redesign, Jubilee Cafe was forced to serve guests buffet style, Ball said.

“We didn’t want it to be a soup kitchen,” she said. “We want our guests to truly have a cafe experience where they are seated and wait staff takes their orders.”

The Jubilee Cafe can seat 72 guests, Ball said. It has averaged about 50 guests since it reopened, which is about the number it traditionally served, she said.

The cafe’s guests are people in need of food or people facing food insecurity, Ball said. Some are homeless, but there is a core group of regulars who enjoy the company of others who make the cafe part of their Tuesday and Friday morning routines, she said.

One thing that was mostly left unchanged is the food, Ball said. The cafe offers the same “classic diner menu” of scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy, pancakes and toast, and the new director has added a breakfast burrito, Ball said.

“It’s my understanding that the guests were deeply devoted to that menu and get concerned if it changes,” she said.