Ottawa churches are joining forces to plan a Thanksgiving community feast.

The Ottawa Ministers Association is organizing a free community Thanksgiving dinner 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Nov. 23 at North Baptist Church, 413 E. Wilson St., Ottawa.

The dinner will coincide with North Baptist Church’s Free Food Fourth Friday, which the church serves on the fourth Friday of each month. The free meal is open to anyone in the community, North Baptist pastor Kim Wilcox said.

The church typically serves 175 to 250 people during its Fourth Friday meals, Wilcox said. North Baptist has been offering the meals for the past two years, he said.

The ministers association and the Baptist church hopes to serve 500 to 750 people with the Thanksgiving dinner, Wilcox said.

“The meal will include turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, pies — all your typical Thanksgiving dishes,” Wilcox said. “Members of the community’s churches will be bringing different food items to the church for the meal, and we, of course, will be preparing some of the meal here [at North Baptist Church].”

The dinner might fill a void left by the hiatus of the annual community Thanksgiving dinner at Ottawa Middle School, which had fed as many as 1,000 people each year for the past decade. The school discontinued the meal last fall after some “key people” could not help with the annual dinner, according to Herald archives.

Wilcox said the discontinuance of the OMS dinner was not the prime motivation for sponsoring this Thanksgiving dinner.

“We were already doing the Free Food Fourth Friday, so this provided a good opportunity to turn it into a community Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “Our Fourth Friday meals are from 5 to 7 p.m., but we are expanding the hours for the Thanksgiving dinner to 3 to 7 p.m. We hope to serve about four times as many people as we would on a normal Fourth Friday.”

Doug Carder is senior writer for The Herald. Email him at dcarder@ottawaherald.com