If you’re feeling peckish for a good chicken dinner on Friday, don’t wing it.

Hope United Methodist Church will host the 110th chicken noodle dinner from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday at 2506 Caton Farm Road in Joliet.

The dinner includes chicken and noodles, rolls and butter, peas, Harvard beets and dessert.

Beth Cheffer, a co-coordinator of the dinner, said members dropped the mashed potatoes years ago.

“Noodles and mashed potatoes: that’s a lot of carbs,” Cheffer said.

Historically, the chicken noodle dinner was a fundraiser of the former Sharon United Methodist Church in Plainfield, which was decommissioned in 2022, Cheffer said.

“It was an older congregation,” Cheffer said. “And we were not able to maintain the building, which was 160 years old. So we knew we could not go into the next few years and be successful.”

When Sharon merged with Hope, the chicken noodle dinner merged, too, said Cheffer, whose memories of the dinner go back to childhood.

In short, the chicken dinner didn’t cross the road; it changed churches – and hatched a century’s worth of fun stories.

“The chickens used to come from the farms because this [Sharon] was a farmer’s church,” Cheffer said. “There was a lady who’d back up her station wagon to the back of the sanctuary and made cole slaw in the station wagon.”

Church members cooked all the mashed potatoes and peas in their homes and brought them to the dinner, until the 1950s when Sharon finally had “a nice kitchen” in its education building, Cheffer said.

Members also hand-made the noodles until the early 2000s or so “because all of the ladies who made the noodles are in their 90s now and they are just not able to do it,” Lynn Jadron of Plainfield, former longtime dinner coordinator, said in 2008.

The chicken recipe, however, remains unaltered, Cheffer said.

“We just cook the chicken with the chicken stock with all the seasonings and carrots,” Cheffer said.

The dinner consistently raises $2,000 to $3,000 each year, Cheffer said. At Sharon, proceeds benefitted the church. Hope has a strong community outreach, so the 2026 beneficiary is Bags of Hope, Cheffer said.

Bags of Hope feeds hundreds of Will County students each weekend through a donation-funded backpack program.

Cheffer said one senior member consistently invites – and pays for – 25 dinner guests.

“They look forward to it,” Cheffer said. “And when they’re done with their chicken noodle dinner, they ask when we’re having our annual meatloaf dinner.”

Tickets for the 110th Chicken Noodle Dinner are $15 for adults and $8 for children ages 5 to 10. Children age 4 and under are free.

For more information, call 815-436-2209.