With the Summer Olympics in all-out sprint mode, the term "multi-ethnic festival" assumes a deeper meaning. It paints a sweet landscape flowing with abundant food, drink and dancing, savored in this ever-growing global village.

So it is among the faithful where I've worshiped on and off for more than a decade, the Orthodox Church of St. Matthew on Eden Brook Drive in Kings Contrivance. After 20 years spent holding services in venues such as Slayton House, the 225-member community dedicated its $2.4 million temple in May.

Now comes the daunting task other property owners face: paying down the mortgage. For help in that department, a festival featuring the cultures represented in the membership -- from Serbian and Russian to Ethiopian and Mexican -- is on tap for the weekend of Oct. 4-5 at the church.

The dream of a festival that features more than one-note crawfish or Delmarva chicken simmered for a long time.

"We talked about it during all of those years when we were meeting in rented space," said Duane Johnson, one of the priests. "It was something that we knew we wanted to do when we had our own building. And it is something of a tradition for Orthodox Christians in America to hold such festivals."

A few realities make the task more formidable. For starters, it's the inaugural edition of an event hosted by a church belonging to lesser-known Eastern Christianity. Second, a surprising number of people have no idea where Kings Contrivance is. "Thank the Lord," one volunteer observed, "that Harris Teeter has opened across the parking lot. That's the perfect landmark" to help guide the geographically challenged (Read my lips: Mapquest).

Given society's fickle attention spans, the events communications wizard, Andrea Misner, is blazing a trail. And while I don't have the time to devote to the project that she does, I'm dispensing what I know about the vagaries of the media: how editors and reporters, beset by deadlines, live in the land of tomorrow and often act in knee-jerk fashion-- particularly on slow news days.

With so many cultures under one roof, the Saturday morning cooking sessions taking place in the sparkling new church kitchen have been real eye-openers. Participants get hands-on instruction in the art of fashioning items ranging from borscht to baklava and pierogies to tortillas.

Sophia Severino, along with her daughter, Marianne Larkin, is busy overseeing preparation of the Greek goodies, which I grew up on. (I have the through-the-roof cholesterol level to prove it.) Sophia, a Silver Spring resident, worked for years on festivals at her old church in Washington, D.C.

"We decided on the menu based on what we felt would give a good representation of our ethnic cuisine." She relishes "going to a church that is bigger than just one nationality."

In her upbeat e-mails to the volunteers, festival general chairwoman Sharon Cross puts the unvarnished truth out there. Sharon's a woman with a can-do spirit. But equally appealing are the occasional flashes of doubt that exposes her (our) frail humanity. Start-up costs, she warns, are no picnic; the festival will have to borrow money from the church.

"After the profits are counted," she says, "we repay St. Matthew first before we rejoice." Sharon tags her missives with the signature line: "This is a leap of faith!"

Tony Glaros is a former staff writer for the Laurel Leader.

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