Vanderslice, Kendall | We Will Feast
We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God
Kendall Vanderslice
Paperback: Eerdmans, 2019, 176pp.
Introduction
In today’s fractured and fragmented culture, we are encouraged to stay loyal to our “tribe” with little interest in engaging people with differing beliefs and lifestyles than our own. The church is not immune to this fragmentation. Churches are confronted with deep, hard questions of who we are and what we are called to be as the church in today’s culture. While some are choosing to engage, others, rightly or wrongly, are choosing to hunker down and adopt a fortress mentality. But what if, as the body of Christ, we chose a different story? Instead of succumbing to fragmentation, what if we aspired and moved toward justice, wholeness, and including?
“Something powerful happens at the table,” writes Kendall Vanderslice in the introduction to her book We Will Feast. And something powerful truly does happen at the table when people gather to break bread and share a glass of wine. Strangers become friends. The things once overlooked are seen. Everyone is nourished more than just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Something powerful happens around the table. What would happen if church was organized around the table? People across the nation are exploring and embodying this very notion in the Dinner Church Movement. It is this movement that Kendall Vanderslice explores in her book, We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship and the Community of God, a book about the theological richness of food, as well as a book about shared tables, shared stories, shared community, and most importantly shared humanity.
Table Worship-Fellowship
We Will Feast, of course, is primarily a book about table fellowship, consisting largely of Vanderslice’s experience in getting to know a diverse group of dinner churches across the United States. In spite of our fractured society, these churches are finding hope and a growing sense of unity. Vanderslice observes, “One small meal had brought death into the world, and through death, Jesus reclaimed the meal as a sign of the continuation of life” (14). Instead of allowing food to remain as a means of fragmentation, God, through Jesus, uses food to re-member us—to bring us back into the shared life for which we were created.
Food, however, is complex, and the issues, dizzying. From agricultural and husbandry practices, to diet, to psychological issues, to cultural and religious issues. As Vanderslice writes, “It can be overwhelming to know where to start” (19). Instead of waiting to eat together until we figure out the answers to important questions, dinner churches are wrestling and figuring out the answers as they eat. The answers are usually messy, much like cooking and eating together as a crowd. As Vanderslice travels across the United States, she finds dinner churches addressing many of the fundamental problems of our day as they share together in table fellowship.
In Lansing, Michigan, for instance, at Sycamore Creek, Vanderslice experiences a church that loves the place it is in and not where it wishes it could be. As Christians, we are called to go and make disciples, but many of us, myself included, look longingly at this call to escape where we are. However, as Vanderslice writes, “It is not a call to find adventure in Jesus’s name but a call to love the place from which we came and to care for the needs of those who ache within it” (117). And one way to achieve this is through the act of eating together, getting to know the real needs of the people in our communities.
Radical Kinship
At Saint Lydia’s church in New York, she finds a church aimed at reversing the individualized trend of Western society, helping her congregants regain the sense that as humans we are inherently communal beings. This is not easy because sitting down with others who are hungry, tired and lonely, one never knows the wounds that are going to be shared. Eating together requires a level of vulnerability that simply sitting in a pew listening to a sermon does not.
When she visits Southside Abbey in Chattanooga, she finds a church wrestling with the ever-pertinent question, “Who is my neighbor?” As the church found out, this question is easier asked than actually lived out in a way that genuinely reflects the community. As Vanderslice attests to, “Southside Abbey is a place where neighbors come together to learn from one another, to see one another, to acknowledge their shared home in the house of God” (73).
Participatory Worship
At Potluck Church in Madisonville, Kentucky, Vanderslice finds a congregation in which members all share powerfully together in their worship around the dinner table. Pastor Rachel Nance founded the church out of the conviction that: “the potluck itself [is] a necessary component of worship.” Vanderslice writes: “At Potluck Church, everybody brings something. Even if it is a persimmon found on the ground, a box received from the food bank, or a bag of fried chicken prepared at the grocery store, everybody brings something. By creating a setting to which everyone contributes, the potluck table manifests the equality of all who gather” (96). Conversation is also an essential part of this church’s worship. “Just as everyone brought a dish to the potluck table,” Vanderslice writes, “everyone brings insight into the conversation, as well, [as they discuss scripture together] (98).
Embodying Unity
Through the various dinner churches Vanderslice visited and the countless people met and stories shared, quite possibly the most profound lesson she saw embodied was the unity these churches experienced in the midst of radical diversity. Just as the Holy Spirit did on Pentecost, allowing unity to be experienced through the diversity of languages spoken, dinner churches are experiencing the power of a unity not based on conformity and blandness but one of a richness found only in diversity.
However, as Vanderslice repeatedly emphasizes, dinner church is not easy. It requires intentionality, shared responsibility amongst all members, and it forces everyone participating to examine long-held beliefs about the church and about the table. Dinner church is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for everyone. Nor is dinner church the one, simple answer that will cure the church’s problems. But whatever tradition and church you and I find ourselves in, the American church desperately needs to think and practice eating together. In her book, Vanderslice presents the inspiration and vision for the real possibilities of the sort of unity that emerges as the body of Christ eats together.
For those who want to understand the transformative power of dinner churches and to have imagination for how they function in a wide variety of places and settings, We Will Feast is an essential resource. Indeed, as Vanderslice emphasizes, there is something powerful happening around the dinner table.