Table Fellowship
The Way of Jesus Happens at a Shared Table
Table Fellowship
The principle central symbol and realization of the “Way of Jesus” has always been the shared community meal. Live the Word supports the development of new, simple and powerful ways to vivify the new identity of Jesus-following communities around a common table.
Jesus radicalized existing meal-sharing practices. Neo-familial table fellowship was one of the principal central practices of the new community that the Messiah inaugurated through his teaching, death, resurrection and ascension. The radical community-forming meal practices of Jesus and his followers transformed the ancient world.
As the Jesus movement expanded in keeping with ancient Hebrew messianic prophesy, it joined Jews and Gentiles together in a transformative new identity as a common family. A common table represents a common life. A shared table means shared community. Meal fellowship was basic to experiences of radical kinship, participation, discipleship, and unity in the early days of the Jesus movement.
Through sharing meals with his followers, Jesus set the agenda for the future of our world, transforming ordinary food, drink and energy into divine bread and wine and power.
“There is one thing that would dramatically change the world we live in and help return us to our rootedness in Christ: Bring back the table! If we were to make the table the most sacred object of furniture in every home, in every church, in every community, our faith would quickly regain its power, and our world would quickly become a better place. The table is the place where identity is born--the place where the story of our lives is retold, re-minded, and relived.”
—American theologian, Leonard Sweet
BACKGROUND: The shared community meal has always been the principle central symbol and realization of Jesus’ teaching.
The shared meal:
is at the heart of God’s ancient covenant to be together dwelling among us (Exodus 24 & the Passover tradition);
represents the most powerful ancient prophetic-Messianic hopes met in Divine promises (e.g., Isaiah 25);
remembers the life and death of Jesus 2000 years ago;
allows us to practice the grace of Jesus by welcome and inclusion of the poor, the weak, the vulnerable and the outcaste;
projects the ongoing life-in-power of Jesus into the future of the new reality he creates by means of a profoundly different means-of-power compared to ordinary means.
The dinner church movement seeks to model what Jesus modeled for us, namely the centrality of the table. Fosner writes: “Jesus used the dinner table to reveal himself and embrace people into the kingdom of God. It is little wonder that the first versions of the church assumed the dinner table as the time and place to gather, because it was there that they expected Jesus to be with them in spirit in the same manner he had been with them in body during the years he walked the earth” (16). The dinner church seeks to return to a way of church that was prevalent in Jesus’s time and in the early church.
But the dinner church is not simply wanting to have dinner just for the sake of dinner; it is a gathering that communicates something very real about the nature of Jesus and his kingdom, namely, abundance. Fosner notes, “An abundant feast that is paid for by Christ reveals an abundant gospel”. Later he asks, “What if [dinner church] had nothing to do with trying to get someone to believe in Jesus but, instead, had everything to do with setting a big table for them to feel Jesus for themselves?”
From a summary of Welcome to Dinner, Church.
What Experts Say about Table Fellowship
Banks explains that in contrast to the prevailing Greek philosophy of his day (which maintained that a person is a soul imprisoned in a body), Paul believed that a person is a body, and thus that Christian faith is always embodied in the world. He thus emphasizes that, “The most profound way a community gives physical expression to fellowship with Christ and one another is through its common meal” (70). He goes on: “The meal is vital, for as the members of the community eat and drink together, their unity is expressed. The meal must therefore be a genuinely social occasion. It deepens their relationships with each other in the same way that participation in an ordinary meal cements the bonds within a family or group” (72). For a rich depiction of the practice of table fellowship in the early house churches, readers are encouraged to pay special attention to the fictional story in the appendix “Going to Church in the First Century.”
From a summary of Paul’s Idea of Community: Spirit and Culture in the Early House Churches
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.
From a summary of We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God by Kendall Vanderslice
The table is not only one of the most important common practices of the church, it is a vital way in which God’s presence is made known to us. Fitch tells the story of his weekly Saturday morning breakfast with his son Max. For a long time, they both struggled to pay attention to one another and to God. Then, David began to pray, asking that God’s presence be made known to them. He describes what would happen as he prayed this sort of prayer: “A calm would come over my body and I would feel the sense of Jesus’ very presence inhabiting our space together. I found myself freed from distractions and able to give myself fully to Max and to Jesus at work here in this space” (43-44).
The presence of God that we learn at the table, Fitch argues, models for us how being attentive to God’s presence can transform any social space in which we find ourselves: “the local village zoning committee, the union hall, the protest marches in the midst of racial violence, the shelter for homeless folk where we are sharing meals and stories of the way god works”(44), and many more.
From a summary of What is the Church and Why Does it Exist? by David E. Fitch
“What did these early Christians do as they gathered together? “At the heart of early Christian worship,” notes Kreider, “was table fellowship.” The Pauline model of table fellowship, “an evening meal providing real sustenance and also in remembering Jesus … was still present 150 years later in Tertullian’s community in Carthage” (186-187). Tertullian gives an account of these meals: “[they] were real meals in which participants ate ordinary, nontoken food in modest quantities according to circumstance and in order to meet need. … Before the meal was a prayer of blessing, and after the meal there was a time of spontaneous worship that may have been a Christian adaptation of the Roman after-dinner symposium”(59).
From a summary of What is the Church and Why Does it Exist? by David E. Fitch
Sometimes, living in the good news of Jesus’s kingdom begins with “welcoming [people] into your home and eating with them” (128). Kathy Fletcher and David Simpson enacted that kingdom reality when their son started inviting his friends, who came from poorer families, over for dinner. His friends invited other friends, and eventually, “more than two dozen kids were coming for dinner each week. Soon, other adults were coming as well, and the table of generosity became a table of healing for all” (128).
Barringer and McKnight then provide an anti-example of table fellowship: “We must always be aware of the effects of our service on those we serve. Calvin Miller, a well-known author, pastor, and professor who passed away in 2012, grew up in very serious poverty in the later years of the Great Depression. He and his family were the grateful recipients of charity during those years, but they were also ashamed of their need and wise to the ulterior motive behind it. Observing the irony of it all, he later wrote in his memoir, Life Is Mostly Edges:
Needless to say, we children didn’t want to go to those churches that brought us the baskets. The last place you want to go worship is the place where the people need you to be poor so they themselves can feel rich in the dispensation of their charity. There is something grandiose in receiving it. Beggars don’t ask for money so they can think well of themselves, but because feeling bad about themselves is usually less painful than starvation” (180–181).
From a summary of A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer
Although Nugent only makes brief, passing references to the place of shared meals in the life of the church community, he is abundantly clear that the sort of fellowship that happens around a table is the true center of the church’s life. Nugent’s chapter on fellowship is the sort of passage that inspires, encourages, and emboldens readers to want to take hold of something that we maybe didn’t even know we were missing and demonstrates why a kingdom-centered view might be so transformative to the church’s way of being in the world.
He writes: “Sharing meals was (in the New Testament world), and still is, an intimate practice. It is often said “we are what we eat”; even more so, we are who we eat with. Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” because he ate with them. He wasn’t content to preach at them from the hilltops; he made a point of dining with them. The practice of hospitality involves welcoming Christian brothers and sisters—even the unpopular ones—into the intimate space of one’s immediate family” (138, emphasis in original). New members, Nugent notes, are baptized into this intimate fellowship of the local church community: “a body where every member is equipped to do the work of ministry according to the Spirit given them in order to build up the body of Christ in love—each member doing its part—until it reaches fullness in Christ. We must baptize them into a body in which the various forms of ministering to ‘one another’ in Christ have become their new life rhythm” (142).
From a summary of Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church by John Nugent Book
“The communal meal is the primary aspect of the community of goods” (50). Because of the new kin group, and because of the active participation of all believers, the table became the lived reality of the kingdom of God for the fledgling church– so much so that the table fellowship became the place where social hierarchies were destroyed, and enemies became friends. In the first century, every meal in some sense was considered religious. Finger notes that for Jews, “disputes about commensality concerned the shape of the community that was truly loyal to Yahweh” (178).
Because Jesus broke these norms through his dining habits, the early church also sought to continue to live this. “By eating together across social boundaries, believers actually teach and preach Jesus’s theology. The Supper itself becomes an act of proclamation” (185). The church’s commensality demonstrated to a highly stratified Roman culture their unity and equality, which people found highly inviting. Unfortunately, the diversity exhibited and proclaimed by the early church “runs counter to the Great American Dream and to the growth of sprawl as new developments of large homes and gated communities move into the countryside” (285). The challenge for the American church is to cut against the homogeneity that characterizes too many churches. We lament the declining attendance, but rarely do we stop to consider the subversive acts that the first century church engaged in that allowed the Lord to add to their number daily.
From a summary of Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts by Reta Halteman Finger
Take this Bread is primarily a story about the transformative power of table fellowship. Not only was Miles transformed by her experience of Christ in the Eucharist, but she worked diligently so that others might similarly experience Christ around the table. In the book’s introduction, she summarizes her journey in faith: “I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all. I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary, yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored” (xv).
Miles possesses the rare capacity to see a deep continuity between the bread and wine that is taken in the Eucharist as part of the church’s worship and the ordinary practice of sharing food around the table with others. Both practices for her are expressions of sharing in the life, the gifts, and the reconciling work of Christ.
Miles’s pre-Christian experiences as a cook in New York City, and later as a war journalist in Latin America and other settings around the globe, instilled in her a deep and meaningful sense of sharing food as a common human experience. “[What] mattered to me was not what I ate,” she writes, “What mattered to me in those years , when everywhere I was wasn’t home, was that I could launch myself into a morning, an unknown town, a war zone, and be fed – usually by strangers and sometimes by comrades, occasionally by enemies, but always by someone who was as hungry as I was or hungrier. We had hunger in common, and we had food” (49-50).
This common hunger, although realized prior to her conversion, would come to be a vital force in her faith formation in Christ. Recognizing the ways in which she was fed by Christ and the church in the Eucharist, the common hunger drove her to start the food pantry, and eventually to incorporate meals into the rhythms of the food pantry. These meals helped deepen the friendships among the volunteers who were doing the pantry’s work. Miles notes: “In the Gospel, a stranger was revealed as Jesus ‘in the breaking of bread.’ And so, as we began to eat [meals] together, and as, over bread, I learned more about the lives of our volunteers, I began to pay attention, to see what kind of community these strangers were building” (208).
From a summary of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles
Undoubtedly, the primary practice that Street explores in this book is that of table fellowship. Specifically, his focus is on the Lord’s Supper as a full meal – in the tradition of Roman banquets – not merely in the elemental form of the bread and the cup. The first century Christian practice of table fellowship, he argues, was rooted not only in Roman banquets, but also in the Jewish Passover and the meals that Jesus shared with his disciples and others, including the last supper. First century Christians saw themselves primarily as citizens of God’s kingdom, not earthly kingdoms, and the meals they shared together, Streett maintains, offered a taste of life in this new, in-breaking kingdom. “If anyone wanted to know what the kingdom of God was like,” he writes, “all they had to do was attend a Christian communal banquet” (202).
As a meal in honor of the lordship of Jesus, these banquets were a subversive threat to the Roman emperors who saw themselves as sovereign over all facets of life in their empire. “The resurrection was a sign to the disciples,” Streett writes, “that God and not the earthly powers controlled the affairs of humankind. The empire’s most powerful weapon – death – could not deter God’s plan. Jesus rose victorious over the grave. He was given ultimate authority over creation” (125).
From a summary of Subversive Meals: An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Domination during the First Century by R. Alan Streett
Table fellowship is an important part of how Pohl understands the practice of hospitality, and in this part of the book, she gives a number of examples of congregations sharing meals together. “When the Eucharist is more explicitly connected to regular expressions of hospitality in shared meals, caring, and friendship,” she writes, “a distinctive Christian identity and way of life are reinforced” (176). Pohl emphasizes that our homes can be vital spaces in which hospitality (and table fellowship) are cultivated: “When we view our homes as personal spaces that are simultaneously crucial to God's work in the world, we discover many opportunities to create a place for healing, personal transformation, and community-building” (171).
From a summary of Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine Pohl