Dinner Church

The Gospel Experienced Around the Table

The Restoration Movement of Churches exploded across North America at a time when the cultural landscape was defined by “Christendom.” In this era, churches and Christian institutions were at the center of culture, the Bible was held in high esteem, and church participation was considered advantageous. However, the Christendom landscape was also fragmented by denominationalism, pitting different traditions against each other.

In its early days, the Restoration Movement begged people to define themselves only as Christians and to rely on the Bible to define what that means. A simple approach to church hierarchy and a straightforward style of gathering and worship made it easy for these churches to spread and reproduce. However, the Restoration Movement benefited from existing within Christendom. They called for a simple approach to church at a time when the majority of people saw the need for church as a part of their lives.

Our world has rapidly changed, and while aspects of Christendom remain, churches and Christian institutions find themselves further and further away from the center of culture. Without Christendom to rely on, Jesus followers from across the spectrum of Christian traditions are looking for new and simple ways to connect with people who have no church. In a move that would surely make Stone, Campbell, and Restoration Movement leaders over the centuries grin, many are finding that our post-Christendom problems can be addressed with pre-Christendom approaches to Christian community.

Dinner Church is a model and strategy that organically grew out of Jesus’ approach to spreading good news. It was practiced by the writers of the New Testament and the early Church Fathers. It remains a robust model for engaging people far from Christ in discipleship and a shared Christian life.

A Dinner Church?

Simply put, a Dinner Church forms a community of faith in the experience of a shared meal. It is a place where strangers become friends, lost people get found, outcasts are welcomed, and people are shown compassion and kindness, a room where nobodies become somebodies. The table becomes a common place of gathering where everyone is welcomed.

Think for a moment of the many “food stories” we have in the gospel accounts: various dinners at the homes of Matthew, Simon the Pharisee, Zacchaeus, and more; the feeding of the 5,000; Jesus speaking of communion with him through a meal, the institution of the Lord’s Supper; resurrection appearances that all involve food—these all point to a model of ministry anchored around the table. I have commented before that if Jesus kept a Day-Timer / calendar, we would see his activities as teaching, praying, doing miracles, and eating! So, Dinner Church becomes a model that is anchored in the gospels and the Book of Acts. Part of the activity of the early church was, “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46, NIV).

Dinner Church in many ways is a fresh expression of the church for today. They will look different based on the local context. Some are placed in what some call “sore neighborhoods,” where food is scarce and there is great need because of poverty and decline. Some Dinner Churches stand alone as a mission while others are connected to existing congregations. Currently, I could cite a variety of denominations that are engaged in a Dinner Church Mission: Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Pentecostals, and more. We need contextual and cultural intelligence to understand where the opportunities exist. Simply put, Dinner Churches are tables where people are fed, the Gospel is preached, and people are invited to follow Jesus and become his disciples.

How We Started a Dinner Church

Any church can start a Dinner Church and reach new people who would never come to an established Sunday morning gathering. I know this because I helped lead a church to do this in our small town of Palatka, Florida. Our church is deeply rooted in Christendom tradition. Our congregation is mostly older. Our budget was small. It had been a long time since we had attempted anything designed for people outside of our congregation.

We began by prayer and listening. A great way to do this is to cultivate prayer for a specific community through prayer walks and listening. When we did this in our small town of Palatka, what we heard was to focus on people within walking distance of our church campus (we are located in a historic residential area). We sensed the Lord saying that we were to love our neighbors, and we began by calling this community dinner, “The Neighborhood.” 

We prayed; as we walked, we had conversations with people who were out and about and gave out invitations. More than 30% of those who have attended our Dinner Church gatherings are unchurched.

The second thing we did in this process was to love and serve. We offered hospitality, made people feel welcome, and set an atmosphere that gave people an opportunity to connect, have conversations, and enter a community. We served a wonderful, tasty, unique, and flavorful meal. Lots of little things added up to making people feel valued, appreciated, and loved. The room where we met was full of joy and laughter.

The community was being built with intention. We noticed and engaged with people who might feel on the fringes. No one sat alone. We got to know one another, and in an often divided and polarized world, we realized we had much more in common than we thought, regardless of the cultural, economic, or political convictions we might have. There was a unity to be had in simple proximity: looking across the table and seeing people of worth because they were image-bearers of Almighty God.

During dinner time, there were some pictures and videos displayed on a screen. There was music and activities that strengthened the engagements and conversations. During this time, we had a formal presentation and began to tell Jesus stories. We focused on sharing in a very succinct fashion what Jesus did, what he said—parables and encounters with people, his miracles, and more. There is a place for the propositions and details of faith, but we began with a narrative theology, asking people to consider what Jesus said about himself and his kingdom. We would close in prayer, offering folks an opportunity to write prayer requests on post-its and stick them on a designated prayer wall. We collected dozens of prayers, and a guild in our church was eager to intercede.

Through this process, an ecclesia formed (the Greek word for church, which means an assembly or gathering). In time, all the attributes of an authentic church, the essentials Jesus envisioned and commissioned, formed, and took root: apostolic leadership, sacraments, creedal faith, scripture, and more materialized and manifested in this community of faith that meets around a table.

Go Into All the World

The Dinner Church's mission then is to go and do it again in the next neighborhood, city block, marketplace, village, hamlet, and culture. As Jesus said, “Go into all the world.”

It is quite simple. The barriers that keep an unchurched person from walking through the sanctuary doors on a Sunday morning dissipate. That can be a high hurdle for some, whereas coming to dinner, sitting at a table, and having conversations is a much lower bar.

The Surgeon General in the United States recently released a report detailing an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. The Restoration Movement called the people of Christendom North America to a simpler form of Christian faith. The Dinner Church model echoes that call in a way that not only honors Jesus’ approach to table fellowship but speaks to the pains felt throughout our modern culture. It invades a person’s life with mercy, grace, peace, faith, and hope; the very love of God manifests in Jesus and pours through his followers to a world in desperate need of Christ.

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Rev. Jon Davis, Ph.D, is a bi-vocational Episcopal priest serving on staff with Fresh Expressions as a Director of Logistics and Operations, coordinating Dinner Church efforts and he serves as the Rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palatka, FL.  He is an author, writer, mission strategist, and trainer and is in demand for conferences, seminars, webinars, and other teaching venues.  His passions focus on worship, mission, leadership development, and more.  He and his wife Beth have a little farm in Oviedo FL where they tend to a variety of critters.