Listen

Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.

Acts 2:46-47

Think

These verses in Acts continue to orient us to the culture of the earliest church. Members met together in the temple each day, and they ate together in each other’s homes. Praise and worship of God was central to their life together, as was sharing God’s goodness and abundance. Gladness and simplicity were the marks of the early church, and this account indicates that it experienced steady membership growth.

Dinner Churches and House Churches are on the rise in several Christian denominations. Members are choosing to gather around tables, rather than in pews, enjoying simple meals together with liturgy, scripture, and hymns. New worshiping communities are starting up in living rooms and house basements with increasing frequency. The dinner church is not an innovation; it is a recovery project. For the first three-hundred years of Christianity the dinner table was central to Christian gatherings.

Church done around a table, a fellowship of sharing food and conversation like Jesus modeled for us throughout the gospels, looks different from many of our Sunday mornings. Where might you experience community like this?

Katie Cashwell

Pray

Good Shepherd, set a table for me this day, in big and small ways.

Be gracious to me and hear my prayer.

Amen.

Go

Your sure provisions gracious God
attend me all my days;
oh, may your house be my abode,
and all my work be praise.
Here would I find a settled rest,
while others go and come;
no more a stranger, nor a guest,
but like a child at home.

from “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (Isaac Watts, 1719)