Taking a Seat at the Table of Welcome

A Legacy of Welcome

My journey to start a dinner church began over 55 years ago in a little suburb of Kansas City. Before I was born, my parents unexpectedly began fostering three children who were in my mom’s in-home daycare. At the time, there weren’t enough foster homes, so a state social worker called and asked if they’d be willing to keep the three children since they already knew them. My parents said yes.

For the next twenty years, the phone would ring, and the request would be the same—“Can you take this child?” The answer was always the same: yes. Yes to dozens and dozens of children and teens. Some stayed for a few days, and some lived with us for years.

People often say, “It’s beautiful that your parents fostered so many children,” and it was. But it was also messy and challenging. I don’t really remember experiencing quietness growing up. All those lives and stories and traumas colliding under one roof meant strong emotions, an enormous amount of laundry, and noisy dinners.

The Liver Uprising

Like the dreaded day of the month when my mom would prepare liver for dinner. Absolutely none of us liked it, and the moans and protests would begin as soon as we all caught a whiff of liver fumes escaping the kitchen. Those dinners were awful and hilarious all at once. On these nights, usually an entire bottle of ketchup was used to smother the liver steaks so that we could bear to chew, swallow, and repeat.

On one particular Brady Bunch-like dinner night, there was a liver uprising. Fourteen people barreled into the dining room, chairs scraping across the floor, people pushing each other as we all sat down, and my dad giving thanks for the gourmet meal.

Then we all sat around the table attempting to eat. After a few minutes, one of the kids said, “Hey, something just hit my leg!” Then it happened again a few minutes later. It wasn’t long before my parents figured out that one liver culprit was tossing liver under the table to the dog, and a few pieces went rogue!

My mom eventually gave up the liver crusade, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief to return to the steak, roast, and ground beef portions of the cow.

I cannot think of another meal in my family that has generated as much laughter and exaggerated retellings. Who knew a sliver of liver could bring levity and belonging to a family with children who needed more memories around the dinner table?

Building a Family Through Welcome

It was a lot of work becoming a family under those circumstances. But there are more than 70 children who might not have had a place to sleep or a family to belong to if my parents had not welcomed them in.

A New Calling Emerges

Fast forward to 2018. By then, I had spent twenty-five years as a youth pastor, school chaplain, and connections and worship pastor. During all those years, spiritual hospitality was foundational for building trust with students and adults I was leading.

It seemed to me that people in church needed the same kind of welcome and belonging my parents offered. And what I was discovering was that more and more, I was talking to friends, family, and former students who let go of their church experience because they could not find the welcome and belonging they needed.

The Birth of Dinner Church

So, I started talking to friends who felt the same spiritual restlessness I was feeling. During that season, someone gave me the book Welcome to Dinner Church, and by the time I finished reading it, I knew what I was supposed to do!

I realized how much of my ministry in every setting up until that point was centered around a table, a conversation, and a shared meal. All that I had seen my parents model around their dinner table for two decades was imprinted on how I had shaped ministry thus far, and now became the model for how we would do church—minus the liver!

Starting The Well

With the help of those friends, we started The Well, a community dinner embedded with a spiritual purpose. Much like the growing dinner church movement across our country, The Well is where the shared meal becomes the central focus from which the music, conversation, and sacred story all flow.

Our variation of dinner church invites people from an intersection of economics, ethnicities, and experiences to sit across the table from one another, listen to each other’s stories, and offer this deeper hospitality, wherever we find ourselves on our faith journeys.

We want each person to be heard, to feel refreshed, and to find they have a place to belong at the table of faith. Around each table, we might have an engineer or MBA grad, single moms or dads with their kids, bi-vocational ministers, folks who work hourly jobs and can barely pay their bills, a person running for city council, and families who are food insecure. We are diverse in ethnicity and politics too.

The Messiness of Welcome

This all sounds beautiful, and it is. But it is messy and challenging, just like the dinners for fourteen in my parents’ home.

You cannot enter our community dinner and slip into the back row of a dark auditorium unnoticed. Instead, you step across the threshold and are welcomed into a dining space where people can belong together AND all our stories and traumas collide; all our politics, our prejudices, our passive-aggressive remarks, and our need for power.

But also all our capacities for empathy, understanding, sacrifice, forgiveness, wonder, and celebration.

Creating Connections Around the Table

We start dinner with a fun greeting song, and during the interlude, there’s a prompt like “What’s your all-time favorite movie?” or “Share your best moment from last week,” to help us move past our apparent differences and discover the fullness of “You too?”

By practicing this sacred invitation, we also invite the welcoming presence of God to join us as we hear a story of someone who encountered Jesus or another chapter in God’s story. We also celebrate birthdays, share prayer requests, and respond together with “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Once a month, we fill bags with groceries, and Wellers (as we lovingly call ourselves) are invited to either take a bag home if they need groceries or deliver it to a friend, neighbor, or client who might need help. In all we do, we are trying to be faithful to an identity of “us” instead of “you and me.”

The Welcome I Didn’t Expect

When I began leading The Well, the hospitality it offers really surprised me because I realized I needed the same welcome I was offering to others.

Dinner church is also an invitation for me—to let go of unconscious assumptions that I am the host who is offering but not receiving. I have spent my life pursuing a spiritual hospitality to give, but rarely saw my need for it or allowed someone to give it to me.

However, launching a church two weeks before COVID-19 shut the country down, losing my father, two friends, and a cousin in the next two years, and working through a lengthy list of really hard life issues all had the incredible result of shifting me out of pulpit mode.

A Seat at the Table for Me Too

A lot has changed in how I approach ministry these days. Much of it is filtered through my childhood image of my family gathering at the dinner table in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.

It’s really necessary for people to experience levity and belonging at The Well because so many need healing memories around the church table. And as a minister, I finally see myself as one who needs a place at the table too.

I don’t just set the table of welcome or provide the nourishment to help people connect and grow. I desperately need to pull out a chair, sit down, and join the meal.