I have a confession to make: I have always wanted to try Dinner Church.
I know, I know — I’m a pastor. I’ve had dinner. I’ve had church. Technically, I’ve even had dinner and church on the same day. But that’s not quite the same thing, is it? Dinner Church, as a worship practice, isn’t about eating before the service or grabbing a potluck after. It’s about the meal and the worship being genuinely, fully woven together — the way they apparently were for the earliest followers of Jesus.
There’s a congregation in Brooklyn called St. Lydia’s that has been doing this for years. They describe themselves as a church where life is lived out around the table, gathering to share a sacred meal the way the first followers of Jesus did — with simple music, scripture, prayer, and communion all happening in the context of an actual, home-cooked meal. It’s ancient, and it’s also kind of revolutionary.
This Thursday, Emmanuel and our neighbors at Forest Hills Presbyterian Church are going to try it together.
On Maundy Thursday, we’ll gather not in rows of pews but around tables. We’ll fellowship. We’ll sing. We’ll pray. And we’ll share communion — but in the sequence the biblical story actually gives us. We’ll break bread together, and then, after the meal, we’ll share in the cup. That’s how it’s recorded. That’s how Jesus did it with his friends in that upper room. The meal wasn’t incidental to the worship; the worship grew out of the meal.
I find that deeply moving, and a little bit humbling, if I’m honest. So much of what the church does has been shaped — rightly, in many ways — by centuries of tradition and liturgical development. But there’s something worth recovering in that original image: a group of people gathered around a table, eating real food, talking, singing, praying, and then passing the bread and the cup among themselves. Church as a dinner party. Church as a family meal.
And to do it together with Forest Hills feels exactly right. On the night that Jesus prayed for the church to be one, we’ll be sitting down at the same table — Lutheran and Presbyterian, neighbors in ministry and, more and more, simply neighbors in faith. What better way to live that prayer than to actually share a meal?
I, for one, can’t wait to pull up a chair.