Faithful Presence

43. Table or Trough? Does Your Family Dine or Feed?

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever stopped to wonder if the shared meal is less about food and eating as it is about the time set aside (meaning sacred) for coming together? In this way, the shared meal sets us apart from the animals. Animals feed, eating whatever they find on their sorties, and as their appetite dictates. Humans, on the other hand, dine- a process of planned menu and shared dishes and, in families, companionship (com meaning with, pan meaning bread). When eating at home is degraded to each family member grabbing food whenever it suits them, we lose much of what it means to be both human and family.

For those with children still at home, you might, at this point, be tempted to say that although this all sounds great, it would never work in your family. Your table is messy and noisy, and people are distracted. Your mealtimes are more like boxing matches or a three-ring circus, with fights over food, over who sits where (or won’t stay seated at all), over who manipulates the conversation and hijacks attention. The hour is not settling but restless. I have a friend whose three children argued constantly over who got to sit in between both parents at their round table. With one more child than parent, it always turned out that at least two of the siblings had to sit next to one another each night without a parent on both sides. The poking wars, verbal as well as physical, were endless. I know of another family whose table was always in such constant motion that the mother began reading children’s adventure stories during the meal as a way to keep the children seated throughout the meal’s entirety.

Despite the chaos, it is good to remember that the table is probably the best place in the home for teaching children about respect, manners, and service and sensitivity to the needs of others. It is at the table we learn firsthand what it means to work for the common good. This helps fortify the notion that each child is indeed a member of the family, this tight little community called “us.” At the table a sense of belonging, of kinship is born and nurtured. Will there be times of conflict, of petulant teenage resentment, of childish behavior?   Most certainly. Just remember, there will also be times of shared joy where drama and comedy play out around the table every night as food is shared. If you want to build family, share the table.

There are, of course, other barriers to regularly sharing meals at home. Often, children are so hungry when they get home from school they fill up on snacks then aren’t hungry for dinner. For some children with attention disorders, medication has begun to wear off toward evening making this a frustrating time for parent and child alike.[1] What’s more, it is not unusual for a family with two or more children to have something scheduled for every night of the week. It is also typical for one adult in the family to bear the lion’s share of food-related acquisition and preparation; let’s face it, somebody has to be in charge of the food, a responsibility that is difficult to sustain in very busy families.

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Are you NEW to Shared Table Blessings?  WELCOME!  I invite you to join a growing number of people interested in the importance of the shared meal amongst family, friends, and strangers. Each post is numbered that you may follow the book I have written about the Christian Practice of Shared Meals.  For the best understanding, start reading posts in order, and send comments or questions my way using the LEAVE A COMMENT box found at the bottom of every post.  ~JAPW

[1]Families with children with attention disorders may experience evening mealtime challenges related to both behavior and medication side effects like appetite suppression and insomnia. When the last dose occurs at noon, a behavioral rebound effect (in particular hyperactivity) around late afternoon is probable, and if a subsequent medication dose is taken, appetite for the evening meal will be blunted, and the child more likely to have trouble sleeping at bedtime. Sometimes, a lower dose at 4:00 p.m. is helpful. In these cases, it is often advisable to delay the evening meal so that appetite is less negatively affected. Working closely with a pediatrician is highly recommended.

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42. The Dining Table: Food for Hungry Souls

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The last post tried to demonstrate how a shared family meal is powerfully generative, with the power to produce, or generate a way of thinking, acting, and responding to circumstances. In particular, children learn from the adults at the table not only civilized table manners and social customs, but about life and death, good and evil, right and wrong. In short, the table is a place for a child to observe what it means to be an adult. For believers, this becomes even more significant, because this is our shared practice for learning what it means to be a man, woman, child, and family of God.

It is also deep mystery how shared table time as a routine practice helps children develop a healthy attitude toward ritual and tradition. It has a potent and lifelong carryover effect on their sense of family and belief, acting as a liturgy of sorts for creating that daily rhythm of how a flourishing family life should flow. And, in this day and age, when culture kidnaps our children at younger and younger ages, this table time protects them. The physical food they eat with us is a symbol of God’s ever-present provision, help and sustenance. This family table is the place we can teach our children what we know of God, and where they can watch us live that love out.

Over many years as a professor at a Christian college, I had students regularly tell me of their struggles to know God. They are so fraught with an urgency to seem grown up without really wanting just yet to actually grow up, that they tend to leave looking for God by the wayside as they try to find themselves. This is quite natural for that age, but they almost universally and wistfully wish they could balance school, work, friends, and faith better than they do. In nearly every situation, my best counsel to them was to become more familiar with who God is, and to study his attributes, his Word, his actions throughout the generations, his dying and undying love for them, and his unchangeable nature. For my students, so focused on mission, I point them toward God because they need a better-developed sense of co-mission as they train (this, too is practice) for a lifelong vocation.

What does that have to do with the family table? The table, with its rich undertones of grace, acceptance, sustenance and togetherness is where parents can use, no matter how brief, the stories of the day just ending to teach their children about God. Mary wasn’t much older than a child when Gabriel announced God’s favor upon her. In her song of response, Mary demonstrates a deep knowledge of and trust in God, exclaiming, “His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.” (Luke 1:50-55)

Mary knows, fears, and reveres her God. It is nearly impossible to revere or fear a God you do not know well. When our knowledge and understanding of God is unformed, we are vulnerable to the human tendency to revere and fear the wrong things. When we revere money, we find ourselves fearing a fickle economy. If we revere health and youth, then illness, aging, even dying frighten us. Our reverence for providing for our own safety and security is born out of a fear of tragedy or calamity. But, at the table, we learn about a God who says throughout history, “Trust me, let peace rule in your heart. I care for you. I give you bread not stones. I love you so much and so completely that I died for you. I am here for you, present among you, and I will never leave you.”

The table truly does provide a powerful opportunity for testimony to our children. In our families, sharing our lives, our family history, our joys and our tears around the table, we also share in the love and knowledge of God. Our children not only learn the stories of our faith, they learn the stories of the family’s encounters with God through its history. We model for children what it means to trust God, to love him with a sincere and devoted heart out of fear and reverence for his holiness, his incarnation, his substitutionary death, and his promise to return. “Food is a direct route to the intimacies of life.”[1] This is food for hungry souls.

Think about planning some family meals this week-for everyone’s sake!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1] Weinstein, The Surprising Power of Family Meals, p. 69.

Featured image by J.Holberg, 2016

41. Be GENERATIVE. Sit. Eat. With. Your. Kids.

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

You must make it happen. There is NO OTHER WAY.  The evening family meal is restorative; it provides time, space, food, and companionship for soothing the rough patches created by the demands of both this day, and of the day anticipated tomorrow. It helps cement people together and organize the family as a team. Table time as a family is for discovery too. We share our experiences and the things we’ve learned, and can discuss whether our responses to particular situations were the right ones.

When our daughter began fourth grade at a new school she encountered her first bully. Week after week, we spent time as a family, almost always at the dinner table, discussing what the bully said today, how she acted on the bus, and what we, as a family should do about it. We prayed together. My husband and I advised our daughter to adopt a “kill the situation with kindness” attitude, but not because we wanted to teach her non-confrontation.[1] On the contrary, we felt that intentionally-responsive smiles and kind words on our daughter’s part comprised precisely the type of loving confrontation Jesus would have practiced. At first, our daughter’s responses only infuriated this bully to grander displays of meanness (all verbal), but, to give her credit, our daughter persevered and trusted that this decision, made as a family at the dinner table, was the right course of action. We also counseled our daughter to try her hardest to imagine what could make another little girl so angry and mean, and to pray for her to experience the joy of a changed heart. Was this bully unloved at home? Was she sad? Did she really just need a friend and not know, socially, how to make one? Our daughter prayed for this girl for many weeks. Eventually, the bullying stopped. Our daughter learned that responding in kind is never as good as responding with kindness. She learned that some people are unloved and unloving. She learned to pray for an enemy, and to ask for prayer. And, she learned that, as a family, we took her problem seriously and were concerned for the outcome. All in the intimacy of the family table.

This helps demonstrate how a shared family meal is powerfully generative, meaning that it has the power to produce, or generate a way of thinking, acting, and responding to circumstances. In particular, children learn from the adults at the table not only civilized table manners and social customs, but about life and death, good and evil, right and wrong. In short, the table is a place for a child to observe what it means to be an adult. For believers, this becomes even more significant, because this is our shared practice for learning what it means to be a man, woman, child, and family of God.

It is also deep mystery how shared table time as a routine practice helps children develop a healthy attitude toward ritual and tradition. It has a potent and lifelong carryover effect on their sense of family and belief, acting as a liturgy of sorts for creating that daily rhythm of how a flourishing family life should flow. And, in this day and age, when culture kidnaps our children at younger and younger ages, this table time protects them. The physical food they eat with us is a symbol of God’s ever-present provision, help and sustenance. This family table is the place we can teach our children what we know of God, and where they can watch us live that love out.

[1] This particular eight year-old girl was not a physical threat, nor did she act as part of a larger group of bullies picking on our daughter, and this happened before social networking made e-bullying a reality. This little girl was just miserably mean. One reason we monitored the situation so closely each night at the supper table was to discern if adult intervention was called for.  But, we also wanted our daughter to learn to positively handle life’s challenges on her own with God’s help and wisdom.

Until next time!

Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

40. Family Supper-Are You Kidding Me???

~ This Side of the River ~ Leave a comment

With schools starting, this is a great time for us to start Chapter 6:Table Time at Home for Families in this blog book called Come Back to the Table: A Countercultural Call to the Christian Practice of Shared Meals.  Hopefully, the preceding chapters have convinced you that sharing meals, as a distinct Christian practice, should be an important part and pattern of your daily family life.  But, as any parent will tell you, mustering the family around a nightly meal can be a harrowing, energy-sucking experience. This may be particularly true for one-parent families, those in which both parents work full time outside the home or in homes with children with special needs. When I began working full time at our local hospital after years of being home all day while going to school at night, I was not prepared for the panicky rush that the dinner hour became. One of us had to eat and run back out for a meeting or school event. A child forgot to tell you on the way home that she needs a large neon-green poster board (no, the white one in the closet simply won’t do) for an ecology assignment that’s due tomorrow. Your spouse ate a big lunch out today with co-workers and isn’t hungry. Dirty breakfast dishes in the sink need clearing out before dinner preparations can begin. Lunchboxes need cleaning out. You forgot that the frozen ground beef you were counting on for tacos tonight got used up in last week’s meatloaf.  The dog is starving and needs to go out, and the laundry should be started before supper to ensure that the volleyball uniform is ready for tomorrow’s big game.

Is it any wonder that the shared meal becomes sacrificed to the tyranny of more pressing issues? Yet, for me and my family, dinner together around the family dining table remained a critically important activity, and we were determined to make it all work even after I began putting in 45-hour weeks at the hospital around the same time our daughter started middle school sports. This is because the table is where we build family. It is the one time each day we can each sit in a place we call “ours” and, for even twenty blessed minutes, know we are in this life together, and that God is at its center. Miriam Weinstein believes a family evening meal “sort of forces an environment when everyone has to stop and sit down. It creates a boundary when you’re sitting around a table. It’s a designated time. It focuses attention on what is going on here and now between the people around the table. It gives us a specific time to review our day”[1] together.

In our next post we will start to “dig in” to what this kind of family life can look like.

[1] Miriam Weinstein, The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier, and Happier (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005), p.74. Weinstein’s treatment of the challenges facing the regular family meal is excellent.

39. What if WE ate like this?

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A Summary of the Shared Meal in ACTS

Eating together, sharing food, inviting any who would come, and using those meals to testify to the life, death, resurrection, and saving grace of Jesus was a common theme throughout the earliest days of the nascent church. What would it look like if we “did” meals the same way?

Most importantly, our tables would no longer be empty, instead reclaiming a rightful place as the central gathering place in our homes, and standing as a visible testament to the importance of shared meals in the life of believers. In our homes, we would not only participate in regular family meals, we would create a new habit- a practice if you will- of intentionally inviting others to join us- people from church, our neighbors, our work colleagues, our children’s friends and their families, visiting missionaries and scholars, and even the stranger we just happen to meet on any given day. Food could be simple fare like bread, soup, cheese and a piece of fruit- anything that would stretch to serve a tableful of guests and family, and be easy to prepare. And every table would always be capable of accommodating “just one more” hungry person.

Such a meal would begin with praise and thanksgiving. Today, we might call this “saying grace”. After the meal proper, invited guests would be asked to bring a word, a letter from a missionary might be shared, and Scripture read. A hymn would be sung. There would be prayer. And these types of meals would happen over and over again throughout the year.

At church, we would gather frequently to share meals and we would be intentional about inviting anyone in the neighborhood to join in. And, just like our home-based meals, the shared meal at church would contain specific components of praise, thanksgiving, breaking of bread, testimony, Word, and prayer, a model we’ll consider later in this book.

As a reminder, these posts are numbered in a specific sequence because they each contain pieces of the chapters of a book on shared meals and Christians.  So, they are meant to be read IN ORDER.  If you have comments or questions, send them via the LEAVE a REPLY box provided.  I am more than happy to discuss the topic with you!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

38. Lamenting a Lost Practice

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Every Sabbath morning at the start of worship, my pastor invites us to the meeting. He makes it clear that our presence for fellowship and worship and praise is the intersection where we, the gathered, meet with one another, God the Father, and Jesus the risen Christ in the counsel and care of the Holy Spirit. As a result, I have come to embrace the notion that the congregation of believers- those who congregate for an encounter with God and for his glory- does, truly comprise a meeting.

Likewise, I think the earliest believers, despite all their ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity, viewed their shared meals together as a meeting, (i.e., as worship) and I like to imagine that they looked forward to these regular meals with great anticipation and joy. This is why I also think of their gatherings as meal-meetings, or what I also like to call fellowship meals, because I also believe the common shared meals and the meetings of the early Church were inextricably connected, not necessarily to the extent of actually being Greco-Roman meal-symposiums, but of at least having evolved out of that prototype.

Of course our worship today, particularly on the Sabbath, is much different, crafted around centuries-old liturgies, creeds and doctrines, not to mention overt cultural-sensitivity to people’s lack of time for multiple meetings in a week. Thus, compared to those first Christians, our worship is much more formal, and our meeting together for shared meals far, far less common. And, it is this general loss of the shared meal- in families and church families alike- that I believe is something to lament because the places at our dining tables are so consistently and symbolically empty.

Our tables are empty because we no longer view a shared meal as a fundamental way to also share the gospel, and because we are unwilling to share our lives in such intimate, selfless, and demanding ways as hosts, who take, thank, break, and give bread to others. But most of all, we should grieve because we are so distracted, and always, always in such a hurry to be doing something else. As I wrote at the start of this chapter, regularly breaking and eating bread together is a practice meant to make us think of Jesus, to recognize his presence at our meal fellowship, and to remember his incomprehensibly great love for us. Our determined failure to practice shared meals on a regular basis should make us stop and think about why we no longer eat together and what we’ve lost in the process.

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Please make comments in the LEAVE A REPLY box, and contact me if you need further information about using this text for a small group or Sunday School study, or as the theme for a weekend retreat.

37. Radical Hospitality is RISKY

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Recall that a special hallmark of the Greco-Roman banquet was that invitations were sent ahead of time to request a guest’s presence. The early Christian meal-meetings, on the other hand, took place in believer’s homes, and appear to have been open to any who had been baptized as believers as well as those who claimed to believe. Moreover, following Jesus’ teachings, the meals would have been evangelistic in nature in that they would also have been open to the maligned and risky fringes of society.

So, now we not only have Jew and Gentile together at a fellowship meal, but men and women, slave and free, educated and illiterate, the economically advantaged side by side with the poorest of the poor. The heterogeneity of the people at this kind of meal, or gathering, would have been a radical occurrence in that day. Actually, if you think about it, it would be a radical occurrence in our time too.

Radical hospitality is risky. It involves the kind of love that sent Jesus from heaven as a fully human being and set his face toward the cross. It’s the kind of love that denies the fear of the rhetorical ‘what ifs’ with sincere determination that Jesus’ love for ‘the least of these’ is the life to which all believers are called. In the end, radical love accepts the likelihood that others will take advantage of the generosity and servant-heart of those willing to empty themselves of pride, fear, and security.

Apparently, this was no different in the early church, because the writings of both Peter and Jude address a form of Gnosticism evident in the lives and actions of some who claimed to be believers (2 Pet 2:13 and Jude 12). Both authors mention the immoral behavior of some at the “love feasts”, or agape meals of the early Christian communities.   Gnostics believed that the sinfulness of their behavior, particularly their sexual proclivities, was “covered” by their salvation through Christ. In other words, they used their salvation as a kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card to justify their ongoing lustful immorality.

Try to imagine, if you will, the meal-meetings of the early believers. Given the heterogeneity of the participants, it is not hard to envision that some of those present were, in their ‘former’ lives, accustomed to attending meals followed by an evening of drinking, entertainment, and revelry, including sexual escapades. Others, still Jews by self-description, would hold to a habit of meals in which ceremonial purity rituals were still adhered to. Still others could be in attendance even though they were not believers at all, perhaps joining in for a free meal, or to find out what The Way was really all about. “In such a socially porous environment it would not be hard for false teachers claiming to be Christians to slip in and freeload, and cause trouble… Christianity was an evangelistic religion, and so this meant risk for the Christian community because they were open to having guests and strangers attend their meetings.”[1]

These are ingredients for a very interesting, even disastrous meal indeed, and the warnings from Peter and Jude would have us understand that the revelers may have gained an upper hand as false teachers. Still, the premise of the fellowship meals was to share the love and fellowship of Christ in ways that were edifying and promoted the virtues of a Christian life. There was, and always will be inherent tension and risk involved here. While we are called to “expel the immoral brother” from our fellowship (1 Cor 5:13), and “with such a man do not even eat,” (1 Cor 5:11), we are also to be open and inviting even to the worst of sinners. The distinction revolves around one’s claims to be a believer, baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit. If such a one continues in sin despite loving confrontation and counsel from believers, that one is to be excluded from the fellowship to the point that we not even eat together. It should not, however, ever prevent us from inviting the unbeliever to our fellowship or our meals.

In Post 38, we will look at the hard truth: our tables are too often empty.

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1] Ben Witherington III, Making a Meal of It (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), p.89.

36. For Heaven’s Sake!

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To the Romans, Paul wrote,

“One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man whose faith is weak eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, For God has accepted him (Rom 14:2-3). “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men. Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble (Rom. 14:17-21).”

Paul here addresses the schisms that arise when any one believer or group of believers makes demands of the entire congregation based on personal preference or historic tradition. For the Jewish Christian, it was anathema to eat meat sacrificed to foreign gods, meat often sold for public consumption in the city and town markets. To them, this meat was unclean. The Gentile Christians didn’t really care, to them meat was meat, and the origin of the meat they purchased did not concern them. Here we have one group, so obsessed with where the meat comes from (again related to their misguided notions regarding ritual purity) that they resort to eating no meat at all, whereas another faction just digs right in and eats it all.

Under these circumstances, the early Christians eating a meal prior to a meeting for praise, worship, testimony and prayer would find the meal itself so upsetting that they’d literally enter the post-meal fellowship with the gall of their disagreements stuck in their craw. And so we have Paul begging them to try harder to put the food nonsense behind them once and for all. We may scoff at the rigidity of some of the early believers, and the “whatever” attitude of others, but we encounter the same attitudes in church today when, for example, we disdain vegetarianism or the need for a gluten-free Eucharist without trying to understand the issues (to name just two). Paul is clear: we are commanded to put aside our personal preferences for the joy and mutual edification of the entire congregation of believers, and reconcile our differences because breaking bread in peace creates an atmosphere in which we can praise, worship, learn, and be sent in peace.

In Post 37, we tackle another hard topic: the risk of being open to any who would come.

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

A reminder: these posts are meant to be read in order, as together they make up an entire book on the shared meal.  Send comments using the LEAVE A COMMENT box provided.  This topic is an excellent one for adult Sunday School classes or weekend retreats.  Please let me know if you’d like me to help you.

35. Food Fight!

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Paul was a major player in confronting early Christians about their need to set aside personal and heated differences over their food practices of the past to enjoy fellowship meals of mutual edification and submissive accord. A careful read of Paul’s letters to the Romans, Corinthians and Galatians clearly shows that some of the biggest divisions among early believers were sparked by radically different food customs and practices at the meals of the gathered community. Try to imagine the consternation of the Jewish Christian eating with a Gentile Christian. The Jew would be upset by the so-called unclean practices of the Gentile. The Gentile, not caring to adopt the ball and chain of the Jewish purity rituals would also be made to feel inferior for eating certain foods, in particular the meat from animals sacrificed to idols. Paul worked tirelessly to get all believers on the same page where sharing food was concerned; his letters, most certainly circulated and read at the shared meals of the early Christians, are filled with admonitions that they stop their petty bickering over food and the separatist notions these disputes fostered.

In his letter to the Galatians Paul wrote, “When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group” (Gal 2:11-12). Apparently, Peter’s conviviality with Gentiles was met by separatist Christian Judaizers with such disapproval that he had begun to withdraw from meals at which Gentile Christians were present. Paul insists that it is not the Gentile Christians who must act more “Jewish” but the Jewish Christians who must live like Gentiles, and he publicly calls Peter to account for his legalistic behavior. Accusing Peter and the Galatians of being brainwashed, Paul instructs them to justify their actions solely on Christ, and resume their shared meals together, because “the table was a prime and powerful image in Paul’s world for boundary marking and community inclusion.”[1] Paul scolds Peter for succumbing to the pressures of some Jewish Christians who were still following the Jewish requirements for ritual purity. Imagine the irony if you can. This is the same Paul who once bragged of his righteous keeping of the law, and the same Peter who was with Jesus when he condemned the Pharisees for the blind way they assumed ritual purity was counted to them as righteousness. It is no wonder Paul confronts Peter to his face.

In post 36, we will continue this discussion!

~Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

Click on LIKE and SHARE within the blog!  And feel free to contact me with comment/questions using the LEAVE A REPLY box provided.

[1] Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, p. 186.

34. Worship & the Shared Meal

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“They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all people” (Acts 2:46-47). Luke distinctly tells us that they met together in their homes for meals, and that these meal-meetings included corporate praise. So it seems possible that “church” – the early practice of corporate prayer, worship, and the breaking of bread- occurred at these shared meals. Today, many scholars believe the shared fellowship meal was most certainly the primary venue for  the reading of circulating letters or in-person visits from itinerant apostles like Paul, Peter, and John.

“A primary way first-century “Christians” spent time together was at meals.  There they made decisions together about their inner workings and their  relationship to the broader world. Meals were the place where they taught and learned together and where they worshipped, prayed, and sang their songs together. This was the time that they had arguments, sorted out differences, went their own ways, and reconciled with one another. It was a central community event. These meals provided the primary experiential evidence for those who opposed them, those who dropped in for visits, and those who were curious about them.”[1]

These meals fostered fellowship and community and most likely served as a major factor in the development of both early Christian identity and its spread. If you recall from Chapter Five that the shared meal of the Roman era was on the order of the Hellenistic pattern of greeting, meal, and symposium, then it’s not hard to imagine these early Christians meeting together in one another’s homes and dining rooms, as any newly formed club or guild would quite naturally do.   Christians would greet each other with a kiss, offer water for washing of hands and feet, break bread during a common meal while reclining on couches, share the cup of wine, then participate in any number of postprandial activities such as singing, praise, teaching, testimony, preaching, discussion and prayer. Such meals would create not only a sense of community (koinonia), but of friendship (philia), and grace (charis).[2] In other words, the shared meal was very likely a critically formative practice giving rise to a new social and religious identity known simply as The Way.

This is especially important to note, because the gospel was for all people, not just the Jews. So, these meals brought together quite disparate groups of people not heretofore affiliated with one another. “Given the diversity that came to characterize Christian groups at a very early stage of development, how could a sense of cohesion have developed so easily? How could individuals from diverse ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds come to call one another “brothers and sisters”? …The most likely locus for this development is the community meal, with its unparalleled power to define social boundaries and create social bonding.”[3]

In the next post, #35, we will begin to ask why so many NT letters address food disagreements in the early Church.  And, like a simple meal, please SHARE this post!

~ Julie A.P. Walton, Ph.D.

[1] Hal Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal: Social Experimentaion and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), p. 21.

[2] Taussig, p. 27.

[3] Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, p.184.