The Altar and the Table
August 26, 2018 • Gerald Griffin
In the last teaching on the practice of eating and drinking, we go back to the Hebrew ideas of animal sacrifice and covenant meals to better understand God's design and intention for communion. Since the fall, God has been longing for intimacy with his creation and through the altar he provided a way to the table.
How the Meal Became the Mess
August 19, 2018 • John Mark Comer
The Lord’s supper, communion, the eucharist – whatever you call eating and drinking with God, this practice is at the very center of the church. And yet it’s changed over the years. What started out as a full meal, around a table, in a home, with a spirit of gratitude, joy and celebration, has since become a quiet, contemplative, individualistic meditation on our sin and its cost to Jesus. How did this practice evolve? Or devolve? And how could we re-imagine this practice as a meal?
Dining Room Table Christianity
August 12, 2018 • Chris Wienand
We near the end of our practice of eating and drinking with the third dimension: eating and drinking with God. The Lord’s supper was originally exactly what it sounds like, a supper. A meal around a table with Jesus and his community. This core practice changed the Roman Empire. Could it change our world yet again?
How to Become the Happiest Person Alive
July 15, 2018 • John Mark Comer
Jesus was the happiest person alive, and he prayed that his apprentices would have “the full measure of my joy within them.” Joy is more than just an emotion; it is an overall condition of the heart. But how do we become joyful people? Through the spiritual discipline of celebration. And the best way to do that is to eat together as a family…
Church Around a Table
July 8, 2018 • John Mark Comer
Long before followers of Jesus ever built cathedrals, they met in homes, around a table, eating and drinking as brothers and sisters. As family. This is a very simple idea that tragically we’ve lost over the millennia, at great cost to the church. What if we were to recapture the shared meal as the center of gravity in our church?
Food: Justice and Injustice
June 10, 2018 • Josh Porter
One dimension of the ancient art of hospitality is using food to do justice. Though Jesus’s ambition was to use the dinner table as a tool to do good, he was well aware that it was also being used to do injustice. The same is true today: Everything you eat has a story. How can we, as disciples of Jesus, break our food’s relationship with injustice in order to do good, eating and drinking?
Neighboring
June 3, 2018 • John Mark Comer
Jesus said we are to “love your neighbor as yourself.” What if he meant our actual neighbors? What if we were to reimagine our homes not as a castle to hide in, but as an outpost for the kingdom of God? And our tables as a tangible expression of love? Our meals as the setting where strangers become neighbors and neighbors become brothers and sisters?
Radically Ordinary Hospitality
May 27, 2018 • John Mark Comer
Jesus “came eating and drinking.” If he had a “method of evangelism,” that was it: eat a meal with people far from God. And all through the New Testament, apprentices of Jesus are commanded to follow his example through the practice of hospitality. Something as radically ordinary and setting a table can create space for people far from God to experience the Father’s warm welcome into his family.