We Will Feast
Z We Will Feast Z Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God
Kendall Vanderslice
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2019 Kendall Vanderslice All rights reserved Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7630-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
To the women of Chez Heureuse: who taught me the joy of intentional living, whether laughing together around the dinner table, crying on the kitchen floor, or filling our home with as many friends as the living room could hold
Contents
Foreword by D. L. Mayfield
ix
Introduction
1
1. On Delight The Gospel as a Story of Meals 11
2. On Beginnings The Early Church 23
3. On Loneliness Saint Lydia’s 37
4. On Dirt Garden Church 50
5. On Neighbors Southside Abbey 63 vii
Contents
6. On Rest Root and Branch 76
7. On Membership Potluck Church 90
8. On Feasting Community Dinners 104
9. On Going Sycamore Creek 115
10. On Transformation Table of Mercy 126
11. On Resurrection Simple Church 138
12. On Unity One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church 150 Epilogue
166
Acknowledgments
171
Notes
173
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Foreword
Some of the best meals I have ever eaten have been the most surprising. The meal in a village of India, where a family fasted in order to feed me, their guest. The fry bread with blueberry sauce made by an elderly woman in my apartment complex. The fluffy cinnamon roll made by the ex–gang member, tattoos running down his face. The meals cooked by refugee friends from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Cuba, Libya, Myanmar, Nepal. The church potluck where everyone showed up with a bag of chips and nothing more. Eating with others changes a person—at least I know it has changed me. As a good Christian girl and then as an aspiring activist, I have always struggled with wanting to save the world and with being overcome by the cares of the world as a result. And I don’t think it is a stretch to say that meals have saved my soul. Feasting together with people who have suffered on earth has restored my faith in a God of abundance, even when circumstances point ix
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in another direction. Eating with others taps into both an elemental need for survival and the holy joy of celebration at the exact same time. A meal savored with other glorious image-bearers does not save the world, but it helps restore our hearts in order to keep moving through it. In her book We Will Feast, Kendall Vanderslice reveals to the reader the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit at work in our churches, homes, and communities. Chapter after chapter I was amazed at the creative, unsung, simple, and profound ways in which people who have been transformed by Christ are living out their faith. These are not the kinds of Christians who get big book deals or are speaking on conference circuits, but these are the faithful people through whom the kingdom of God is coming in our midst. I think now is a profound time to consider the implications of what Christian community can look like in a deeply divided and unequal society. Vanderslice continually brings the reader back to Jesus, who conducted most of his ministry at a dinner table, who feasted primarily with the poor and the outcast. Jesus also lived in a time of great injustice, perhaps exemplified by the overwhelming number of people who experienced food scarcity during his time, with many individuals not knowing where their next meal would come from. And yet, Vanderslice says, in this context Jesus feasted constantly. When he turned water into wine, he made a lot— x
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and of the best quality possible! When he fed the five thousand, he made sure there were baskets and baskets overflowing with extra bread and fish. These stories, and the stories of believers who have tried to model this kind of hospitality, will continue to grow in importance in our own age of abundance, excess, and growing inequality. Food, and our relationship to it, brings up so many issues: broken systems, economic exploitation of the poor, power dynamics, and our own tendency toward insular thinking and homogeneity. But what happens when we make a conscious decision to break out of these ways of living and thinking? Something holy happens. This isn’t a typical book on how to be more hospitable—how to create a cozy, comfortable environment, one filled with simple recipes that will impress your guests. Instead, We Will Feast is a meditation on true neighborliness, rooted in the reality of both the New Testament context and the current American Protestant church. It flips the narrative, focusing on how Jesus was dependent on the hospitality of others. And it looks at how Christians are starting to see that they need their neighbors—especially those who are different from them—in order to experience true communion, in order to start being consumed by Jesus Christ himself. People can, and are, learning to grow in the love of an abundant provider-God and to keep their eyes open for those who xi
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could always be added to the feast at hand. “Holy food for holy people,” as one pastor in these pages says. As a white evangelical, I’m struck by how I was raised to believe Jesus came to save my soul, which in practice meant my mind. But this book reminds me that Jesus also came to feed my actual body. It is so much simpler and more elemental than I could possibly realize. I am seeing food in light of our global reality, of cultures, of scarcity. I am thinking about food as it relates not just to me but to my neighbors. In her epilogue, Vanderslice writes that “worship around the table is a communal search for every glimmer of goodness in an aching world.” It instantly brought me back to some of my most treasured meals, always eaten with neighbors from far and wide. This book ostensibly chronicles the various forms of dinner churches that are on the rise in America. But truly it is a book about the wider work of the Holy Spirit and a church that is creatively finding small ways of renewal in some of the most unlikely spaces. No matter what your relationship to or definition of church might be, there is space in this book to catch a glimpse of the joy, abundance, and holy imagination of what it means to feast together in this world that we call the House of the Lord. It will surprise you, just like the very best meals always do. D. L. Mayfield January 2019 xii
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In 2008, Brooklyn pastor Emily Scott announced that her church, Saint Lydia’s, would begin holding their weekly service over dinner. Longing to dispel feelings of isolation that city living fosters for so many young New Yorkers, Scott decided to model her service around the early church practice of Eucharist, having a meal together. From those beginnings and in the span of just a few years, small, independent dinner-Âchurch communities emerged all around the world. These communities do not focus on worship first and then eating together later; they understand the meal itself as worship. These churches encompass a range of denominations, both conservative and progressive. Found in urban, suburban, and rural areas, they attract wealthy, middle-class, and unhoused neighbors. The congregations are intergenerational and multiethnic—reflecting the demographics of their particular locations. Some meet in restaurants, 1
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others in gardens and on farms, a few in church basements, and the rest wherever they can find the space. Services aren’t limited to Sundays: across the country, a dinner-church service takes place every night of the week. What these fellowships all hold in common is a firm belief that Christian worship at the Communion table is much more than a taste of bread and wine. This form of worship is nothing new. After all, the gospel is a story of meals, opening in a garden and ending at a feast. Records of the early church suggest that they primarily met for worship through eating meals. But over the last thousand years, many churches have lost focus on the centrality of food—and with it a powerful method for the unification of Christ’s diverse body. As worshipping communities transition from sanctuaries to farmland and from pews to tables, their demographics shift too. Across the country, a range of denominations boasts of dinner-church congregations diverse in age, race, marital status, income level, and sexual orientation. Men and women nervous to step through the doors of a sanctuary, hesitant to sit next to one another in a pew, are finding God together as they dig through dirt and feast on bread.
Z The narrative arc of the gospel—from creation and its fall, to Christ’s death and resurrection, to the building 2
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anticipation of a restored earth—is grounded in the act of eating. Meals end in death and meals offer new life. The book of Genesis opens in a garden, where humanity receives her primary responsibility: to care for and tend the earth. The only restriction placed on those first humans was a restriction on what they could eat. God said to feast upon fruits from all the trees, so long as they stayed away from just the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The temptation proved too great. In feasting on the forbidden fruit, the man and woman faced a sinister kind of death: every relationship God designed as good—relationships with the soil, with fleshly bodies, with one another—now brought a dimension of evil. But in God’s love for the beloved creation God called it good, and in the narrative that continues through Jesus, humanity received a ministry of meals. Here, Jesus reconciled the relationships that were broken by the knowledge of evil. Reclaiming the cross from a sign of death to a gift and symbol of the continuation of life, Jesus asked his followers to do one thing: to eat. Through consuming bread and wine, Jesus gave his followers a way to again honor the interconnectedness of all of creation. Feasting together, they remembered him and his promises of a coming Kingdom, an eternal banquet in the presence of God, and an end to death and pain and evil. This contemporary revival of the early church practice of shared meals as Eucharist and worship suggests 3
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something important. As our world devalues interpersonal contact in preference for digital media, as differences in belief create deep fractures in denominations, and as the political landscape continues to reinforce division, people long to sit down together and eat, to share a physical communion of together remembering Christ at the table. Something powerful happens at the table.
Z I attended my first dinner-church worship service on a warm Thursday evening. Working on a master of liberal arts in gastronomy, I’d recently designed a research project studying the formation of friendships over a series of meals, and I had a personal interest in theology and food, but I did not yet see a connection between the two. The Eucharist compelled me to believe that food could somehow serve as a tool for community-building and peacemaking. That summer I’d been questioning whether to leave my food studies program and turn to seminary when two friends asked me to ride with them out to central Massachusetts to attend Simple Church. When we pulled into the idyllic New England town square—four churches, a library, and a strip of small businesses situated around a large green and gazebo—I felt as though I’d driven into the set of my favorite TV 4
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show. Turning toward the parking lot of the Congregational church, we watched children toss a Frisbee and a young, bearded man dressed in red plaid and a black beanie greet the stream of women and men walking through the door. An older woman carried her casserole dish of mac and cheese. A father arrived with his four ravenous sons. A farmer and his veterinarian wife bore a salad of fresh vegetables. “Hi, I’m Pastor Zach!” The bearded man introduced himself in his thick Texan drawl. He embraced my two friends in a big hug; they knew one another from seminary. “I’m so glad y’all drove all the way out here!” As Pastor Zach transitioned from his post at the door to the church basement, he strummed his guitar and began singing, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Jesus gave it to me, I’m gonna let it shine.” The children scrambled to the center of the room to dance while the twenty or so adults formed a circle around the perimeter of the space. After the song, we prayed together before Pastor Zach delivered the first half of the Communion liturgy. “We gather on a Thursday night to eat. On another Thursday night, a long time ago, a group of friends gathered at a table together. And at that dinner, Jesus took the bread and he lifted it up and gave thanks. He broke it and gave it to his friends, saying, ‘Eat this in remembrance of me.’ ” After eating a handful of freshly baked 5
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bread, torn from a loaf passed around the circle from neighbor to neighbor, we walked through a buffet of soup, salad, pasta, and more bread, filling plates high before finding seats at a table. We sipped our soup while listening to the day’s lectionary reading and hearing a short sermon. And then we talked. “You don’t have to agree with your neighbors,” Zach advised the group as we transitioned into a time of discussion. “In fact, it’s great if you don’t! Listen to what they have to say, ask questions, and understand why you disagree.” I sat at a table with a single, evangelical father, a lesbian couple—both mainline Protestant ministers—and a young woman who called herself spiritual but not religious. As we moved through three discussion prompts written on a chalkboard by the buffet, we clearly did disagree. While we all held firmly to our varying beliefs, our surety pushed us toward lively debate rather than argument or frustration. We closed by worshipping in song together and drinking a generous pour of grape juice—reminding ourselves that while we disagree we still come together to worship God. As my friends and I drove away from the surreal little town that night, the lights of the gazebo flickering in the distance, my mind buzzed. While I’d taken Communion for most of my life, this was the first time I’d actually experienced it. It was transformative. 6
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Over the coming weeks I ruminated on the evening, seeking to understand the experience in light of my research on food and friendship. From that point, in less than a month’s time, I drew up a research plan, consulted with my school’s internal review board, partnered with a sociologist at the university’s School of Theology, and launched into my food studies thesis. I began to study the Simple Church community, joining them in worship and interviewing congregants about their experiences. As a researcher I was supposed to maintain a reflective approach, remaining one step removed and aware of the ways my very presence affected my findings. But I found myself transformed every week as I dined. As my research came to a close, the congregation embraced me as one of their own, pulling me along on their journey to discover how to be the church together. By the time I’d finished writing my thesis, they presented me with an official offer of employment. For a year and a half, I spent my Thursday evenings sitting at the children’s table, engaging the church’s youngest members in mealtime conversation; the rest of the week I ran the church’s bread bakery, making bread and selling it at farmers’ markets both as ministry and monastic- style funding. But the researcher in me never let go. Fascinated by the worldwide movement of dinner churches, I continued independent research on the breadth of meal- 7
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centered communities. I encountered an interdenominational network of pastors encouraging one another as they explore new ways of doing church. Every time I hear pastors speak in excitement about the work they are doing, I grow further convinced that this movement is the Holy Spirit engaged in reconciling work. A shared hunger for an embodiment of the Lord’s Supper has fostered dialogue among dinner-church pastors from a range of denominations living in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The intergenerational tables they set encourage discussions among men, women, and children with a wide variety of life experiences. In dining together, these congregations embody the very purpose and work of the church. When Jesus commanded followers to eat together in remembrance of him, he meant it. He knew that eating together would re-member and heal the divisions of the broken body made one in Christ. In order to overcome the differences that threaten the unity of Christ’s body, writes social psychologist Christena Cleveland, we must cling to an identity that is more encompassing than our identities of difference.1 It can be difficult to cling first and foremost to the identity of Christ-follower when the identity of conservative, progressive, liturgical, evangelical, Baptist, or Anglican keeps us from listening to other followers of the same Christ. But the identity of dinner-church pastor serves as a powerful intermediary—unifying pastors who em8
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body a range of differing beliefs in the remembrance that Christ is present at the table. Simultaneously the tables they set foster dialogue among church members often stifled by differences in belief. Methodist bishop Larry Goodpaster writes that despite the many varying opinions about how the sacrament should be served and what it means, “there is a common sense that something holy, something transformational, something grace-filled happens” at the table. “As a result,” he says, “the Eucharist may indeed provide a way forward and a way for this divided, suspicious world to find its way to a different place, an alternative and holy vision of what it means to be in community.”2 I am beginning to understand there is no better platform for the Eucharist to do such reconciling work than when eaten in the context of a full meal. The dinner-church model is not perfect; every pastor is open about the difficulties she or he has faced. Whether reconciling with a denomination that practices a closed table (a theology that understands the Eucharist as reserved for baptized believers), or funding a meal for a church with mostly low-income members, to questioning whether one church can ever be truly welcoming to all, these pastors must decipher how to make this model work within the limitations of their own denominations and locations. The beauty of meal-centered worship, though, is its adaptability to so many different contexts. 9
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By turning the process of eating into an act of worship, each church is perfectly poised to identify the physical needs in their communities and use their worship to address those needs. In the following pages of this book, as you read the stories of each church, my hope is that you too will see God at work in all of these meals and begin to encounter God every time you sit down at a table to eat.
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8 On Feasting Community Dinners
At my church home in Boston, we spend every weekend of Eastertide (the Christian season that stretches from Easter Sunday to Pentecost) feasting together as a community. Each week we gather in a different neighborhood, stuffing more than a hundred people into a tiny city apartment to share a potluck feast. It is a time for folks from different services or different neighborhoods or different life stages to mingle and to take care of one another’s kids. It is a time for folks who are food- insecure to know they can find a hearty meal and those who are lonely to know they will have a place for community. It is a time of healing for those who feel lost or out of place on Sunday mornings, a time of bonding for those who are new to the city, and a time of goodbyes for those who will soon leave. Every year, the season of feasting breathes new energy into the community, deepening relationships between pastors, small group leaders, church members, and new guests. 104
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Feasting is a time to delight in the abundance of God’s creation and to commune with God as well. It is a reminder that God not only provides for our basic needs but also chooses to address those needs through conviviality, pleasure, and bountiful celebration of food, family, and friends. It’s a radical action, proclaiming that even in the midst of suffering God restores creation, and it’s worth celebrating the pleasure of the world even now. Feasting is intended to be not a celebration of gluttony or indulgence but a time to delight in God’s creation of good food and loving community. Episcopal priest and avid home chef Robert Farrar Capon says, “Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful.”1 In Jesus’s miraculous provision of food and drink— from turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana to the feeding of five thousand men and their families on the hillsides—Jesus affirms this sacramentality of unnecessary goodness. He doesn’t just provide decent wine for the wedding guests, he provides an abundance of the very best quality. He doesn’t just satiate the hunger of the crowds, he turns five loaves and two fish into a meal with baskets and baskets of leftovers.
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When we look at the people with whom Jesus feasted the most, we see him consistently at the table with the poor, the lonely, and the most overlooked members of society. Jesus feasted with the most vulnerable not merely because he felt a conviction to feed the poor, but because he delighted in their very presence. Founder of the world’s largest gang-intervention and rehabilitation program, Father Gregory Boyle says, “Because those on the margins have been cut off, have been hurt, have been lonely, God views them as trustworthy guides into the kinship God desires. So we go to the margins because there we will find the people who can lead us into our own salvation.”2 Those society presses to the margins are the very center of God’s world. If Jesus found such deep delight in feasting with those cast aside by society, is it any surprise that the Holy Spirit continues to dwell and find joy among the same?
Z Seattle pastors Verlon and Melodee Fosner don’t think so. Captivated by Jesus’s meals with the poor, they realized that the church they pastored in Seattle actually bore little resemblance to the model set forth by Christ. Longing to follow Jesus’s example, they set to work reforming their eighty-five-year-old congregation, turn106
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ing a gathering of middle-Âclass families into a feast for the homeless, the lonely, and the sick. As they turned their focus away from giving campaigns, membership goals, and measurements of spiritual growth and turned it toward cooking, eating, and loving those at the table instead, they found freedom and delight in watching the Holy Spirit transform lives. What began as a vision for one church location has spread across all of Seattle. You can spot a Community Dinners service by its signature placard on the sidewalk—a sign with an image of a plate and silverware— as well as by the line gathering outside its doors. Each service draws around 150 people, 90 percent of whom do not have stable access to food or housing. These guests line the sidewalks along with all of their belongings, eager for the doors to open. Community Dinners hosts a feast in neighborhoods all over Seattle. They currently offer services seven nights a week in seven different areas, with a goal of eventually moving into every neighborhood in the city. Rather than in church buildings, the gatherings take place in community centers, which are often less threatening to those who have felt hurt or rejected by churches in the past. Once the doors open, volunteers usher the long line of hungry individuals through an abundant buffet: dozens of pans of lasagna, a giant bowl of salad, garlic bread, 107
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ice cream, cookies, and iced tea. A feast for everyone, a celebration of God’s abundance all around. All are welcomed to walk through the line as many times as they please, feasting until they cannot eat anymore. A musician performs in the corner, providing background music to ease any tension in the room, while an artist paints a piece to reflect the experience of the community. While plenty of churches eat together after their services, very few do so with the intention of drawing in those who are hungry. And plenty of soup kitchens offer meals to folks without homes, but rarely do men and women with secure incomes attend to eat and enjoy the communion. But Jesus did not separate the practice of feeding the hungry from that of feasting with friends. He enjoyed communion with them all. Dismantling the social stratification of meals was, in fact, one of his main intentions. Jesus hosted dinner parties that turned the forgotten into guests of honor. Each Community Dinners service is prepared by a site pastor and his or her team of volunteers. The volunteer crew, made up of local students, members of other nearby churches, and regular Community Dinners attendees, prepares the meals at a prep kitchen in the Fosners’ original church building. While the site pastor spends time talking and praying with the night’s dinner guests, the volunteers set up the buffet line and serve all who come through. They pile plates high with the rich 108
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array: fresh bread smothered in butter, pasta spiced with oregano and basil, ice cream squished between chocolate chip cookies. Each pastor, all of whom are bivocational, devote one day per week to his or her site. As they get to know the folks that regularly attend, they identify men and women who might enjoy participating on the volunteer team. Verlon and Melodee strive to see that Community Dinners functions as a church, not a soup kitchen. Building community among those from varying socioeconomic backgrounds is central to Christ’s ministry, and therefore, they say, must be central to the ministry of any church. In order to lessen the divide between leaders and attendees, every volunteer takes a break from serving to sit and join in mealtime conversation with those at the table. They too feast on a plate of gooey lasagna and crisp salad. The feast only functions to create true community when everyone eats together, host and guest alike. As they all settle into their seats, the pastor stands to offer a brief sermon focused on the gospel narrative of Christ’s death, resurrection, and redemption. Some folks wander back through the line for seconds and thirds, their hunger drowning out the message offered on the other side of the room. While the proclamation of the gospel is important to the Community Dinners service, the spiritual practice of feasting tells far more about the abundance of 109
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God’s love than a sermon ever could. It doesn’t concern the pastors if folks keep eating and ignore the sermon— they realize that the journey toward communion with Christ looks different for everyone.
Z The Community Dinners model is built out of the assumption that the Holy Spirit is in fact present during each and every meal, and through this communion the Spirit leads men and women into wholeness and freedom. By giving this responsibility back to God, the pastors say, they rest from the pressures of pastoral care. Their primary responsibility is not to convert but simply to listen, to feast, and to pray. Evangelism—sharing the story of the gospel—is important to Community Dinners. However, through the guests that attend their meals, the church has learned to rethink the way this practice has historically been done. They’ve witnessed the importance of affirming the dignity and inherent equality of all those gathered, no matter their difference in economic status, educational background, or religious understanding. At Community Dinners, listening is always central. The pastors host in awareness that the Holy Spirit is already present among those who gather. While the language the guests employ might differ from what was 110
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common in the Fosners’ original church, these conversations regularly reveal that the men and women who attend already know God, whether or not they have ever heard the story of Christ’s death and resurrection before. By feeding the hungry and housing the unhoused, the Fosners take Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Matthew seriously: “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me” (Matt. 25:40). They center their ministry in the understanding that they are feeding and housing Christ himself. “Of course Jesus is out among the people who walk into the doors of Community Dinners,” they say. “Where else would he be?” It is no surprise, then, that many of these dinner guests who have never even set foot in a traditional worship service can poignantly articulate their understanding of spiritual things. The church leaders, Verlon has discovered, are the ones who must learn how to listen. Such listening takes place naturally when gathered around the table, where conversations about the mundanities of life naturally arise like the scent of roasted garlic permeating the air. Many Community Dinners attendees spend their days overlooked by everyone who passes by. But at the table they experience community, where their personhood, their stories, their reflection of the Image of God matters. Over time conversation naturally deepens—inevitably leading to a discussion about the limitations and hardships of life. In these conversations, the pastors rec111
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ognize their own commonality with every church member. They bond over their shared experiences of pain and limitation. The pastors listen to the deep hurting of those around them. Rather than press an easy fix—Jesus is the answer to all our problems!—they respond by revealing their own fears and frustration. Most often they find the vulnerability of a shared meal fosters honest conversations between pastors and the church. And the joy and companionship of feasting express the abundant delight of God far more than uttering the script of any evangelistic tract. “Growing up, we had pews full of broken people but it was taboo to talk about it,” says Brian, one Community Dinners site leader whose tattoos tell the story of God’s transformation in his own life. “If someone did talk about their brokenness, we’d brush them under the rug. So at Community Dinners, it’s like we’ve lifted up the rug. How many churches will let a pastor preach about his brokenness and the room be okay with that?” “For a long time, I felt the pressure that I had to bring something big to the table,” says Will, another site leader. “My job has shifted to asking ‘What is Jesus up to?’ and to making sure I’m listening. Sometimes it’s scarily easy!” The team has identified dozens of neighborhoods around Seattle where more than a third of the population is in the lower-third income bracket of the city. These “sore neighborhoods,” as Verlon has named them, often 112
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don’t appear to be places of want, but the hungry live in the shadows of expensive homes and trendy restaurants. The goal of Community Dinners is to launch services in every neighborhood on this list—feasting with hungry residents all across town.
Z Verlon and Melodee have slowly passed the leadership of each site on to other pastors, focusing their own energy on training new leaders around the world. In his meals during his time on earth, “Jesus implanted both the message and the manner of working it out in culture,” Verlon says, “and that should never be questioned. It is valuable for us to note what God has established that is timeless by design. The more we understand the deep roots of Jesus’s dinner table, the more beautiful it becomes.” To Verlon, holding church around the table is not an evangelistic tool, a package through which to share the message of the gospel. Eating with others embodies the gospel, the message of which is rendered meaningless when void of any physical expression of care. “Jesus’s strategy of rescuing the world didn’t involve talking about spirituality. It involved having dinner with sinners, caring for people. The Church is not meant to be a purity system or information download. It is meant to be a rescue expression—Christ’s rescuing all of cre113
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ation back to the purpose for which it was created. We are guilty of being so heavenly minded that we’re of no earthly good. We are primed by theology and ignorant of sociology. Jesus very much believed that he wasn’t handing over just the message but also the way it would be done,” he says. Verlon envisions the dinner-church model transforming the work of the church around the world, providing for the needs of neighbors through feasting together. How can anyone sit and listen to a lesson about God’s love and provision, Verlon questions, when all they can think about is the deep hunger in their bellies? A gospel that doesn’t care for the poor, he says, is heresy. But a gospel that is shared through the spiritual practice of feasting together, rich and poor? That is a gospel worthy of devotion, vulnerability, and abundant delight.
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