Start with Food

Reflections on Family, Fellowship & Sustenance for the Soul

In a recent article in Christianity Today titled “Confessions of a Loner,” Sophia Lee writes of her search for community within the church. She and her husband married at the beginning of the pandemic. Guests “attended” via Zoom, and when the laptop closed, the couple feasted on sushi delivered via Uber Eats. Lee didn’t particularly mind. The marriage was about them, right? They saved thousands, and who cared how they got married?

As newlyweds, Lee and her husband attended church services digitally for a year. Finally, in-person church resumed, but Lee found she “had gotten comfortable living a self-contained, self-gazing life. Navigating 58 minutes of freeways to meet a friend suddenly felt draining and unnecessary. Was it really worth all that effort when we could just text or call?”

Then tragedy hit. Her mother-in-law was struck and killed by an SUV while out for a daily walk. “Our church asked if we wanted a meal train,” Lee writes. “We said no. We lived a ways from most of the congregation, and besides, I hate casseroles.” Less than a year later, she gave birth to their first child. Again, she turned down offers of food.

She now realizes that turning down those meal trains was a “grave mistake.” The offers weren’t just about the food. Making food and serving it was a way for her church family to show up, to stop by and ask if she and her husband were okay, to be the hands and feet of Christ to Lee and her husband David when they were hurting.

Community

I’m focusing on the food, but in reality, Lee’s piece is about her ache for the kind of close-knit community in which she had grown up, one in which adults and children alike shared meals, wandered in and out of each other’s homes, and otherwise shared their lives. It was the kind of community some of us were fortunate enough to experience as children but few actually have today. Loneliness is at epic levels. People share GIFs, chats, and texts with “friends” they barely know around the world, but somehow, sharing a meal with the person next door—or in the next pew—seems terrifying.

Lee’s mention of food is significant and leads me to another illustration. When we were first married, my husband and I struggled to “break in” to our church. We spent months attending but still felt there were plenty of extra-church social gatherings (dinners, birthday parties) that we simply weren’t invited to. Our congregation wasn’t trying to be exclusive. They were caring, kind people. But the couples in our age group had known each other for a decade or more and had been raising their children together for years. They were comfortable together; it didn’t occur to them to invite the newlyweds.

Finally, after a few children into life, my husband and I began hosting a weekly small group in our home. At last, we found the kind of community and fellowship for which we had so longed.

The gamechanger?

Dinner.

Forging Connections

We decided, for the sake of convenience, to have everyone over for a meal first. Kids would eat with the adults, and then pre-arranged babysitters would usher the children to the playroom downstairs while the parents gathered in the living room. One family would bring the main course, another dessert, and another drinks. Over spaghetti and Cabernet Sauvignon, Italian beef and craft beer (these were traditional Lutheran gatherings—adult beverages were present), we finally forged the kind of connection to our church family that we had been so desperately craving.

Christ commands us to be in communion with fellow believers. Lee quotes Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” We most often associate this verse with marriage, she writes, “but it is an inescapable reality that the Creator, who himself dwells in community as three persons in one, created all humankind to be with and for other people.” We serve as the hands and feet of Christ to each other during our stay in this broken place. Many Christians long to be truly a part of the “family of Christ,” living as a family can and should. But like Lee, like my husband and me, they struggle with the reality of how to break in.

Fortunately, the Bible and millennia of Christian experience light the way—there’s food.

When God visited Abraham to tell him he and Sarah would have a son, Abraham slaughtered a calf, and Sarah made bread. When Joseph’s brothers visited him in Egypt seeking grain, Joseph fed them a banquet—and, weeping, told them who he was. When Christ preached to the thousands on the hillside, he knew they would be hungry; he had compassion on them and multiplied the fish and the bread so that they might eat. Christ and his disciples shared the Passover; the Apostles broke bread together; the early Church shared meals in common.

How incredible is it that food, the very means of our physical sustenance, can also serve as the catalyst for our spiritual connectedness? It’s a beautiful way of blending the physical and spiritual. Food feeds our bodies; communion with Christ feeds our souls. Eating together with other believers does a little bit of both.

A Family Affair

Interestingly, decades of research back up the importance of the “family dinner” to both individual and corporate wellbeing. Kids and teens who have dinner with their families at least three times a week eat healthier, are less likely to be overweight or engage in risky behaviors, perform better academically, and have stronger relationships with their parents.¹ Eating together is good for the nuclear family, and from my own experience I believe it’s also good for the family of Christ.

So if you’re struggling to find community, wherever you live and at whatever stage of life you might be in, I offer this advice: eat with people. It seems so simple, and yet, in this age of hectic overscheduling and social disconnectedness, it may feel like it takes a near Herculean effort to break bread together. But the witness of millennia of Christian life is not wrong. Families eat together. The family of Christ is no exception.

Planting Roots

Sophia Lee said she didn’t think much about community until she needed one and it wasn’t there. In their newly discovered longing for community, she and David found a church closer to their home and joined a small group. It felt awkward, she says, but they want to stay there and plant roots. At the close of her article, she notes that she is pregnant with the couple’s second child. This time, she writes, she plans to accept the casseroles.

Note
1. CASAColumbia, “The Importance of Family Dinners VIII,” (2012).