Thursday, February 16, 2012

Community Dinner


Every Monday night we gather together with fifteen of our neighbors for a family dinner. We are united not only by neighborhood boundaries, but by our desire to build genuine community through studying, speaking and sharing the Gospel. Monday's are sweet time of conversation, laughter, insane amounts of good food, and lots of red wine. We spend time sharing how our weeks have been, playing and drawing on the chalkboard wall with the two amazing kids in our group, telling the stories of Christ's redeeming work in our lives, admitting where we're struggling and where we need prayer, taking communion, and discussing how we can encourage and serve our neighbors.

We feast together. As we gather around the table for a meal our community is strengthened and knit together, and this is precisely why I love food and why I love to cook.


Living intentionally in community is not always easy and certainly can be a strain on comfort and free time, but it also incredibly rewarding to see the Holy Spirit at work within our group and our neighborhood. God calls us to live in community. Practically for our group it looks like this:  helping our neighbors move, helping our group member get around and grocery shop with a broken leg, hosting bar-b-ques, lazy Saturday breakfasts and super bowl parties, inviting our neighbors to events, delivering meals, meeting for coffee, daydreaming up a community garden, meeting with small groups to study and memorize scripture, praying for one another, going to the hard places in conversation and challenging each other in where we are not believing the Gospel, celebrating birthdays and weddings and anniversaries, babysitting, attending neighborhood association meetings and community fundraisers, opening our home outside of Mondays and worshiping together at church on Sundays.
 

If you are interested in the idea of Missional Community, I encourage you to watch this video. I cry every single time.

5 comments:

Erin said...

Love this. Thanks for giving our dinner such a beautiful description.

Allie Peach said...

Kara,
Thank you so much for sharing that video. I cried the whole time! I feel like what was said in the video is what our hearts have been crying out for—but we haven't been able to put it into words so perfectly. I will definitely be sharing this with, well, everyone.

Annie said...

Kara, I loved everything about this. I wish we lived in the same town so I could pick your brain about some of these things! I have all kinds of questions about community and loving our neighbors (the literal ones, especially!), but sometimes, I realize we don't always get the answers to our questions. Sometimes, we're just supposed to try, just supposed to do. (I loved that video, by the way. Totally teared up.)

elventryst said...

I LOVE this! I have always dreamed of doing something very similar. You are definitely blessed to have such a space for doing that and to have a community of believers. I know I've said this before, but I'd love to sit at your table one day!

Avid Traveler said...

I did not expect searching for a beet recipe to land me here, but perhaps there's some meaning in it. Sounds like you have a really nice thing going!