About Us | Table Collective

Our
Story

Turning Every Table into a Church.

Our Core Belief

This is how the world changes - little by little, table by table, meal by meal, hour by hour. This is how we chip away at isolation, loneliness, fear. This is how we connect, in big and small ways - we do it around the table.

The Table Manifesto.

At the very beginning, and all through the Bible, all through the stories about God and his people, there are stories about food, about all of life changing with the bite of an apple, about trading an inheritance for a bowl of stew, about waking up to find the land littered with bread, God’s way of caring for his people; about a wedding where water turned to wine, Jesus’ first miracle; about the very first Last Supper, the humble bread and wine becoming, for all time, indelibly linked to the very body of Christ, the center point for thousands of years of tradition and belief. It matters. It mattered then, and it matters now, possibly even more so, because it’s a way of reclaiming some of the things we may have lost along the way.

Both the church and modern life, together and separately, have wandered away from the table. The church has preferred to live in the mind and the heart and the soul, and almost not at all in fingers and mouths and senses. And modern life has pushed us into fake food and fast food and highly engineered food products cased in sterile packages that we eat in the car or on the subway—as though we’re astronauts, as though we can’t be bothered with a meal.

Food is the starting point, the common ground, the thing to hold and handle, the currency we offer to one another. But “The Table” goes beyond food. This is about a family, a tribe, a little band of people who walk through life together, up close and in the mess, real time and unvarnished. I’m not just talking about feeding people’s stomachs, but about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day. The heart of hospitality is about creating space for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It’s about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment.

You see, when we offer peace instead of division, when we offer faith instead of fear, when we offer someone a place at our table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, we represent the heart of Christ.

We tend to believe that what we’ve done is too bad—that our sins and mistakes are beyond repair, and our faults and failures too deep and ugly. That’s what shame tell us. But if we take a chance and come to the table, and if when we are there we are treated with respect and esteem and kindness, then that voice of shame recedes, just for a little while, enough to let the voice of truth, of hope, of Christ himself, get planted a little deeper and a little deeper each time. The table becomes the hospital bed, the place of healing. It becomes the place of relearning and reeducating, the place where value and love are communicated.

I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond the church walls, out of the hands of the priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchen and dining rooms and backyards. The building bocks of the most common meal—the bread and the wine—are reminders to us: ‘He’s here!’ God is here, and he’s good.’ Every time we eat, every time we gather, every time the table is filled: He’s here. He’s here, and he is good.

There are many things in this life we cannot change. We can’t fix, can’t heal, can’t put the broken pieces back together in people’s lives, but what we can do is offer ourselves, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people we love and who are difficult to love through the fear and the mess. That’s all any of us can do. That’s what we’re here for.

The table is where time stops. It’s where we look people in the eye, where we tell the truth about how hard it is, where we make space to listen to the whole story, not the textable sound bite.

We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for.

The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel. If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.

History of the Table

The idea for “The Table” began 20+ years ago at the Saddleback Church in Mission Viejo, California. I lived in San Diego at the time, just completed the Adventures in Mission program and had just taken the full-time position of student minister for the Sunrise Church of Christ. The only problem was, I had no idea how to run a youth ministry. Up until that point I had been an intern that simply hung out with teenagers. What they were asking me to do was to run a full youth ministry program, and I was woefully unprepared.

What I decided to do is to read every book I could get my hands on about youth ministry and go to the nearest youth ministry conference I could find, which, as luck would have it, was up the road about an hour and a half at one of the largest churches in the United States, Saddleback.

I decided to go up a day before the conference began because I wanted to actually see their youth ministry in action. After all, they could tell me about all their principles and practices, but I wanted to see it all in person. I walked in on that Sunday night and what I saw changed how I thought about, not only youth ministry, but ministry in general.

As I walked in I was expecting to see rows of chairs, like what we did back in San Diego, and a stage where the worship band would perform and the speaker would teach. What I found instead was round tables as far as the eye could see. After asking the sound guy what was going on, he explained to me that the round tables were divided into neighborhoods (grade levels), and each table had 8 teenagers and 1 table leader. This table leader had a table talk sheet (discussion guide) and was not only responsible for leading the discussion that night, but also for following up with the teenagers during the week. Each table had a name and a street sign was hanging above their table to help the teens navigate through the rows of tables. This was the first time I had ever experienced or even considered the powerful shift from rows to circles.

While I dabbled with this model for years, I kept writing in my journal and praying to God about the implications of what I just saw. Years later, when we moved to New Zealand, something else happened that added another layer upon the rows to circles shift. It was called, “Wine-ing with God.”

New Zealand is a very secular society and people’s idea of Christians were that they are boring, judgmental, and prudes. Needless to say, getting people to come to church was a challenge. One night, one of the families that we were reaching out to invited us over for dinner. Unbeknownst to us they had invited 5 of their atheist friends to meet us, “the pub pastors” as they called us, because we would often go into pubs to hang out, have a beer, and get to know people.

That night we were peppered with questions about Christianity, God, and the Church. We were asked about the Canaanite genocide, the Crusades, the Holocaust, and prosperity preachers. After dinner one of the atheist visitors spoke up and said, “Hey, what if I bring a bottle of wine and we continue the conversation next week?” Another atheist laughed and said, “Wine-ing with God it is,” and we laughed. Well, the name stuck and we held that “Wine-ing with God” group every week for the next year, with most eventually attending our church.

What I realized was that this was an example of 5 people who would never step foot inside a church but were willing to have spiritual conversations sitting around a dinner table with a couple of preachers. What I noticed is that the food and hospitality offered by this family (who did eventually become a part of our church) created a kind of sacred space for us to go below the surface and talk about some pretty weighty issues. While they never would have felt welcomed at some of the churches in the area, they did feel welcomed at the table.

The third event that solidified this idea happened just a few years ago when we came back to Georgetown, Texas from living oversees. I was doing church consulting for a couple churches and Melanie and I were praying about what was next for us. We contemplated planting a church in Hutto, Texas continuing to do consulting, or look for something else to do entirely. We were attending the Georgetown Church of Christ as members and enjoying getting back into rhythm with our friends and family that we missed while oversees.

We then got acquainted with Preston and Sarah Cox. Preston was the executive minister at GTCOC and Sarah actually grew up at my home congregation in Garland, TX. We began to have dinner together and slowly I shared with them my ideas about ministry, hospitality, and the like. I kept saying, “There has to be a place where everyone feels welcome.” Over and over again I would say that until finally the phrase, “Everyone is welcome at the table” came out of my mouth. That was it. Everyone is welcome at the table.

We decided to experiment with this idea. We invited a few friends to join us and before we knew it we had a house full of people sharing food, faith, and laughter…all around the table. We only had two requirements when we started. We said in order to come to the table you need to bring food to share and something from your life to share. We began to theme the nights so it was easier to decide what dishes to bring. We would have Mexican food night, Italian night, Burger night, etc. And we also wanted to open the floor for people to share something that they learned or something that God had put on their heart from that last week. If people didn’t want to share, that was ok, we were happy with them simply sharing their presence with us.

Eventually, my house was so full we had to start another “table” at Preston and Sarah’s house. It was growing to the point where we had to make a decision. Do we continue this and turn this into “a thing” or do we say, “that was a fun experiment, let’s leave them wanting more.” We sat down and prayed about it, and after much prayer and discussion (and based upon some life decisions that were taking place with both of our families) we decided to close it down. Now, several years later, I still feel the loving nudge of God to come back to the God Dream that started 20+ years ago, and I simply am trying to be obedient.