Friday Night Dinner Club

Eating is one of our favorite pastimes! We love eating so much that statisticians tell us that 60% of all Americans are now overweight. That stat floored me when I heard it because I would have guessed at about 40%. We love to eat and we love to eat well in our country. We probably don't think about it very much but we eat better than most countries in the entire world. A friend of mine who recently returned from France told me that their food portions are almost half the size of our portions at most restaurants. We have a love affair with our food!

Knowing this about our culture should help us in the Church to think about ministry and fellowship with one another. We can integrate basic things like eating into our ministry at the Church to help bring people together. What I have started to notice in the Church is that when people start to get to know each other they begin to care for one another. When people care for one another with genuine affection then they learn to lean upon each other and perhaps even start to grow together in the Lord.

The first thing that we have to do is get together within the Church. The greatest way to do this is around the dinner table. Several moths ago a friend of mine by the name of Ronnie decided that he and his wife needed to expand people they knew in the Church. So Ronnie (this is his real name) had my family and another couple over for a home cooked meal. It was a good night and it was great food since Ronnie is an excellent cook. We thought initially that this was a one time event, but within another month all of us were at Ronnie's house for another wonderful home cooked meal. It seemed that all of our families began to do this on a regular basis. My wife calls it the Friday Night Dinner Club even though we only do this about once a month. This has changed since it first started because the last time we got together my wife and I cooked the meal at our home. We made everything from scratch like Ronnie and it was fun trying to cook something different that we don't normally eat. We are slowly getting the other couple to cook something from scratch as well for one of our Friday Night Dinner's. This has become a wonderful time of good food, new friendships that have developed, and a lot of laughter each time we eat together. Before we started to get together I thought that Ronnie's wife was a bit stuck-up, but I realize now what a sweet sister in Christ she is. Every time we get together now she reminds me of how I thought she was stuck-up and we laugh about it. I cherish these relationships within the Church.

Thinking about the Dinner Club this past week gave me an idea. Why not do something with this more and more in our Church? I have decided that this fall I will try to organize some type of Dinner Club that will help people in the Church to get to know one another better. One Friday night a month I will try to get 3 or 4 families together to share a meal and have a time of fellowship. It is easy to get people together in intimate settings like our homes and its easy to get people together to eat! I will enlist Ronnie of course to help with the organization of this even though he doesn't know yet. My hope is that it will strengthen our Church that has a lot of love in it already and help people to love those they do not know in greater ways. This concept is nothing new of course they did it all the time in the early Church (see the Book of Acts). Our problem is that we have lost sight of being intimate with other Christians.