PRACTICE: Feasting

Food, glorious food. It sustains and nourishes. It delights. It carries memory: the collective stories and traditions of generations before.

Search your memory. When you look back on holidays and celebrations from childhood, what meals have been lovingly prepared? When you consider recent moments of fellowship—where you felt true joy and belonging with family or friends—are you gathered around a table? Devouring charcuterie or chips and salsa?

Feasting is more than a way to fill your stomach. It’s a way to fill your soul. This experience transcends cultures. Yet in the 21st century West, many of us have lost our way.

For many, the art of eating together has been sacrificed on the altar of productivity and convenience. We eat in our cars or don’t put down our phones and gather around a table to share the day’s joys and disappointments. We half-heartedly watch a sitcom rerun or scroll through TikTok. As a culture, our schedules are becoming fuller and fuller and our meals are getting shorter and shorter. Shocking statistics reveal the detrimental effects of this loss on family dynamics and societal well-being. People who sit and eat with others experience measurable improvements to their overall well-being, improving behavior, mental wellness, and academic performance.

The time spent around a table also has spiritual implications. Feasting provides space to better know ourselves and each other. The alternative is shallow conversation and hollow distraction in our devices. As author, Leonard Sweet aptly notes, “An untabled faith is an unstable faith.”

When we reclaim our time and embrace one another through communal dining, we follow the example of Jesus. A significant portion of Jesus’ ministry occurred around a table. In his signature, disruptive style — Jesus, bucked this system of social superiority. He regularly ate with the “wrong” kind of people like prostitutes, women, tax collectors, and drunkards. His decision to choose hospitality over hostility broke cultural barriers and turned heads. He put his proclamations of love and holy pursuit into action.

The cross wasn’t Christ’s first display of bold, countercultural, expectation-breaking love. Before the upper room or the triumphal entry, Jesus demonstrated his pursuit around the tables of the poor, unaccepted, and downcast.

The practice of feasting is about seeing the ordinary table as a sacred place of ministry. A place to catalyze community and welcome the outsider.

As we embrace this practice together, we nourish our bodies and our souls, fostering belonging and connection in an increasingly disconnected world. So, let’s reimagine our table as more than just a place to eat. Let’s create sacred spaces for relationship, rest, and holy rebellion against the loneliness and tribalism so prevalent in our world today.