episode 2

​Our community goes against nearly every principal and model of the past few decades of Evangelical church history. Padded chairs arranged in the traditional Sunday morning rows now need to be  moved around the table in time for dinner, even while a great deal of activity is still happening around the food tables in preparation for our opening call to worship.  Our start time is fluid...we begin when we are ready.  After all, participation in the setup is a given so everyone is already here. Whenever we are ready, we are ready.  Wine and whatever else we are drinking has been poured while the laughter has been part of the preparation just as much as the furniture rearranging has.  Our beginning is marked by the tone of the singing bowl. A prayer is offered and instructions for dinner given.  I would say that this marks the formal beginning of worship for us, and it used to. Church for us at this stage of our lives actually began as soon as we turned on the lights and began preparations.  
Traditional churches have their welcome or greeting times, often at the beginning or shortly after.  It's a time to politely smile, say hi, or some other greeting prescribed by the person up front.  It's a time for latecomers to sneak in without drawing attention to themselves ... to look like they've always been there. Often they miss it entirely.  I remember one Sunday morning in a previous ministry one of our members approached the stage after service to chat with our worship leader, who happens to be my wife.  She began the conversation with an innocent and sincere smile, almost excitedly ... like she had discovered some new church growth secret.  "In our last church we did this really cool thing every week that helped us get to know each other" she said with a kind of shy excitement.  "Really?" my wife inquired.  "What was that?"  "Well we had this greeting time where everyone got to take a minute and say hi to each other and to meet new people" she shared. My wife, playing it very cool said "that's a great idea ... and actually we do it here every week. You just are never here in time to be part of it". It was true, this particular family always showed up about 15 minutes late each week.  They weren't alone either.  It became rather comical and frustrating to note that you could always tell the new people because they were the ones actually in the room at greeting time.  I've never been a fan of this formulaic and programmed form of social engineering that is often the recognized form of "community building". It's a time, though well intentioned, that visitors and first timers absolutely dread.  For those like myself, cringing at the thought of small talk, it is exceedingly uncomfortable to see that everyone else knows everyone else.  You're hoping to be ignored while at the same time longing for someone to acknowledge your existence with more than an awkward obligatory smile.  
Our Common Table community has never needed a greeting time.  We have never had those awkward handshakes and smiles.  Our hands are too busy with preparing for the gathering.  There are no spectators in our group and what has been painfully, and yet, refreshingly clear is that people looking for a "church" are very often uncomfortable in our setting, while at the same time people who are looking for "community" are drawn in by what they experience.  As someone who was trained in the Church Growth theory of the 90's, my biggest transformation and personal growth has been moving completely away from the marketing model that was driven into me and, like a good student, consumed two thirds of my ministry years.  According to those benchmarks we were fairly successful and well accepted in circles of our peers... me as preacher, teacher, leader, and my wife as a gifted and charismatic worship leader.  Week after week we produced the worship experience for increasing numbers of enthusiastic members.  We created programs that attracted people to our building.  Other leaders and faith based organizations welcomed us enthusiastically because we were able to keep the machine moving forward. Not so much anymore.  These days we are considered by the establishment to have completely lost our marbles on our road to certain failure.  Both of us began to feel that something was missing in all of the production and programs.  Cynically I wondered if it hadn't all become just about "the show"... not just in our setting but in nearly every part of what we were witnessing.  The skill and aptitude of marketing had accomplished what was the logical outcome but we had blindly ignored.  Instead of creating community we created consumers.