Remember when you got busted at dinnertime because your brother kicked you under the table, and you couldn't stop laughing? You tried. Dad gave a stern look. But the milk in your mouth had to come out somewhere. It squirted out your nose. And that made your siblings laugh even harder.
Remember when things were tough for your family? Rent was due and your parents seemed scared? That pre-meal prayer was fervent. Your family needed God to show up that week. So you prayed together. And you were extra thankful for the casserole that night.
Remember going around the table, sharing your “highs” and “lows” of the day? You never wanted to go first. But after you did, you felt better than normal. As a youngster you couldn’t describe it. But it felt good to share your day with people who cared about you.
Many youth in my neighborhood don’t have spaces for these kinds of interactions. A lot of them don’t eat around a dinner table with their families. Most of them don’t have caring people to share the events of their days with. Virtually all of them seek something like this.
At UrbanLife, we serve 16,000 meals per year. It’s an extraordinary number. You wouldn’t expect that to come out of a kitchen that measures 6 feet by 5 feet. Hot meals in that volume cannot come from setups that lack both ovens and stoves. In real terms, our kitchen is a plastic-industrial sink, two refrigerators and a leaning closet half packed with food. But somehow, it is enough.
Dining with youth in the neighborhood and providing warm meals is central to what we do at UrbanLife. Together, we are focused on seeing God transform a neighborhood, from the inside out. Transformation doesn’t happen solely because 80 more bellies are full. In fact, the food is not the change agent at all. The most powerful dynamic is the interaction around a family dinner, between neighborhood youth and their adult volunteers. In these mentoring friendships, students know they are listened to, welcomed and cared for. They begin to experience healthy family interactions. They laugh and share details from the day. They practice giving thanks and cleaning up after themselves. They build trust.
This strategy for relational ministry has been employed for years. Jesus used it throughout his time on earth. He ate with all kinds of folks: slimy tax collectors (Mark 2:15), ‘skanky’ prostitutes, obnoxiously religious phonies (Luke 7:36-50), and poor folk. He took a lot of flack for this. But he also knew that eating with someone expressed deep love.
This fall, we are working to improve this sacred practice. We are working against the impersonality of a cafeteria style-food line. Instead, we are making practical changes to spur authentic relational building events. We will sit in single tables throughout the building. Each table will have a trained adult volunteer. We will train a team of student leaders and adult volunteers to deliver and serve tables of students so that they can remain seated. Often, we will strategically seat students. And we will provide activities during dinner to propel conversations and incite good times. It sounds great in theory, right? I will have to report back on how it goes.
We need people like you to pull this off. First, I invite you to join us any Monday night at 5:15 PM for the meal. We can use you to serve tables of students. We are also looking for groups, of friends or Bible studies, of sports teams or families, to provide food for a Monday night meal. There are a variety of “home run” meals that groups have brought in the past. Crock Pots, fired up in just a few homes, can generate food that feeds scores of people. Some groups get each member to bring different ingredients and then combine them together to make tacos, burritos, or baked potato bars. If you are unable to visit or sign up for a meal, I invite you to consider donating to cover the cost of a Monday night meal. It costs $250.00 for us to serve between 60-80 students on a given night. Filling this need will allow us to love and serve youth in this context throughout the school year. Please contact me if you (along with others you know) are willing to step up in any of these ways.
We are relentlessly pursing the vision of transforming a neighborhood, one transformed student at a time.
Extraordinary, God-inspired, unexplainable transformation often occurs in the most ordinary places. In our context, it happens around rectangular folding tables and over warmed plates of lasagna.
