Why Do We Worship at Table?

When Christ-followers first began to meet in the first century, they did so at lively dinner parties. Gathered around a meal, they shared stories, made meaning, prayed, sang together, and taught one another from the Torah (the Hebrew scriptures) as well as Jesus’ life and teachings. If the party was in a wealthy person’s home, they would provide the feast. If not, the group would meet in a rented “upper room” and share potluck style.

 

It was typical of dinner parties across the Roman Empire to break bread at the beginning of the meal, so it might be shared, and to enjoy wine at the end of the meal during symposium, a time of teaching and discussion. However, Christians began to infuse new meaning and symbolism into their meals together. They began to understand that at these meals, their hunger was fed, not just with bread, but the living bread of Jesus himself. Likewise, that their thirst was quenched, not just with wine, but with the new covenant of grace. They discovered that somehow through these meals they were knit into a beloved community of God’s people and became the body of Christ in their time and place.

 

They also began to depart from other Roman dinner parties in one important way: inclusivity. Where other dinner parties could be exclusive, welcoming only the wealthy or powerful elite, Christians began to welcome a much wider group of people, including slaves, servants, and foreigners. Where Roman parties would observe a strict hierarchy in their seating chart, giving positions of honor to the wealthiest and most powerful, Christians began to embrace a more open and egalitarian seating arrangement. They even invited women to stay and be part of the symposium time after dinner, where women were not traditionally welcome.

 

To say that Christians were perfectly inclusive and egalitarian would be an overstatement. They were a work in progress. The apostle Paul writes letters to several dinner churches, reminding them of their call in Christ to be different from the other Roman dinners: to share with each other — to save food for the working class, who would arrive to the feast after everyone else — to not be insular and feed only themselves, but to share their food with the wider community. Since the empire used dinner parties to reinforce the power structures and social strata, many saw the inclusivity of the early church as threatening to the empire, and that is part of what led to their persecution.