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Across the United States, churches are shutting down in rapid numbers, and more Americans are losing interest in attending church services on Sundays, according to Lifeway Research and the Survey Center on American Life. A ministry called Dinner Church Collective is working to change the trend.
Dinner Church Collective, a subset of Fresh Expressions, is a nationwide community of mealtime missionaries spreading the word about a simple and effective approach to starting new forms of church, according to their website. The Collective describes themselves as a community rediscovering a table-centric church and innovating together, and they are made up of several independent dinner churches operating in various parts of the country.
What is a dinner church?
Verlon Fosner was a pastor at an almost century-old church in the heart of Seattle. The church was largely stable and had committed staff, but in the mid-2000s, it began to decline, Fosner said.
Month after month, the church did so poorly that Fosner said he and his wife, Melodee Fosner, needed urgent measures to reverse the decreasing numbers of the congregation.
“We worked really hard, entrenched best practices as a church and had a really committed and talented staff who helped me in pastoring the church. So, it did not make sense why we were on a reverse,” Fosner said in a Zoom interview.
After Fosner and his wife desperately prayed, studied and asked the Holy Spirit for directions, Fosner said they realized the circular population, nonbelievers and the unchurched in the community were very interested in Jesus but not really interested in the institutional aspect of the church.
“They wanted to dialogue and talk things through with regard to spiritual things,” Fosner said.
So, Fosner and his wife started experimenting with new forms of church. After a few mistakes, he said they arrived at a simple and effective practice: dinner church — a practice Jesus lived out with his disciples.
“When we looked at that [the new model of Sunday services] and saw that the last time the Church was doing really well with circular people, they were eating around feasting tables, and they were preaching the Jesus stories,” Fosner said.
So, they decided to replicate that. Stories about Jesus come with tremendous dialogue, and the circular people in the community are fascinated by these stories, Fosner said.
“We realized we needed to go back to that simplicity,” Fosner said. “There is a cultural and spiritual language that is associated with Jesus stories that keeps people glued.”
In July 2007, Fosner said he established the first dinner church in Seattle on the simple principles of compassion, a meal and a message.
In a dinner church setting, tables with food are set. Soft music plays. Christians and non-Christians have dinner and chat. Smiles are shared. Jesus stories are told. Questions are asked. Burdens are shared. Short prayers are said. Yokes are broken. Friendships are built. A community is united.
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Imparts of dinner church on the Body of Christ
“When we opened our first center in 2007 in our own building, we were quite frankly shocked,” Fosner said. “We were really amazed at the number of people who were willing to come to dinner service but not willing to come to the Sunday service.”
Stories about Jesus are unique, and the way Dinner Church presents them makes them more attractive to people, Fosner said.
“I could not explain it. There was just something about the Jesus table that started bringing all kinds of isolated folks who would not feel welcomed in our family-based worship gathering.”
Fosner said he explained to the guests they did not call their gatherings a church but a community dinner, and they would be telling short scriptural stories about Jesus and offering a prayer at the end for those who wanted to stay.
“We thought they’d leave, but they did not. They ate, and they stayed,” Fosner said.
Over the next few months and years, the dinner church spread across Seattle and into the United States. Now, there are 14 dinner churches operating in Seattle and nearly a thousand more nationwide.
Fosner said his team has their eyes on doubling the number of dinner churches in Seattle by the end of 2025.
With the dinner church model, they did not work as hard as they did in the past and did not spend as much money either, Fosner said. And yet, people poured in.
“It is really a God thing,” Fosner said.
The dinner church model has opened up the best forms of discipleship and evangelism, which is getting difficult for the traditional church to pursue, Fosner said. The dinner model has helped the Church integrate into neighborhoods and become the heartbeat of those communities.
The dinner church model has a tremendous capacity to grow the Church and the congregation the Lord has given His people in the likeness of Christ, Fosner said.
Week by week, dinner church has had a great influence on people’s lives by bringing Christ-centered conversations back and reviving discipleship, Fosner said. Christians who were docile in faith have become very active men and women of God.
The dinner church model has helped believers go from a theoretical faith to accomplishing the work of Christ, and their lives begin to look like that of Jesus instead of just studying Him all the time, Fosner said.
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Propagating the Gospel via Dinner Church
While dinner church has a structure consisting of sharing stories about Jesus and a meal, it is still flexible and any church can adopt it, Jon Davis, the operations coordinator and trainer at Fresh Expressions, said in a Zoom interview.
Davis’ branch of Dinner Church holds a dinner service at their church property, while Verlon’s would instead use a community center in "sore neighborhoods," areas where residents are not making enough progress, Davis said.
In the Bible, many teachings and miracles happened at meals and around food, Davis wrote in an article for Fresh Expressions. For example, he mentions the feeding of 5000, dinners at Simon’s, Zacchaeus’, Matthew’s home, resurrection appearances and the establishment of the Lord’s Supper.
“All of these and more were principal practices and how Jesus connected with people,” Davis wrote. “Meals were a regular pattern in Jesus’ ministry for lost people getting found, broken people being restored and sick and wounded people getting healed. Jesus models for us the table as a central location for the mission of the church to be fulfilled.”
Fresh Expressions helps with resources for anyone who wants to start a dinner church, Davis said. Fresh Expressions has resources and Dinner Church Collective has a community ready to help, so those who want to start a dinner church are not alone.
On Fresh Expressions’ website, there is a training section with many resources, including Dinner Church School of Leadership, which the website describes as “seminary training for missional leaders recovering the ancient practice of gathering church around the table.”
Dinner church is not new, Fosner said. It's not an innovation but a recovery project aiming to do church the way Jesus Himself did church.
Dinner church should be a part of the wider family of God in an ongoing way, because there are large pockets of people who are in need of a Jesus table in order to experience Jesus, Fosner said.
“If we are going to do a church for them, then we need to understand that Jesus' table is intended to be used for them,” Fosner said.
The Church must innovate to take the Gospel to communities in need of the good news, Davis said.
“What has brought the church to where it is today will carry it no further,” Davis said. “We have to adapt to the uncharted territory of the 21st century. We have to adapt to the changed world. The mission has to change its tactics. We see the adaptations throughout the Scriptures.”
Justice Nwafor is a Nigerian journalist. His work has been published by several outlets, including HumAngle, Earth Journalism Network, Reuters and the BBC. In August 2023, his work was recognized as the best in the Business and Environment category at the Sanlam Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism in South Africa.
