Attendees at Hochma, a Mennonite congregation in Montreal, don’t eat before going to church on Sunday morning. They’d be too full for breakfast.
Lyne Renaud, who pastors the congregation, had always dreamed of having a café. Over the last decade, that vision developed into a meal served during worship after an opening song or two.
Potlucks and other fellowship meals are synonymous with Mennonite congregations. But Hochma and a handful of other Anabaptist faith communities go a step further, incorporating shared meals into every worship service.
“To be connected with people around the table and a meal, for me, is the best way to connect and the best way to just share the gospel, share my life and hear from others,” said Renaud of the breakfasts that grew out of the church’s ministry to the unhoused.
“Hochma” is not just a portmanteau for the impoverished neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve but also a play on the Hebrew word for practical wisdom. Renaud and her husband, Michel Monette, started the church in 2004 as a Mennonite Brethren congregation after working with church planters for five years in Paris. Since 2012 it has been part of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, with a robust ministry for people experiencing homelessness that has spun off as its own independent organization, Care Montreal.
When Hochma was using its building as a shelter overflow, it would receive bread from a local bakery to distribute as people left in the mornings. That practical connection to food continues today with hearty Sunday morning breakfasts of bacon, potatoes, sausage and eggs.
“If we want to feed them with the gospel, we need to feed them physically, because some of them do not eat or do not have enough food, and they come to the church with an empty belly,” Renaud said.
The congregation counts about 25 members, though worship services see three to four dozen participants as Hochma continues to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. People sit in groups of six to eight around tables for the service and subsequent conversation on questions from that day’s preacher or teacher.
“I worship God when I am doing things for others,” Renaud said. “It’s very hard when some person comes in the church to know them quickly, because we just meet them once a week. With the breakfast, I get to know them faster because I have 20 minutes to sit with them and talk.”
The relationships that develop around the table and during worship circle time are core aspects of Open Table Mennonite Fellowship in Goshen, Ind. The house church has gathered for about a decade at Faith House, a transitional housing ministry owned by Faith Mennonite Church.
Open Table has grown to two worship circles on Sunday mornings. The early group gathers for a light meal followed by its worship circle time, followed by coffee, biscotti and conversation shared with the later worship circle, which concludes its own worship circle time with a simple meal of bread and soup.
“I wouldn’t use the description ‘meal-based,’ ” said Pastor Karla Minter. “But table fellowship and worship was a natural connection, and we’ve always had a meal.”
Open Table’s timeline meshes with the rise of the “dinner church” movement, in which Christians have sought to reinvent church by considering the act of eating together to be worship. The approach is especially attractive to millennials and other younger Christians weary of institutions but hungry for relationships and meaning.
“For maybe the last 10 years there has been a trendy ‘dinner church’ model, and when people were talking about church planting, they were talking about dinner church,” Minter said. “To make the meal the place where people are drawn to and go from there, that is a particular experience that is happening, but that doesn’t describe Open Table.”
The meal is there, but it is not the centerpiece or reason for gathering. Jesus often gathered with others around food, providing a model for those who came together to start Open Table to explore a worship style focused on engagement.
“The meal is very simple. We don’t prepare food to be showy, and neither is the worship,” Minter said of the lay-led gatherings. “We bring what we have. It’s homemade, and we eat together. We talk about our lives. So, worship happens before we arrive, and it continues when we leave.”
With its setting within Faith House’s housing ministry, guests who may be in search of stability often join the group.
“To sit at a table where people are talking congenially with each other — not yelling, taking turns — the model for that is very ordinary but has touched people deeply on their healing journey,” Minter said. “We didn’t use that space in order to participate in the transitional housing ministry, but I think because of who Open Table is, the positivity just happens naturally. To listen to others who come, the time we spend together is very formative.”
Like the other groups, Motley Church in Lancaster, Pa., eschews a sanctuary’s rows of pews or chairs in favor of encouraging group engagement.
It doesn’t even meet in a church, presenting its weekly menu on Tuesday evenings at HUB450, a community center that houses offices for Eastern Mennonite Missions and LMC, the Lancaster-based Anabaptist denomination.
Motley Pastor Robert Brody said the church has been meeting for about a year as a “new expression” of New Danville Mennonite Church, where he is a full-time pastor.
“We want to plant other expressions of church throughout the community, because one size does not fit all,” he said. “A number of years back, I had a number of young adults come to me — not churchgoers. They said, ‘We want to learn about God, but church is creepy.’ So, we originally met in bars and restaurants. It evolved. It was a transient group.”
The dinner church approach is evident on the menu received by the 30 or so attenders Motley Church currently averages. Appetizer questions get people talking before the main course, which is the passage of scripture for that evening’s gathering.
“I’ll read that passage, I might give a short, five-minute talk,” Brody said. “Then we’ll have food for thought: How did that message hit you? And then the take-home box, a verse to memorize that week or a challenge for when you get home.
“In all of that, it’s not me standing and giving a lecture. It’s more conversational.”
Brody is recently retired from overseeing an LMC district as bishop and is interested in working with traditional churches that might be struggling and searching for new strategies. New Danville was interested in offering something to people who might work on Sundays or just not want to spend that morning in a church building.
“We’ve found neither church can do everything,” Brody said of Motley and New Danville. “The menu mentions what’s happening at New Danville — and vice versa, Motley does a format that doesn’t work for New Danville on Sunday morning. It’s a very symbiotic expression that works for both.”
In creating points of entry to new relationships, great things can happen. In the last year, Hochma took its breakfast outdoors to its Montreal sidewalk and offered coffee when the weather was nice to invite people in. That led to a man encountering God in a profound way.
“He said, ‘I never met a welcome like that,’ ” Renaud recalled. “God touched him, and he stopped taking drugs and alcohol. He was baptized in September. It was amazing.
“They come from a poor world in so many ways, not just in money and food but in relationships. He was able to talk with someone in the breakfast and make connections, and during the discussion he could ask questions and clarification, and for him that was amazing.”
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