As you guys know, I generally keep the subject matter on my blog to food and food alone. More specifically recipes. I consider food to be a safe subject to write about. While recipes are good and the photos aren’t half bad I know it is lacking. I rarely give you a relatable story element or any real look into my life. Essentially all the wrong things to do with a blog! Minus the pictures thing… I can give you pictures. 🙂

Will and I have ventured into something that I think is worth sharing about. We have recently started hosting a weekly event that fuses both food and our faith together. It is called “Dinner & Discussion” (D&D for short) where we do exactly that; gather for a meal together and then proceed into a time of discussion. The group is limited to the number of seats we have at our dinner table which is a tight 10. The book we chose to take the group through is Restless by Jennie Allen. D&D is based off of Acts 2:42 which was directly inspired from the If:Table model. What you end up with is a small group Bible study meets dinner party. It’s pretty awesome. And in the process we get to partake in the age-old tradition of eating a meal together and allow room for community, connection and fellowship to take place through the evening. Something we are greatly lacking these days.

We broke Restless down into 10 weeks, choosing to go through the book rather than the Bible study version. This means there will be 10 menus… 10 complete sit down dinners. Yes, it is a whole lot of work that takes a ton of planning, shopping, and preparing. It is certainly stretching and challenging me in lots of different areas. And if I am honest, I needed these areas to be stirred up. It has been an incredible exploration into what it means to serve God by serving others with the skills He has gifted me with. It is quite humbling to see others blessed by giving them something that most don’t get these days, both a home cooked meal as well as a safe space for open honest discussion.

Dinner & Discussion is most certainly an experiment. It is not by any means a perfect model to follow. In fact I have quickly realized it doesn’t scale too well. And that is okay. We had to try something and this is what we came up with. Maybe a more communal approach would be better and it should be done potluck style. Or possibly find a group of people who are willing to rotate hosting. Or maybe it is best to order pizza, catch up on life, and then get down into the discussion. Or X number of weeks is too many, maybe try the once a month, If:Table model. All I know is that both Will and I felt God calling us to step out , explore, to learn more about group dynamics, how to lead better, and most importantly how to serve people with what God has given us.

So in effort to share the process, I plan on doing a series of posts following each week of D&D. The planning, the preparing, lessons learned, the menus, recipe links and if I remember to take them, pictures.

Dinner & Discussion, Week 1
Dinner & Discussion, Week 2
Dinner & Discussion, Week 3
Dinner & Discussion, Week 4
Dinner & Discussion, Week 5
Dinner & Discussion, Week 6
Dinner & Discussion, Week 7
Dinner & Discussion, Week 8
Dinner & Discussion, Week 9
Dinner & Discussion, week 10