Every Friday I buy some halal meat to go with our pizzas, since we get a number of Muslim young people from our neighbourhood coming for an action movie and to cook their own pizza in our oven. I actually didn’t buy any this week, since we had so many other friends coming. We had lots of kids, South Africans,good friends, and neighbour kids we haven’t seen before, and Amerca’s best pastor, Rev. Paul Jackson of Glenwood Community Church who blessed the food.
Pizza party is not church for us, but it is one of the weekly loops in our lives that allows others to enter our life of celebration. We are dependent on others to throw different kinds of parties to allow different parts of kingdom living to find expression. It is also an element of regularity for our family and our transient lifestyle. We have pizza every Friday, even when traveling. We got the idea from an International Teams guy (Tim Barnes) in Illinois who eats pizza and watches a football game each week wtih his family and friends. I have heard that a lot of people do this on a regular basis.
PREDICTION:
I believe that FOOD and cooking are as essential to emerging/organic church than what music was to contemporary/seeker church. I also predict that in the next few years, as emerging churches stop emerging and settle down into their calling, that we will see a resurrection of the church cookery books in the tradition of the Mennonite and Amish churches. Although these will be web based instead of print.
I have discovered that one of the secrets of a good party is keeping people out, but then sometimes that is really hard to do. So we just let people in and let the house fill up.
The movie (Timeline) was really lame, but the ladies went for a walk and a prayer in the park while the men looked after the thousands of children (my wife counted 19 kids that were in our house). Luckily we have a monstrous backyard, comprising about 10 feet X 10 feet of prime London real estate.
The Pizza was great. One of those times when all the ingredients were just right and you knew the pizza would be good by the smell of the dough in the kitchen. But there was no halal meat, so Salman went back home and came over with more ingredients for his pizza.
Andrew,
these kinds of gatherings are why we felt the Lord lead us to build this
http://weblogs.oxegen.us/watercarriers/archive/2004/05/28/2136.aspx#FeedBack
Our first gathering is here
http://watercarriers.fotopages.com/
On the June 1 entry
Peace
Bring it on!
Tall Skinny Kiwi predicts: I believe that FOOD and cooking are as essential to emerging/organic church than what music was…
Andrew, I don’t know who to be more jealous of — you getting to spend time with Paul, or Paul getting to spend time with you guys. I wish Melissa and Ezra and I could be there to visit both of you! 🙂
Jed
get your butt over here someday, like you said you would. And pass on greetings to all in Vancouver WA. I heard you pulled out of Fuller Seminary because of expenses – same reason i had to pull out of Fuller. This makes us brothers in poverty.
Everyone, this is Jed Brewster who married Melissa, a very cool girl in the church we were pastoring with Paul Jackson.
Jeds parents are famous. They revolutionized the learning of foreign cultures and languages with a method called LAMP. They have enabled people to tell their story, and listen well to other stories, in cross cultural contexts around the world. Jed’s mum is Betty Sue Brewster who still teaches cross-cultural storytelling.
Your right about food.
If you are in our neighborhood on a Sunday night you’ll nearly always find friends and pancakes at the Glock’s house.
This Tuesday we’re having a bar-b-que party…
Vive good food for the Kingdom.
i think an emergent web-based cookbook is a great idea! and you are right – timeline stunk.
If only you knew how often we do talk about trying to get our butts over there like we said we would — it will still happen, I promise.
Contrary to what some would say, being “poverty brothers” ain’t all that bad . . .
Can we live without food?
I have thought about the subject of spiritualuty and food and food’s importance in Church life for years — not necessarily related to the “emerging/organic” church life, but to the life of the Church as a whole. There’s something very spiritual in brea…
wow – i was just blogging about this too…
we’ve just decided as a community to do a one month series on the spirituality of food.
we’ve also been toying with the idea of a cookbook or cookblog of some kind as we’re such foodies!
Some in our group are probably as obsessed with food as they are with Jesus! (maybe not quite).
I think you’re spot on with your prediction.
Thanks for the invite-shame I couldn’t make it. Ended up at a pub in Islington watching a group at the King’s Head Pub called End of Culture. Pretty good.
andrew,
don’t think i’m missing the point. i dig your parties and am thinking of starting to thow them myself – thursdays though. our church is buying an lcd projector, so that should make it more fun :-).
did not know what halal meat was, so i checked it out here >
it seems that many muslims missunderstand the term…
Ok ive done it, ive jumped on the bandwagon
http://emergentcookbook.blogspot.com
Bets regards