Welcome meant historically a person whose coming is pleasing, bringing pleasure. One common pleasure that manifests welcome is eating. Eating well isn’t just about nutrition, it is about eating together.
Warm bread with a friend. A stranger that reaches out with cold water on a hot day. A warm drink with friends after a day in the snow. Pleasurable connections between people in the physical world often start with food or drink, and such connections are likely to be maintained in spite of later challenge. In rural or desert settings where the environment is a common hardship, hospitality is expected and treasured.
When Roger Williams came into an indigenous Algonquian settlement, hospitality from strangers is what enabled him to survive. In the modern world sometimes teams consist of geographically distant people that can do all that seems formally needed online. Yet if we are wise, we initially and periodically fly them to one place and encourage them to share meals in small groups and as a team, knowing that the levels of communication possible face-to-face are deeper and more sustainable than pure online relationships.
If that is true for complex task-oriented relationships, how much more it is likely true for personal, emotion-laden, or spiritual relationships. Jesus taught us to pray two or three together. He of course did not specify if that meant in person, and there was no such thing as online in his day, but such prayer often seems more powerful when people are connected in person vs. online.
Some Christians are famous for their love of food, in the spirit of what they call fellowship — time spent strengthening relationships. Many types of Christians have this proclivity, but the Baptists have three teachings that interact to cause them to especially value connections between people:
- Focus on individual conscience.
- A believe that any one conscience is flawed, and needs other Christians around to help hone the conscience, as iron sharpens iron.
- A commission to make disciples of Christ.
Here is a food pyramid that reflects types of fellowship experiences a healthy Baptist lifestyle might encounter by frequency.
The benefits of food fellowship can be entirely negated if people eat while staring at a screen. That type of eating is called eating alone, even if others are present. The point, religious or secular, is NOT the food. It is the interaction between people with all five senses.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
Photo is by Dan Gold on Unsplash.com.
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