This summer we are launching dessert church which is super awesome. Combining my love of sweets with my love of God makes me wonder why we didn’t do this earlier. In reality this is another adaptation in the 8 year history of Sellwood Faith Community. July marks the start of year 9 and the transition from online dinner church to in person dessert church. We’ve been meeting at 5:30 during the pandemic, with some of us eating dinner while we gather by zoom to reflect on scripture, share how it is with our souls, pray together, and bless one another. It has been a good enough way to gather given a deadly pandemic. Now however we are ready to return to in person gatherings, but the intimate nature of dinner, where we each bring food to share around the table, is still not ideal given the raging infection among unvaccinated folks and the deadly potential of the delta variant.
Our community discussed our options for in person gatherings at the end of one of our recent online worship celebrations. We decided to meet outside in the back yard of the SFC house so we could still share food together, but that rather than have each family bring all their food we’d just do dessert. SFC will provided individually wrapped ice cream bars and popsicles, and folks are welcome to bring another dessert for their own household if they prefer. We won’t have tables out, but rather clusters of chairs so each household can sit at a distance from others, but still close enough to visit and connect. We moved the time back a little bit so that folks can actually eat dinner if they want ahead of the gathering.
As a leader of this community it is so wonderful to have these sorts of adaptations bubble up from the wisdom of the collective, gathered body. Dessert church is not what I would have come up with on my own, but together, talking through possibilities and focusing on hospitality, we arrived at a beautiful new expression of our community.
In the 8 years I have been a new start pastor this has been the best piece of the work, and something that has been part of our culture at Trinity as well. We are better together, the holy spirit moves most freely in places of shared decision making, and God continually surprises and blesses as we adapt and listen.
This summer on Sunday nights you will find us enjoying the sweetness of the life of faith together.
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