Eating Together

Drawing on Andrew Walls’s idea of the “Ephesian moment” in world Christianity, Emmanuel Katongole notes that the coming together of different cultures into the church depends on a common table: “the expression and test of that coming together was the meal table: ‘two cultures historically separated by the meal table were not able to come together at table to share the knowledge of Christ’ . . . . Thus, the meal table – the institution that had once symbolized the ethnic and cultural division – now became the hallmark of Christian living. It is this experience that was reproduced at Antioch, Jerusalem, and other places as ‘one of the most noticeable features of life in the Jesus community,’ for ‘the followers of Jesus took every opportunity to eat together’” (189, quotations from Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History).

In short, reaching the full stature of Christ that Paul talks about “is connected to, and revealed in, the very concrete, mundane reality of ‘eating.’ It is the ‘eating together that not only confirms the ‘belonging together’ of the different cultural segments of Christ’s body, it is the also the “eating” that draws these segments into the full power (very height) of Christ’s saving power. To the extent that the ‘very height of Christ’s full stature’ is about the material, social, economic, and political possibilities of the Gospel, it is the ‘eating together’ that locates us into the Missio Dei (189).

And this leads Katongole into a critique of Western missions, especially of short-term missions: “the more groups heading to Africa on mission that I encountered the more I lamented the fact that neither the design nor the built-in expectation of going to Africa ‘to help’ offered an opportunity for American and African Christians to eat together in ways that illumined our sense of belonging together as members of the same household. Benevolence notwithstanding, African Christians and Western Christians continued to live in two separate worlds, which connected only through occasional incursions of Western ‘humanitarian assistance’” (191). 

Western Christians should visit Africa as much to learn as to help out. But even more, they should visit in order to form friendships, and express their global brotherhood at a common table.