Setting the Table: When Dinner Church Filled Rooms with the Unchurched

Setting the Table: When Dinner Church Filled Rooms with the Unchurched

Dr. Verlon Fosner's Seattle congregation was declining 14% every year despite doing everything right—improved worship, new programs, upgraded tech. So Verlon stopped trying to fix the decline and started asking a different question: Where is God already at work among people who will never walk through our church doors? His answer transformed his understanding of missional church. In 2008, his team opened their first dinner church in a struggling neighborhood with just tables, food, and Jesus stories. The room immediately filled with never-been-churched people who'd never wanted anything to do with traditional church.

In this conversation, Verlon shares how dinner church creates a fundamentally different entry point for faith by recovering the ancient practice of gathering around Jesus' table. He explains why inviting someone to dinner is different than inviting them to Sunday worship, how the first apostles focused on Jesus stories rather than systematic theology, and what happens when tables replace classrooms as the primary environment for discipleship. If your church is declining and you're exhausted from trying to fix it, this conversation offers a different way forward for missional church in a post-Christian context.

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A Solo Reflection on Prayer, Longing, and an Australian Movie from the 90s

A Solo Reflection on Prayer, Longing, and an Australian Movie from the 90s

This week's episode breaks from the usual format. Pivot producer Joey Goodall steps in for a solo reflection on what prayer practices are actually for, and what happens when we lose sight of that. He ...

3 Sep 7min

Leadership for a Diverse Church

Leadership for a Diverse Church

Eastminster Church has been in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood since 1856, and for most of that history it worshiped and looked like a fairly typical Presbyterian congregation. Aaron Teter, the...

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What Sunday Morning Teaches People About Monday

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20 Aug 28min

Ministry That Doesn't Rush Toward Results

Ministry That Doesn't Rush Toward Results

For twenty years, Johnny Sertin has practiced a kind of place-based ministry built on staying put. He and four other families started the Earlsfield Friary in southwest London, committing to live with...

13 Aug 39min

Augustine Was a Pastor First

Augustine Was a Pastor First

For most of his afterlife in the Christian imagination, Augustine has been a theologian first, a philosopher second, and everything else a distant third. What tends to get lost is that he spent nearly...

6 Aug 33min

A Different Kind of Strength

A Different Kind of Strength

Second Corinthians is one of the strangest letters in the New Testament: a leader defending himself, a community in open doubt, and in the middle of it, some of Paul's clearest writing on power in wea...

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The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You

The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You

"The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists." That's how Dr. Scott Cormode opens his book, and it's the starting point for this conversation about Christian leadership wi...

23 Juli 37min

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The Church With No Budget, No Staff, and No Sunday Service

Ten years ago, JR and Amy Rozko planted a two-hundred-year-old congregation in Canton, Ohio, only to discover that what their city needed wasn't another program but a rule of life: a shared rhythm of ...

16 Juli 36min

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