Potluck Dinners

After being at GFC for a number of years, I wanted to find a way for the church to feel more togetherness, and potluck dinners seemed like an obvious strategy. After all, when we were in St. Louis, the church there had a potluck every single Sunday, and it turned out to be an incredible tool for church growth—so much so that the local newspaper made a big deal of it when they profiled the church.

The GFC potluck turned out to be the most archetypically GFC thing we had ever done. And it was a disaster.

My potluck renaissance wasn't the first time GFC had tried to eat together. After all, everyone on the Farm participated in Farm Dinners, but those were all prepared by one household (which really means they were prepared by one woman), and shared with the single people who lived on the Farm. But those weren't dinners for the church as a group. And there had been occasional church dinner events, but the normal strategy was for each family to stake out their territory at their table, so the "together" part was about as together as eating with your family at a restaurant in a strange city. This "family table" strategy meant that I ended up sitting alone on a piano bench to eat alone at one church meal because I wasn't in anyone's family.

I wanted to see something better, so I approached one of the elders with the idea. The response was predictable. Pretty much every ministry idea got the same response: "If you want to do that, go ahead. We're not going to oppose you, but we're not going to support you either." And as usual, there was no money available to help with the idea.

That was enough for me, so I went ahead, set a date, and made announcements several Sundays in a row.

People loved the idea. They all showed up. I wasn't surprised that they all staked their claims to "family tables," and I had expected to pay for paper plates, coffee, and lemonade, so that part wasn't much of a surprise either. The part that surprised me was how few people brought any food. Those who did bring food didn't bring very much: a family of four might bring one small dish of green beans. Back in St. Louis, we never had problems with food variety or with volume, but apparently in Ohio, "potluck dinner" meant "free meal."

I tried again the next month. This time, I included the exhortation to please bring some food. I remember saying that you should bring enough food to satisfy your family plus a visitor or two. It was a bit better this time, but not by much. One of the elders saw what was going on, though, and raced out to Kentucky Fried to supplement the paltry offerings.

Running out of food at the church potluck was pretty typical in those first few attempts, so it wasn't unusual for the last few people in line to go out to Taco Bell and bring their food back. I did that a couple of times, reaping the ire of church leaders.

For a couple more months, I made a point of buying two or three large restaurant-size pans of lasagne at Gordon Foods; after that I told the elders that I was about done with the experiment. It was expensive, and I never could recruit people to help clean up either, so it was all my project. They did lend some organizing assistance by making the announcements and assigning menu items: depending on your place in the alphabet, you would bring a main dish AND a salad or a main dish AND a dessert. That got me out of the kitchen, but the whole thing was just a lot of trouble, and we never had enough food, so finally we just gave up because eating a buffet meal with your family in a church building wasn't that much of an improvement over eating a meal with your family at home.

The coffee hour aftermath

The "eating together as an evangelistic strategy" idea did take root among the elders, though, so they decided it would be good to have a coffee hour after church, but in typical GFC fashion, they bollixed the whole thing up. The menu was coffee or tea plus cookies, offered at the back of the main room after worship. So far, so good. But because it was an evangelistic strategy and because (as usual) there was very little money, there was a general announcement that the coffee was ONLY for visitors. Not for regular members. That was really awkward, because (when the scheme worked as planned) the only people with coffee and cookies were newcomers. The rest of us had hustled out the door as usual. It took several months for everyone to figure out just how uncomfortable that made the newcomers and how the regular members felt at being left out.

—Curt Allen