It's time to Pivot! In episode seven of season four, our hosts Dr. Dee stokes and Dwight Zscheile welcome this weeks special guest, Church Planter and Co-Lead Pastor of North City Church, JD Larson.

In todays episode, we explore a few questions around JD and his work.

How do dinner church gatherings work? What happens?

What theological commitments underlie dinner church?

What are you learning? What are some challenges and opportunities you’re facing?

Special Guest: JD Larson.

JD Larson: Like there's nothing more discipleship focused than having to contextualize your relationship with Jesus and your faith in a conversation with a stranger. So it's not like mission is separate from discipleship. It's actually something that's been lacking in the church for many years. Is mission integrated with discipleship?

Dwight Zscheile: Welcome to Pivot. I'm Dwight Zscheile from Luther Seminary.

Dee Stokes: And I'm Dr. Dee Back again for another episode of Pivot Podcast.

Dwight Zscheile: In this episode, we want to focus on a local church that is innovating within a particular form of fresh expression called Dinner Church. And we have with us a pastor who has a lot to share about that. Would you introduce our guest for today?

Dee Stokes: I'd love to. Thank you, Dwight. We have a very special guest today, and he's special to me because he is one of our Seeds alums, and that's JD Larson. He and his wife, co pastor North City Church in North Minneapolis. He is co vocational, of course. He's an entrepreneur and he is also the coordinator of community development for the Dinner Church Collective. JD We are so excited to have you here today. Thank you for joining us.

JD Larson: Yeah, this is just great. I'm happy to be here.

Dee Stokes: So we want to talk about dinner church. What the heck is that like? I mean, I mean, can you explain what dinner church is? I mean, what is it?

JD Larson: Yeah, it is what it sounds like. And not all at the same time. I feel like there is some some intrigue, definitely, and some misunderstanding, too. So the way I describe it to maybe a Christian neighbor of mine is like we, our church gathers around tables and a big community meal and we do church in the midst of a big community meal. How I describe it to a neighbor who's maybe not a Christian or hasn't been to church for a while, is: it's a big community dinner. All are welcome. There is live music, good food, good conversation, a story about Jesus and some good discussion about life. So that's how I describe it. What it is, is basically we talk about it as kind of a recovery project of what we imagine would be similar to an agape feast in New Testament times/ early church where they gathered around food and meals and there was great socioeconomic diversity. Everyone was welcome around the table. And so that's from different angles. I can I can go into detail about what it's actually like, but it's essentially a a community meal open to the neighborhood that is hosted by our church. And I think what it's not is a fellowship meal in like a church basement with just Christians after a service. It's not that. It's not a just community, a free community meal that's like connected to a food shelf or something like that that would be handing out like clearly meeting the need of of someone who's looking for a meal that evening. It's dinner and it's church. You know, it's it's both of those things. It's it's a church expression centered around a community meal.

Dee Stokes: Can you tell us a little bit about your church specifically? Like is there something that maybe is a little bit different that you all do than other churches might do?

JD Larson: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is we got a load of kids. So on any given dinner church Sunday, like 40% of the people in the room are under 18. So it's quite rambunctious, chaotic and beautiful all at the same time. So it's got a lot of energy. And so one thing we do that might be different than other dinner churches is we have kind of a specific intention towards little ones and we have kids programming that they actually can register for or sign up for if they're new or if they're a regular, they just go and participate in much like you would at a Sunday morning church where they have their kids time, but they eat with us around the table as they talk with us. And then at some point they go and have kids programming while we're doing other things at dinner church. So that's unique to us, but I'm not sure there's much else that's unique outside of other dinner churches and how they do things.

Dwight Zscheile: So tell us a bit more of the history of your church and how did it evolve to become focused on dinner church?

JD Larson: So North City Church that I co-pastor with my wife, Christian Ann started in fall of 2019 as what I would call like a typical church plant, typical urban church plant that was focused on Sunday morning expressions around sermons, contemporary worship, inviting the neighborhood to maybe a different sort of church experience. But it was still the mold of church as we knew it. But there was a really strong DNA for table like we were really taking as a core team, a launch team with how much Jesus ate with people in his life. And so initially we were trying to do that outside of our primary gathering, where we would encourage people as an expression of mission to eat with their neighbors, to host neighborhood parties. We had potlucks on the Parkway. Parkway is a really prominent part of our neighborhood, and those were the most exciting parts of our young church plant. And we even started experimenting with something we call Brunch church or table Church Sunday, where Sunday morning we would do a potluck brunch and just tell stories from our lives and in Jesus' life. And that felt really good. And we started to wonder like, can this be more a part of our story, that expression. And then the pandemic came seven months into that. So we experienced some pretty typical growth that church plants do. And then everything changed. Everything kind of in Minneapolis in particular. It was quite a two years after that point of trying to survive, trying to respond to what was going on in our world, in our city. But once some of that started to settle and we tried to like think about how we had survived and we started to think about how we would quote unquote, relaunch after that, because we had been basically putting sermons and worship out digitally as church and trying to connect in unique ways. We felt that we had like one more hand to play, if you will, one more thing to try and through some long discernment, we just said, let's try this thing called Dinner Church. Let's try to do what we were doing every fifth Sunday with Table Church Sunday, but do it on a Sunday evening, maybe in a community park. And let's try to do that more, because that had the most energy for us pre-pandemic and we said we were going to do that and we didn't really know what that looked like. So we were building the plane as it was taking off, found some resources online, some from the the group that I'm a part of now, fresh expressions that were really helpful. And we flew out to a group that was doing dinner church out in Seattle and learned a lot from them. And the first Sunday we did it in the summer of 2021, there was like 25 people there and 16 of them were new people from our neighborhood. So we were like, "Whoa, this is this. There's something to this." The next Sunday there was 50. The next Sunday there were 75. By the end of the summer, we consistently had 90 folks gathering together around a community meal what would become dinner church. So the fall of 2021, we made a pivot to making that our main gathering as a church.

Dee Stokes: Did you find that you had more people then than you had in your original church plant coming to dinner at that point?

JD Larson: Yeah, we've settled back into the same number of people we were pre-pandemic, but in a different way with different people. I would say. I thought in reflection, on the first seven months of the church, we were pretty good at gathering Christians who were looking for a new church. We weren't particularly good at engaging with neighbors who weren't interested in church or who hadn't been to church in a long time. And that dynamic has dramatically shifted with who we've built relationships with and and what's happened since we turned to becoming a dinner church.

Dee Stokes: Sure. I've sat in dinner church collective meetings and you always start with the theological underpinnings of dinner church. Share that with our audience. What, is this theological?

JD Larson: Yeah, it's certainly biblical and and theological. I'll just speak to my own biblical and theological formations, maybe not necessarily how the dinner church collective would present it, but here's how it was for me and hopefully that's okay. I think our people had a dissatisfaction with talking a lot about Jesus, but not actually trying the things Jesus tried. And so Dinner Church came out of a place of our community, our young church plant, looking for some new expression of church and looking at Jesus's life and saying, Why don't we just try more things Jesus did. And you can't look at Jesus's life and not see how many things happen around a table, how many times he eats with people and you can't not look at the early church and and just note how meals together were a foundation of their gathering. So there's certainly tons of biblical precedent for this form of church. And that was really compelling to us because we were just looking for an expression of church that could embody new ways of just practicing Jesus' life. Our mission statement is to love our neighbors in the way of Jesus. Theologically, I think I have encountered or maybe reached a depth in my own relationship with God in participating in a dinner church and engaging as a leader, in a dinner church. And how I explain it is when we became a church plant, we paid a local design firm to make a fancy logo for us. And it was just kind of trendy and cool. And if you look on our website, what it is, is it's a square with four arrows around it that represents a table. And each of those arrows represent just at the time was kind of trendy and cool. And there's a gold arrow for the part of the Minneapolis that we're a part of and we're like, "Oh, we care about the table. Let's put it on our logo." We had no idea what that fully meant. And now when I look at a logo, I see what I hope people experience every time they participate in a dinner church and in our context. And that is the convergence of four different presences, one being our authentic selves. And I think it's impossible to be anonymous. At a dinner church you walk in and eating around a table is highly relational. You have to bring yourself as much as you're comfortable bringing, but it's a space of authenticity and vulnerability. Also around that table, another chair would be your brothers and sisters in Christ. Like you can't have a solo experience with God. You rely on them, you're on mission with them. And then of course, the essential presence of Jesus at that table. Like the difference between just a neighborhood dinner and a dinner church is it's explicitly a Jesus table. We're trying to set the same sort of tables that Jesus set in his own life in the early church set, and that's where he chose to instead of in the temple at the table, build bridges, forgive folks, teach, engage relationally in the actual effects of people's lives and people that experience Jesus around the table. And we do two the last chair and this is where the theology has really developed for me is the essential place for the stranger in the Christian gathering. For us, that last chair represents our neighbor, the stranger who is either estranged from God or estranged from relationship. And I can't tell you how important it is to have the presence of someone who is seeking had the presence of someone who is wondering about God, who thinks differently than you do, to be there at the table with you. And when God's presence is thick in the room, when we bring out our authentic selves, when we're there with the beloved community and we engage and create space for a welcoming space for the stranger, there's something deeply, profoundly theological that happens. There's something deeply transformational that happens in the confluence of that of that reality.

Dwight Zscheile: So for some of our listeners who may have never been to Dinner Church, give us a even more kind of detailed picture of what actually happens. So you gather, where do you gather, who does what? What happens? What does it look like?

JD Larson: Yeah, let's go there for sure. So you might find our information on on Google or something like that or drive by a sign on, in our instance, it's Weber Parkway in Minneapolis that says: Community dinner, free and for everyone at 5 p.m.. So maybe it sparks your interest and you're curious and maybe you're either hungry for food or hungry for community. You pull into our parking lot and much like any other church in a non church location, it's in a community center. So it's kind of this third space, not a sacred like church building. And you come in and you're greeted like you would be at any other church, like, Hey, how's it going? And there's some instruction to go sit down, find it, find a seat, share something you're grateful for. So you walk in, there's music playing. It kind of feels like almost, uh, like a community party or something like that. Like a wedding reception where you walk in. It's kind of informal. There's small talk, there's snacks, there's drinks. You walk in and you find a reasonably friendly looking stranger to share what you're grateful for or just make small talk. Then someone comes up on the microphone an emcee and usually it's me, my wife, someone else that says, Hey, we're North City Church, We host this community dinner. We do this because our mission is to love our neighbors in the way of Jesus. And he loved people by eating with them. So that's why we host this community dinner. We hope you enjoy it. Let's pray for the food and eat. You can smell good food. It's really important for us to have good food and we have some great food. And you go up to the line, you grab food, you're served food, kind of not quite buffet style, but you're greeted by warm faces and a warm main dish and dessert. And it's it's a very generous meal. You sit down and you talk with these reasonably friendly strangers. Some of them might be your friends if you've come a couple of times, but the meal is the main dish, if you will. Like we believe in what I just described, that moment where those presences are converging around the table and hopefully you experience laughter, hopefully you experience authenticity. Hopefully you experience being listened to. It's amazing how much we don't have spaces to be listened to in our culture and just what happens around a community dinner table. You meet someone new who has a different story and it's a beautiful thing. And then while you're doing that, there is live like pub style or coffeeshop style music going on in the background with someone who is playing an intentional set of music that is half Christian, half quote unquote secular. But it all kind of has this theme to it. And that person is explaining why they chose the songs they chose. Just like someone in a pub or a coffee shop would be interacting with the audience. And it's very natural to just slide in and out of listening to the music and jumping back into conversation. And if it's a worship music or a hymn or something like that, sometimes people find themselves just sitting there and contemplating the lyrics to the hymn while they're eating their potato salad. You know, that happens for a good 25 minutes. The kids start getting crazy and running around the mic, comes back up and says, Hey, kids, we've got something special for you. And then transitions them to their programming. You hear a little announcements about what else is going on in this community called North City, other things they've got going on. And then we offer what we call a community time question at that point. And that's a really intentional shift where the meal is over. You might be finishing up a few more bites, but it's really clear that we've made a transition that we're going to linger after this meal and get a little bit more intentional with our conversation with each other and the community time question is usually an icebreaker question, but sometimes it's like not so icebreaker ish. Like what? What has brought you joy this week or something like that? And it just turns the conversation slightly to a more vulnerable place. And then we tell people that we're going to share a story from Jesus' life and a communicator will come up then five minutes later and just say, "hey, for the next 7 to 10, 12 minutes, we're going to share a story from Jesus' life because he's him. His story has been really meaningful to our story." And we tell a gospel story and we do it in such a way that's connected to our own story. And we don't make a lot of applications. By we I mean the communicators like these aren't sermons. We're trying to recommunicate gospel stories in everyday life, and we're trying to help people see from our own stories the difference that that story has made. So then after we tell that Jesus story, heavy narratives not preaching, we turn that question real tangibly to the people around the table and say, Hey, we want to have a discussion. If you're open to it with a few people around the table with you. And we want to ask, what's one thing that stood out to you from this story? Or what difference do you think this makes in your life? And it's not a Bible study. The point is not to make a theological like the best theological point of the discussion. We at different points have called that time actually "listening time". And we said that actually the best form of participation in the next few moments is to honor someone by listening to how they're reflecting. We give guidelines. We say, Please don't share more than two minutes so that everybody who wants to has a chance. So we put some parameters around just like healthy social discussion like that, and we give permission for people to just go right back to talking about the Twins. If they don't feel comfortable with that level of conversation and they don't want to go there. But most people do. And it's really wonderful and it's beautiful and people might even naturally flow into prayer for each other. Sometimes neighbors who are there for the first time praying for Christians who've been there from the beginning. So it's this really beautiful thing that kind of can organically happen. And then in the summertime, just close the time with a blessing. We the emcee will get up and just say, Hey, we want to bless you into your week. If you don't mind, can I just pray for us to kind of round out our time and you can hang out as much as you'd like? Parents, please go get your kids from programming because we don't want to keep them. And that's it for summertime. And sometimes it rolls into lingering conversation around the table and our team kind of tears down everything. And there's one table left because there's a really great conversation going. You know, in the wintertime, we add a few more elements that are kind of more core to our community. So we celebrate communion together and then sometimes we'll sing a worship song or a doxology in the wintertime. And I can say more about why we do that, but sometimes we add those elements in towards the end as well. And that's a dinner church experience. That's ours at least.

Dee Stokes: Sounds wonderful, JD. Hope to maybe one day come by and sneak in and experience. You mentioned something as you were talking. Share with our listeners kind of the theology of the third space. What is that? And yeah, tell us about that.

JD Larson: Yeah, thanks for noticing that. It's really important. Our table theology, our church's expression is really based on hospitality, which in its etymology is the love of stranger. And so a third space. I'm not I can't remember the sauce off the top of my head, but that's basically been defined as you have your home life as your first space. You have your your work life as your second space. And then there are these other spaces in life where you do life in a shared way with others. An example of a third space would be a coffee shop, community center, YMCA, library. This is where your life intersects with the neighbors around you. And that's a very essential component of our humanity, our life together. And for a long time, historically, the church was a third space. It's where neighborhood happened. It's not so much anymore and really not so much anymore in urban contexts, typically. And so our church wanted to be an organization that created a sacred moment in a third space, if you will. So the community center that we gather in feels more safe and accessible to neighbors who don't see the church as third space anymore, who seem like a strange from the church or don't want to walk through its doors or have baggage around church. They look at a community center and they can see themselves belonging in that space be before they ever walk in the door. And so that was really important to take that third space like a community center, that's everyone's space and say, this is a space where we can do community dinner, where we can do dinner church and create a sacred experience in that space.

Dwight Zscheile: So do you have other things you do as a church other than these dinner church gatherings or and if not, do you anticipate doing them? Or is this really the heart and soul and primary thing you do?

JD Larson: It is the heart and soul and primary thing that we do, but we do do other things. And the way that I like to describe it to folks that ask because once you get curious about dinner church, one of the natural questions that comes up is what about discipleship? Like, what about sermons? What about like congregational singing and worship? Like and. I you know, in my study of the church and experience of the church, I've noticed that churches that are healthy have strong moments of connection with God, moments of connection with each other and community and moments of mission and connection with their neighborhood in authentic ways. But I think most churches prioritize the first two and create Sunday experiences that are for connecting with God and each other and are hopeful that connection with the neighborhood and mission happen organically as an overflow of those things. We're sort of an upside down church in that way in that we've made the decision to make our primary space prioritize mission in the way that we gather ourselves, not forsaking connection with God or connection with the other. They're not exclusive. They happen there. But the primary way of gathering is mission together in a community dinner context. So what we've had to do is instead of flipping it and say we're going to do sermons and worship on Sunday morning and hope that mission happens throughout the week, we flip it and say we're doing mission and some of those things on on Sunday, and we want to equip people as disciples throughout the rest of the week. So what we do is we have men's and women's groups that function as kind of discipleship groups that are very kind of what I would say, call personal space. So that like 4 to 6 people being very open and transparent with each other's lives, kind of the nitty gritty of what it means to follow Jesus and be a disciple of Jesus. Those conversations happen in that space. And then we also have what we call micro churches, which are more of kind of the next space or like group space, which is like 8 to 12 people. People need to know who their people are in our community and form more life on life sort of relationships. And those spaces happen in people's homes. It's basically kind of like a house church expression. And they do that in addition to dinner church and then dinner church is more of our social space where you are a part of a broader community on mission together. And we do a lot of like asynchronous discipleship efforts. So we just went through a Sabbath practice where we make a lot of resources available and we invite people to journey through those resources with us. And so people access those teachings in an asynchronous way, not necessarily from me, on a Sunday morning during a sermon. And then we have worship nights where we create space for usually once a month for people to have an intense congregational spirit led prayer and worship experience. So we've kind of flipped the script, if that makes sense to your listeners. It's somewhat of a false dichotomy to ask Where is discipleship? Because the way Jesus discipled people was on mission. Like in the context like there's nothing more discipleship focused than having to contextualize your relationship with Jesus and your faith in a conversation with a stranger. So it's not like mission is separate from discipleship. It's actually something that's been lacking in the church and for many years , is mission integrated with discipleship.

Dee Stokes: So I want to comment on that. I'm glad you dropped that in there. Thank you for dropping that on us and dropping the mic, because most times we think discipleship is sit in a class, read a book, follow it. But Jesus did intentional relational discipleship. And that relational component is so important, I think, in discipleship, which is apprenticeship, you know, follow me as I follow Christ. That's what Paul said, right? And so we we have gotten away. Mentor mentorship is apprenticeship is discipleship. And I think the Lord is calling us back to that. So thank you for for what you do at dinner. Church. We want to ask you what you've learned through this process. Um, what has been let's start with that. What have you learned?

JD Larson: One of the things we've learned is how bad we are at talking with people around the table. Just humanity in general, post-pandemic like real life eating with each other. Conversations are tough, and I think I've learned how hard it is for Christians to talk with non-Christians. And I have been surprised how that is a skill that needs to be taught and developed within Christians. And we've done a lot of work on helping them be a non anxious presence in places where people disagree with them or have a different. Background in them. And so I think I had this kind of like rose colored glasses view of like, oh, this is this will be great. I'll get people around the table and relationships will form. It'll be really fun. And it has been, but there takes some intentional training on how to just talk to people, how to actively listen, how to ask questions before adding your own perspective and stuff like that. That's been a learning curve.

Dwight Zscheile: So how can people learn more about North City Church or where can they find you?

JD Larson: Yeah, you can find more about North City Church at North City Church MPLS that MPLS stands for Minneapolis. You'll find my info on there. You can find me on Facebook. JD Larsen I'm on Instagram as well. But that North City Church MPLS dot com is a best place to go. To find out more about what we're up to.

Dwight Zscheile: Wonderful. We will put that in the show notes for everyone. Thank you so much for sharing with us and blessings on this wonderful adventure your church has been on. It sounds amazing.

JD Larson: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to to share the story. And I love helping people foster their curiosity of dinner, church or even act on it if they have an impulse to do so. So feel free to reach out to me if you're looking for more intentional learning or coaching in that.

Dwight Zscheile: Thank you so much. And our next episode, we will be exploring the story of another innovator and doing some wonderful creative work in a local church in a different context. So look forward to joining us then.

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