Disciple: A Movable Feast Is Your Feast
By Summerlee Walter
It’s not unusual for someone to approach Brittany Love after a presentation about A Movable Feast and tell her they like what she is doing with the ministry.
“I always think, ‘No, it’s not what I’m doing; it’s what you’re doing,’” the A Movable Feast director and young adult missioner said.
A Movable Feast was originally conceived as a diocesan young adult ministry based out of a customized trailer that both holds a chapel and serves hot, home-cooked food. While the trailer still frequents college campuses and actively helps churches reach out to young adults in their communities, Love’s vision is more flexible. She wants churches to take the idea behind A Movable Feast — gathering with people where they are, feeding them and inviting relationship — and see what connections form. Sometimes that looks like passing food through the trailer window, and sometimes it looks quite different.
“Anytime that a church gets into the community and feeds people, it benefits the whole ministry of the diocese and The Episcopal Church,” she said, “because we become known as the people who feed people.”
RECLAIMING A SAINT
This March, Holy Comforter, Burlington, borrowed A Movable Feast’s trailer to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day during the city’s annual downtown celebration. Vestry member Shannon McQueen knew some of the coordinators of the downtown event and approached the clergy with the idea that Holy Comforter should be present in some way. Knowing the festival included a food truck rally, assistant rector the Rev. Timothy McLeod immediately thought of the trailer.
“My institutional knowledge was able to take advantage of and fill out what the town was already offering and capitalize on an inspired lay person’s idea,” he explained.
The event opened with an ecumenical gathering of Episcopalians, Catholics and Presbyterians celebrating a St. Patrick’s Day evensong at Holy Comforter.
“What we wanted to do was use St. Patrick’s Day — because it is inherently a religious observance — to model the idea that what we say and believe in worship compels us to go out into our community and take that message with us in tangible ways,” McLeod explains.
Once downtown, volunteers served free food through the trailer’s window, and the sides of the van (a convenient erasable writing surface) displayed information about Holy Comforter. Even though McLeod was not staffing the food truck, the mere fact he was still wearing his collar was enough for a few former Christians to approach him and ask what he was doing at the festival.
Holy Comforter’s visible presence at the celebration did draw a few people to the church on Sunday morning, and their success in inviting people to worship through their presence in the community has inspired the church to think about how they welcome visitors once they’ve chosen to spend time at the church.
A MULTIPURPOSE MINISTRY
A Movable Feast’s trailer is a large vehicle, and, sometimes once it parks somewhere, it lives there for awhile. The trailer’s time at St. Stephen’s, Durham, illustrates the ministry’s versatility. From October, 2015, through August, 2016, the trailer served refreshments for people lined up outside of El Buen Pastor, Durham, waiting for food assistance; served water and lemonade to young people hunting Pokemon around St. Stephen’s; and passed out hotdogs during Trunk or Treat.
Parishioner Megan Carlson started to think about additional ways to use the trailer during its time parked in the church’s parking lot. She wanted to do something that appealed to young adults and decided to leverage the trailer’s lowkey nature to provide an alternate worship opportunity.
Throughout the summer, Carlson opened the trailer on Wednesday evenings for outdoor compline.
“We literally opened the trailer,” she said. “There was no Altar Guild. We played Bible Pictionary and Bible trivia on the side of the trailer as part of summer Bible study.”
Food and worship are the key components of A Movable Feast, whether or not the trailer is present.
A EUCHARISTIC FEAST
Across the Diocese, on Saturday, September 17, members of St. Martin’s, Charlotte, gathered at the Galilee Center to celebrate a Eucharist modeled after the very earliest Church services, when worshipers would set aside some of the bread and wine from their agape feast to use for the Eucharist.
The evening began with a potluck to which each person was invited to bring a dish “that meant something to them,” leading to a rich mixture of Southern cuisine and beloved dishes from other countries.
“We separated some of the food, and told the story of Jesus,” the Rev. Josh Bowron, rector of St. Martin’s and that evening’s celebrant, explained. “I asked them to take a lot of bread and to drink a lot of wine. The theme of the night as we reflected on it afterward was we were stuffing our face on God. I wanted to have this notion that sacramental practice does not need to be rationed out — it can be an abundance of that symbol.”
Just as happened in Burlington, the Eucharist at
Galilee Center originated with an idea from a lay person.
“The conversation was going on for weeks and months before I even came in, so what I want to come out is that this was lay led,” Bowron emphasized.
A MOVABLE FEAST ON CAMPUS
Harkening back to the original vision for the ministry, the Rev. Greg McIntyre, Episcopal chaplain at Davidson
College, took inspiration from A Movable Feast to move the long-standing Canterbury Club dinner out of the chapel and into the campus’s student union.
“That’s what we’re trying to get away from, that if you come to worship then you get a meal,” he explained. “We just want to create space for good fellowship, Sabbath time, a moment of grace and good conversation that is not structured.”
Knowing that Davidson students live in a competitive environment, McIntyre has worked hard to keep the dinners from becoming “programmed.”
“The students appreciate the homecooking,” he said. “They appreciate it when there are [St. Alban’s, Davidson] families in the room. The idea is just to get the church on campus, to open that doorway. “
A MOVABLE FEAST AND YOU
To borrow A Movable Feast’s trailer or to brainstorm ways to embrace the spirit of A Movable Feast in your church, email Brittany Love. You can also find an event near you at amovablefeast.org.
Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.
Tags: North Carolina Disciple
