...outside might be another way of doing that.

(This might ramble and take a while, but stay with me......)

Our normal setup for both stops is to go outside and put out four tables (2 for food, 1 for cutlery/desserts, and 1 for drinks), get the servers in place, say grace and then have the folks come through in a line and get their food. That's the way we've done it since we started years ago. It's functional and it works. 
And at the second stop, which is not at the church but the parking lot of the Mercy House, it's the pretty much the way we have to do it.

But...
I think we can do better at the first stop. I think we need to do better at the first stop.


In the past two years, the number of folks coming to eat at the first stop has grown significantly. It's a rare night when we don't have 40 people there when we say grace to start, which means 40 people get in a line to be served food. Depending on what we're serving and who's doing it, it can take a while to get that 40th person (and the ones who walk up afterward) through the line.
As much as I struggle with people standing in line to get food, I'm struggling even more with having them sit outside of the church when there's an empty dining hall inside of it. That's where we bring them when it's raining. If I was one of the folks being fed, I think I might wonder Why can't we eat there all the time? 
So after Thanksgiving I think we're going to try and make a change in how we do the first stop. We're going to eat inside Fireside Hall every week. And instead of setting up inside the exact same way we do outside, do things differently. No lines. Have them come in and sit down at the tables and serve them there. There's a couple of ways that can work and it might take some trial and error to see how we can do it best. In a perfect world*, I can see us eating family style. Have one or two "table hosts" at each table and bring the food out in platters for each table and have the "table hosts" serve our friends, with others running drinks and food back and forth from the kitchen. Because that's a normal meal, sitting in chairs at a table, not balancing it on your knees in a courtyard on a short concrete wall.
Would that make things harder for us? Heck yeah. One of the beauties of the way we do it now is no matter who comes or how often they've come, I can plug them in just about anywhere and we're fine. the new way would require a much more coordinated effort, especially from the kitchen to the table. And it would mean doing two different styles of preparation  between first and second stops.  


This isn't written in stone and there things to work out before we try it, but it seems like a direction to move toward. We've been at it long enough that if we do this, I think the people we serve will trust us enough to go along with it. 
I'll keep you posted on how it's going.


We talk a lot on Tuesday nights about showing and bringing the Kingdom of God to the folks we serve. Showing them they are welcome to eat inside the walls of our church instead of feeding them ....






*which we don't live in, so we might have to work up to that a little slowly. Maybe make plates up and bring them to the table or something similar to that at first.