Faithfulness & Bones

Dear Table fam,

Over these past weeks, our Board of Elders and I have been prayerfully discerning the future of The Table. After many conversations, much wrestling, and more than a little grief, we have made the difficult decision that: The Table Community Church will come to the end of its life together this fall. Our final worship gathering will be Sunday, September 27.

In other words, we are closing The Table.

Some of you have already heard this from me or from members of our board face to face. We wanted to tell as many of you personally as we could before putting these words into an email. A community built around a Table deserves more than a press release.

For a while now, we have used the language of recycling when talking about the possibility that our life together might be reaching its completion.

I like that word because recycling is different from simply throwing something away.

It says that what has existed still matters.

That the material of a thing can become part of something new.

That nothing faithful needs to be wasted.

Last Sunday, as we continued our Wayfinders sermon conversation/journey, we talked about faithfulness and bones (feel free to listen by clicking the link) = about those moments when the structures that once carried life no longer look the way they did before. And about the strange possibility that God may still be present among the bones.

I believe this is the location where we find ourselves.

The Table has been many things over the years. We have gathered around meals and Communion tables. We have baptized people in lakes & oceans, married people in barns & boats, buried people, prayed for one another, pissed each other off, forgiven one another, packed thousands upon thousands of meals, washed our neighbors' clothes, raised children, asked enormous questions, wandered through wilderness seasons, and kept setting the Table.

There has been so much life here.

And because there has been life here, there is also real grief in saying that this particular expression of our life together is ending.

But an ending is not the same thing as a failure.

One of the questions we have continually returned to as a community is not simply, “How do we keep this thing alive?”but “What does faithfulness require of us now?”

We have reached the conviction that continuing to sustain The Table organizationally is no longer the faithful thing to do. Dragging an ending out because we are afraid to name it would not honor what this community has been. Nor would slowly exhausting the remaining energy, resources, and people we love.

So we want to end differently. We want to finish well. We want to tell the truth about where we are.We want to grieve what needs grieving. We want to celebrate the hell out of what God has done among us.

And then we want to release one another…freely and lovingly…into the next communities, friendships, tables, practices, and places where the Spirit will continue forming us.

Between now and September 27, that will become part of our work together.

We will gather. We will tell stories. We will eat and drink. We will remember. We will practice gratitude and grief. And we will keep asking the question our Wayfinders series has been teaching us to ask:

How do we walk faithfully when we don't have a map?

Apparently, sometimes the answer is simply to take the next faithful step. And then another: 10,000 unsexy steps. And trust that the God who met us here will not suddenly stop being God when we leave this particular Table.

There will be more information in the coming weeks about our remaining gatherings and about our final Sunday together on September 27. There will also be plenty of room for questions, conversations, sadness, anger, gratitude, memories, and whatever else this ending stirs up in you.

For now, though, I mostly want to say this:

Thank you.

Thank you for trusting me and our leaders. Thank you for setting this strange and beautiful Table with us. Thank you for your courage, generosity, friendship, service, laughter, questions, prayers, and presence. And thank you for allowing us to believe together that perhaps even this ending can become one more act of faithfulness.

The Table may be coming to an end.

But the bones remain.

And I have a suspicion that God still knows what to do with bones.

With deep love and gratitude,

Pr. Zig