Someone’s New in the Kitchen

by Jason Byassee

Jason Byassee

It’s been said that Jesus eats his way through the gospels. Open up any page of the gospels and Jesus is usually there eating and drinking. It’s no wonder he uses eating and drinking in communion to make us part of his body.

We have some changes to the way we eat and drink together that have been a long time in coming. As always, these will require feedback and patience with one another.

Our kitchen is a sort of crown jewel of our campus. Our leaders wisely built an ambitious commercial kitchen with which to host events for us and our broader community. We have had remarkable volunteer leaders there–Jan Niblick, Denise Stanley, Mary Carolyn Abernathy, Tamera Holshouser. With their encouragement, SPRC saw the need, and Finance found the money to hire a kitchen coordinator. Lynn Rollins is working for us part-time in that capacity and she is a wonder with her expertise and professionalism and grace.

With Lynn’s hire, we have an opportunity to get serious about the kitchen policies that have existed on paper for some time, but haven’t been followed as uniformly as necessary. For example, groups have to clean up after themselves when they use the kitchen. This is not only common courtesy of a sort that roommates and spouses have to master on day 1; it’s also necessary to keep people volunteering. If you have to clean up for two hours (I exaggerate not) before you can cook, you’ll think twice about volunteering. We also cannot leave dirty dishes or food out for basic sanitary reasons. It’s gross at home, but unsanitary and discourteous in a common kitchen.

What else will this mean? Outside groups will pay a deposit. We will almost certainly change the locks and limit the access non-staff have to the kitchen. We will need to require donations or approximately $3-5 each for meals. These (nd probably other changes) will be for our good, and we’ll be proud of the results.
One other change is to how we serve coffee on Sunday mornings. Chuck Eyler has helped us all see that drinking coffee together in the chapel is a great use of that space and time…especially in welcoming new people and getting to know folks who aren’t in our normal Sunday routine. This has been wonderful…but Chuck needs help. Folks who have made coffee down the Sunday School wing for years have had their routine disrupted, but I hope y’all will join Chuck in this new coffee-making routine. We’re going to begin selling our own Boone United Methodist blend courtesy of Uijin Park and Espresso News shortly with a tithe of proceeds going to mission. While this time together in our most beautiful room is wonderful. We will work hard to incorporate the 11am worship folks and Crossroads folks into that community time?

As Jesus and the disciples ate and drank their way through the gospels, they had their own complications. Who pays? (some women leaders, one verse tells us–see Luke 8:3). Who gets how much (handy when he can always make more)? More locally now–how do we navigate the different sort of volunteer we’re getting these days? More households are two-income. Fewer stay-at-home parents are ready to volunteer oceans of time to church. Folks in my generation are much more inclined to pay than to do the work ourselves. These changes are neither good nor bad, they just are. What do they mean in terms of how we share our kitchen? I don’t know. I just know Jesus will be faithful as we try to figure it out together.

And that he’ll meet us as we eat and drink at his table.