The following article was shared recently on the Discipleship Ministries website. For additional ideas about how you can address food insecurity needs in your community, contact the Dakotas Connector for Justice and Advocacy, Meaghan Wharton. Also, be sure to participate in the Bishop's Thanksgiving Offering by sharing how your church is meeting the needs of your community here. Donations to the connectional offering to Feeding South Dakota and Great Plains Food Bank can be made here.

The children beg for bread, but no one gives it to them.” — Lamentations 4:4 NIV" ¹

The line of cars stretches around the block. It’s another Wednesday morning at our drive-through food distribution. As I move from window to window, checking in, offering a smile, and a listening ear where I can, a young woman rolls her window down just enough to speak. A toddler sits in the back seat, a laptop bag in the passenger seat.

“I never thought I would find myself here,” she says quietly.

She started her career in tech after earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science. It was a remote position with good pay and full benefits, until the layoffs hit earlier this year. Now she’s a single mom, waiting for groceries, hoping her next SNAP deposit isn’t delayed again by the government shutdown. My heart aches for her and for the little one who smiles between bites on a toy in the back seat.

For a moment, the hum of idling engines becomes the sound of a nation’s unraveling. The gap between the middle class and the food line has never felt so thin.

A Holy Drive-Thru and the Church that Eats Together

Every Wednesday morning, the parking lot at St. Mark’s UMC comes alive. Volunteers line up boxes of fresh produce, canned goods, milk, and meat. Cars begin forming a line an hour before distribution starts. Some drivers are regulars who greet us by name. Others are first-timers, embarrassed, nervous, avoiding eye contact. Off to the side, a prayer station stands ready. We pray with those who ask, reminding each one they are not alone, that God sees them, and that this church loves them.

Later that night, we host a Wednesday evening Dinner Church called Family Table. There, the same food we give away becomes the food we share. People who came through the line that morning, along with folks stepping out of the 5:30 AA meeting or showing up early for the 8:00 NA group, come inside the community center and sit down at tables. Volunteers, neighbors, and friends from the street eat together. God sightings are shared; prayers are spoken, and communion happens in the most literal sense.

After dinner, we gather for Community Bible Study, where people who have never cracked open a Bible sit beside lifelong church members, exploring scripture together.

And on Tuesday nights at Compassion UMC, it happens all over again—friends experiencing homelessness, recovering addicts, seniors on fixed incomes, and single moms gathered around steaming pots and full plates, sharing their lives and their faith. The air smells like the banquet hall in the kingdom of God.

What began as a simple commitment to provide food has evolved into a network of tables, a ministry of presence, dignity, and belonging. And I often think: this is exactly how the first Christians did it.

The First Church Crisis: A Matter of the Table

The first crisis in the early church wasn’t about doctrine or leadership; it was about food. In Acts 6:1–6, Hellenistic widows were reportedly being overlooked in the “daily distribution.” The apostles realized that if some were excluded from the table, the gospel itself was in jeopardy. They appointed seven Spirit-filled leaders to ensure everyone, especially the most vulnerable, had enough to eat.

This was the first formation of a leadership structure, and it wasn’t to form a hierarchy or clergy caste system, but to build infrastructure around the emerging mission as they followed the Spirit.
From the beginning, the followers of Jesus understood that discipleship was not merely about believing the right things; it was about embodying love in daily practice. They broke bread in homes, turning meals into means of grace. The table wasn’t a metaphor. It was the center of their mission.

A Modern Table Crisis

Today, we face our own Acts 6 moment. As SNAP benefits are reduced and grocery costs rise, food insecurity is spreading like a shadow across the nation.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, roughly 13.5% of American households, about 18 million families, or 47 million people, experienced food insecurity in 2023, including nearly 6.5 million households with children.²  That means one in eight families struggled at some point to put food on the table. While complete 2024–2025 data are still being compiled, most analysts expect those numbers to rise sharply due to inflation, reduced SNAP benefits, and the ongoing government shutdown, pushing millions more Americans to rely on food banks, churches, and community networks for their daily bread.

But hunger doesn’t strike evenly. It follows the fault lines of class and race. Working-class families, single mothers, and people of color experience hunger at twice the rate of white households. The U.S. Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/) reports that Black and Latino families are more than twice as likely to struggle with consistent access to food.

Sociologically, this reveals how food insecurity mirrors our wider system of inequality. Structural violence, a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, describes the quiet, normalized harm embedded in social systems that limit access to life’s necessities. This is not about individual failure but collective design: zoning laws that isolate the poor, grocery chains that abandon certain neighborhoods, wages that lag behind rent.

Food insecurity is not only an economic crisis, but also a moral and spiritual one. It exposes the fractures in our social body, where some feast in grand ballrooms while others go hungry.

Incarnational Sociology: From Hull House to the Church Basement

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House in Chicago practiced what we I call incarnational sociology. Rather than studying poverty from a distance, they moved in… sharing life, meals, and struggles with their immigrant neighbors. Addams believed that knowledge detached from the lives it describes is morally incomplete. Truth must be tested in experience, refined in community, and measured by its capacity to heal.

Addams was influenced equally by both the social gospel movement and the American pragmatism of philosophers like John Dewey, a tradition that rejects the false choice between rigid certainty and anything-goes relativism. For Dewey, truth was not something handed down from on high but something human beings make together through shared inquiry, tested in lived experience, and revised through dialogue. Democracy, for both Dewey and Addams, was not just a system of government but a way of life: people learning together how to live well with their differences.

Hull House embodied that vision. Addams’s “sympathetic observation” blended intellectual analysis with moral presence. She insisted that real understanding requires proximity, sharing daily life with the people one studies or serves. She brought neighbors with her when she spoke publicly, ensuring their voices checked her generalizations. Her research always aimed toward relief and reform, from child labor laws to sanitation policy. In her hands, sociology became not a detached science but a social ethic, a discipline of presence that turned knowledge into neighborliness.

“Incarnational Sociology,” like incarnational theology, insists that truth must take flesh. It must be discovered in proximity, enacted in compassion, and tested in the consequences it produces for vulnerable neighbors.

The early church in Acts 6 practiced the same thing before there was a word for it. They didn’t theorize about justice from afar, they organized the daily distribution of food. They shared life with widows and laborers, turning the fellowship hall of the first century into a living laboratory of grace.

Our church basements, dinner churches, and food pantries can become the Hull Houses of our time, where faith and inquiry meet in compassionate proximity, and where the gospel takes on flesh again through the simple, radical act of eating together.

The Table as Theological Protest

In the Roman Empire, bread was a tool of domination. The state fed people to keep them loyal. The church fed people to make them free. The daily distribution in Acts 6 was a theological protest, a declaration that God’s economy runs on grace, not greed.

Our world still needs that protest. As safety nets shrink and inequities deepen, the Spirit is calling us back to the table—not just to hand out food, but to share meals, build relationships, and practice communion as community transformation.

If the government shutdown drags on, the situation will likely worsen before it improves. The USDA’s contingency funds are limited, meaning monthly SNAP allotments could shrink even further in December and beyond. Some households may see delayed or interrupted payments, widening the hunger gap across already-struggling communities. States will be forced to scramble, diverting emergency funds, leaning on food banks, and mobilizing nonprofits to fill the breach. But those stopgaps cannot sustain the millions of families living one grocery trip away from crisis. 

The longer benefits are reduced, the greater the ripple effects: increased strain on food pantries, rising malnutrition among children and elders, and growing pressure on congregations to meet needs once covered by public programs. When the government eventually reopens, partial retroactive payments may arrive, but trust in the safety net will have eroded even more deeply. This moment will almost certainly ignite renewed political debate over SNAP’s structure, work requirements, and funding, but in the meantime, the church will again find itself on the front lines of compassion. As the state falters, the body of Christ must rise to fill the gap, rediscovering what it means to be the community that quite literally feeds the world.

A Call to the Church

In the days ahead, it won’t be the churches with fog machines, light shows, and buildings dedicated solely to concert-style worship that thrive. It will be the churches that feed the hungry, shelter the unhoused, and open their doors when the night grows cold.

It will be congregations that practice incarnational sociology, learning, eating, and organizing with their neighbors rather than for them. The same Spirit who resolved the crisis in Acts 6 is stirring again, calling us to organize, distribute, and dine together.

This is our moment to show the world what the Way, the Truth, and the Life of Jesus really looks like.

Embodied Communion: Fresh Expressions and the Table as Ecology

The principles of incarnational mission come to life most powerfully not in policy statements, but around tables. The Fresh Expressions movement and the network of dinner churches it has spawned offer a simple pathway for ordinary congregations that long to reclaim sacred property as common ground and sacred meals as common good. Across Florida and beyond, meal-based Fresh Expressions are transforming fellowship halls, parking lots, and public parks into places of belonging and renewal. Each shared meal collapses the distance between housed and unhoused, rich and poor, churched and unchurched, forming what Wesley might call a “means of grace” that is social, not only spiritual.

These communities practice environmental justice on a human scale. They repurpose kitchens and sanctuaries once dormant during the week into ecosystems of care, spaces where food waste is reduced, loneliness is healed, and local partnerships form to meet real needs. Around these tables, hospitality becomes ecological: nourishment replaces scarcity, and communion becomes creation care.
In this sense, meal-based Fresh Expressions are more than outreach strategies… they are a sacramental ecology for our age of fragmentation. They model a post-rapture Christianity that stays, eats, and rebuilds. When congregations open their tables, they embody the redemptive pattern of Christ, who did not flee the world but entered into it and fed it with his own flesh. In the act of breaking bread, the church learns again that salvation is not escape from the earth, but its restoration.

How Your Church Can Respond

• Start small, start local. Host a community meal once a week and invite everyone, no strings attached.
• Partner with food ministries in your area, bringing spiritual and relational depth to existing efforts.
• Listen first. Ask neighbors what they need most and co-design solutions rather than imposing them.
• Partner with your regional food bank or Feeding America affiliate. Becoming an approved agency gives churches access to bulk food, often including fresh produce and dairy, at little or no cost, along with training on safe storage and equitable distribution.
• Share the table. Eat with, not for. Relationship is the first ingredient of justice. Giving people food is great. Eating together at tables is better.
• Teach theology at the table. Every loaf broken is a sermon. Every shared meal is a sacrament. No need to “preach,” just point to the presence already there.