from the Rev. Canon Brian Cole
Drive around Asheville and you will see signs for new church starts that don’t always make it clear what is being advertised. In the evolving world of church planting, current wisdom suggests that people who might visit a new church don’t want it to look too much like a church. If they wanted that they would already be active in a church. In order to welcome them into a church, they need not to be turned off by going to church.
So, new ministry starts often use warm and inviting words to name themselves. The name draws you in.
Food Booth, for example. I have often thought if I were ever to work on beginning a new Episcopal mission, I would want to call it Food Booth. Both words are great on their own, with the invitation to eat and take your fill of sustenance and the manna that God gives AND the temporary, light-on-your-feet structure that speaks to an age when people are wary of becoming a nameless addition to a big institution. The two words, placed alongside each other, both name an annual event at All Souls and remind us of the mission of God.
God has called us to the altar, to eat and drink and share this expression of Christ’s sacrificial love with others. And the altar, the place of eating, sends us into the world, to make more altars, more places where others are fed. Those places where we are sent, those opportunities to see God’s grace, are often only with us for a season. Before we build the temple, let us make a booth. Before we decide this thing has to last forever, pay attention to the sacred timing that might suggest our work is done and that booth building is all that is required now.
At All Souls, Food Booth is a remarkable time to share hospitality with fellow All Souls parishioners and the community beyond our doors, who, on Crafts Fair weekend, draw very close to our doors and end up entering our doors to beat the August heat.
So, please join us again this year for an opportunity to make and share food, to offer hospitality and welcome, and to be ambassadors of this great cathedral and the ministry that flows from and returns to this place.
Each August, when we participate in Food Booth, we don’t simply raise money for outreach. Each August, in the midst of a church first founded in 1896, we plant a new ministry. Welcome to All Souls. Welcome to Food Booth.