A table-centered community

Sept. 18, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

It happened at our house four years ago. My wife, Linda, and I became pretty much the only ones who consistently ate meals together at the kitchen table. Somewhere along the way we gave up trying to have nightly family dinners, mostly due to the clashing schedules of our emerging young adults who worked or had classes during the usual mealtimes.

Not that this is a tragedy. Our 1,500-square-foot 1941 home on California Avenue in Como Park was built without an enclosed dining room. I suspect none of the other houses on our block do either in what seems to have been built as a working-class neighborhood of starter homes during World War II. We have a cute little dining nook in the kitchen, enclosed in a plaster archway with bench seating on two sides and a chair on the third, with a bright, sunny southern exposure that makes it especially wonderful in the winter.

But the disappearance of group dining is part of a trend. Last year, in an Atlantic magazine piece, “Why Dining Rooms are Disappearing from American Homes,” Nolan Gray described this architectural trend in new homes and renovations of “great rooms” that have taken the place of the traditional dining room, because people don’t use them anymore, preferring to eat alone in other spaces while watching TV, scrolling on their phones, or working on laptops.

On the one hand, it makes efficient use of square footage at a time of rising building costs. But this trend toward eating alone in spaces other than around a dining room table is appearing in other ways in American life.

In the magazine’s January cover story, “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson described a small Mexican restaurant near his home in North Carolina. The bar—formerly a busy gathering point loud with conversation and popular with regulars—is now lined with carry-out bags which customers come in silently to pick up and go eat at home. Probably alone. The restaurant itself seldom has dine-in customers anymore.

As Thompson writes, “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important fact of the 21st century in America.” Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” came out in 2000, bringing to our national attention what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called “an epidemic of loneliness” in America.

But what if all this represents a tremendous opportunity for local churches like ours to become “table-centered communities” again? Whether a regular neighborhood dinner, a monthly meetup of congregants at Stout’s for conversation or “theology on tap,” or an alternative, dinner-church-style worship service—where people regularly gather to cook dinner together and share a common meal and worship service—all these are ways this new church can be counterculturally communal again, offering an antidote to the loneliness epidemic.

What possibilities do YOU see?