Jan. 16, 2025
By Rev. Rick King

Lately, The Atlantic has been covering the disappearance of various forms of community in American life. Last June, in a piece titled “Why Dining Rooms Are Disappearing From American Homes,” Nolan Gray described the architectural trend in new homes and renovations of “great rooms” that have taken the place of the traditional dining room.

He writes: “The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next ‘dinner holiday’ on Easter or Thanksgiving.”

He writes that Americans now more often eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms, sometimes in groups, but often alone while watching TV, scrolling on their smartphones, or working on laptops. The most obvious reason is the cost of building houses and the need to make the most of square footage.

It’s happened to us at our house. Linda and I are pretty much the only members of our family who consistently eat meals together at the kitchen table. We gave up trying to have nightly family dinners with our kids, mostly due to the clashing schedules of our emerging young adults who work or take classes during the usual mealtimes.

Our 1,500-square-foot home on California Avenue in Como Park was built in 1941 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 this trend toward eating alone in spaces other than around a dining room table is appearing in other ways in American life. In “The Anti-Social Century,” this month’s cover story in the magazine, Derek Thompson describes a small Mexican restaurant near his home in North Carolina where 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.

This change in food delivery and restaurant seating has taken place since the COVID-19 pandemic. The restaurant’s general manager, Rae Mosher, told Thompson, “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it. I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.”

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 outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called “an epidemic of loneliness” in America.

Since its publication, the advent of smartphones, pandemic quarantines, the extreme market segmentation which drives advertising, and a plethora of various kinds of media outlets have all combined to render us both more socially disconnected and more tribal, which has deeply affected our politics and religion.

But all of this presents not just a doomsday scenario for you and me, but a tremendous opportunity for local churches like ours and New Life to become “table-centered communities” again.

Whether it’s a monthly potluck, the Thirsty Falcons meetup, a “theology on tap” group meeting in a bar, Dinners for Eight, or launching an alternative, dinner-church-style worship service—where worshippers regularly gather to cook dinner together and share a common meal that is also a worship service—all these are ways the church can be counterculturally communal again, offering an antidote to the loneliness epidemic. What possibilities do YOU see?