Oct. 4th: Come Hungry

Hey everybody —

Two things to get straight before you plan your Sunday, because both are different from normal:

• We're not meeting at the Foster Theater. We're at First Tongan United Methodist Church, in the basement. Enter through the conference room and head downstairs. - We're not starting at 10:00 a.m. Come at 11:50 a.m. We start at about 12:05 p.m.

This week isn't our usual service. It's a community meal — our first as a church in this new season — and that's the whole gathering. After three Sundays of learning a new building and a new set of procedures, we wanted a week where the only assignment is to sit down together.

How the hour will go

Pastor Joel will welcome everybody and explain how communion will work. We’ll sing a capella, have a brief communion liturgy, then a blessing of the food, and then… it’s on. As usual, preference will be given to elders (you know who you are) families with little kids (as do you).

That's it. No sermon, no set list, no order of worship to follow. Tables, bread, a cup, a spread, and each other. Oh and Jelani’s boombox for background groovin’.

What to bring

• Food to share. Bring something meaningful to you to share. Here is a sign-up list if you haven't seen it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1Vf2WoOE4jFSpcJQ1Vz-Ah0ISs8P1lIMLiLIVdAYBKpM/htmlview?urp=gmail_link

• Your kids. It's a family meal. Loud is fine, and there's no kids programming so we’re all together. - Yourself, even empty-handed. Seriously. There will be plenty. The point is you, not your casserole dish.

If you can come at 11:00 a.m. to help with tables, chairs, etc. and get the room ready, the setup crew would be glad to have you. Same at the end for teardown.

IMPORTANT: Please remember to park on the street. There are two other churches that meet on Sundays and one of them will be preparing to leave as we arrive, so we won’t be using the parking lot. We'll be in the basement, but you can also enter from the conference room door on the east side of the building.

Access Kids launches October 11

Real news: kids ministry starts back up Sunday, October 11, back at the Foster Theater. Julie McBee and James have been working on this for weeks, and we're glad to finally put a date on it.

Parents, read this part carefully. Our new space changes how drop-off and pickup work, and it's different from what's currently on the website and from how we did things at Knight St.

• No shoes in either studio. Kids church meets in the studio space, and getting there means walking through the big dance studio. Shoes come off — kids and adults both. Plan your socks accordingly. - Pickup is at the small studio door, inside the ballet lobby. You'll come in from the street, get your kids, and walk them back to the theater using the outside street access. - One bracelet per family. Instead of a bracelet per child, you'll get a single bracelet with all your kids' codes on it and the total number of kids checked in, circled. Fewer bracelets means fewer chances one gets dropped, tossed, or split between two parents.

We know that's a lot of change at once, and more structure than some of you are used to. There's a ballet school sharing the building with us, including a class that arrives right as we're wrapping up, and these rules protect our kids, our volunteers, and their students at the same time. As Julie put it, it's easier to loosen the reins later than to reel them back in.

None of it is permanent. The whole system gets reassessed in early November, with volunteers, parents, staff, and lead team all weighing in. If you have any questions, bring them to Julie – you can reach her at julie@accesscov.com.

The forum

Our community forum at accesscov.com/forum is a good place to keep Sunday going — trade recipes from the meal, ask Julie a kids-ministry question where everyone can see the answer, introduce yourself, or share what's going on in your life.

At Access, we’ve decided we’d rather not have our spirituality mediated by social media algorithms that train us to be angry and afraid.

Reminders

• Sunday, October 11 — Back at the Foster Theater, 10:00 a.m. Normal time, normal place, and Access Kids launches.

One final thought

October 4 is World Communion Sunday — the day a huge swath of the global church, across traditions that agree on almost nothing else, takes the bread and the cup on the same day. Which makes it a fitting day for us to eat together in a church basement that isn't even ours.

This week's lectionary readings keep circling a vineyard. Isaiah sings about one that God planted and fenced and watered and waited on. Jesus tells a story about another one. In both, the owner comes looking for the same thing: fruit.

Isaiah says plainly what fruit God was hoping for.

“He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”

Isaiah 5:7 (NRSV)

Not attendance. Not a well-run service. Justice and righteousness — which, stripped of the churchy weight those words have picked up, mean something close to: people treated right, and nobody's cry going unheard.

Good thing to hold onto on a Sunday with no sermon in it. Because a table where everybody eats isn't a break from the work — it's a small, edible version of what God has been after the whole time. People fed. People known. Nobody stuck at the margins of the room. You can't preach that into being. You have to set it up, cook for it, and sit down in it.

And the cup we'll pass around on Sunday is itself fruit of a vineyard — handed to us by the one who planted it, on a day when the same cup is being lifted in a few hundred thousand other rooms around the world.

So come hungry. Bring a dish or don't. Pull up a chair next to somebody you don't know yet.

See you Sunday.

Onward in the love and grace of Jesus, who as always, gives us Access to God.