$ Dinner Church School Of Leadership (Fresh Expressions)

With traditional approaches becoming less and less effective in reaching secular populations, leaders are now reaching out for different sociologies of “doing church”. Interestingly, rebirthing a common ecclesial form from the Apostolic Era is proving to be highly effective again in creating great commission environments for unchurched people.

Dinner Church is not an innovation – it is a recovery project! And that historic recovery is at the heart of this program. Any leader who desires to recapture a very rich sociology of church from the first 600 years of Christian history soon realizes there is a lot to be embraced. Planting a Dinner Church is not as simple as doing church as we know it, except around tables. That would be akin to the proverbial iceberg being measured by what is visible on the surface and excluding the large mass residing under the water. Any serious student of the dinner church would do well to embrace some extraordinary and intrinsic differences in the areas of preaching, discipleship, evangelism, and the familial sociology that constituted a Jesus table. That historic ecclesial form drew its meaning from the New Passover that Christ himself practiced and handed over to the first disciples.

Simply stated, the depths of understanding to be mined in the dinner church theology is significant, and warrants graduate-level instruction and theological reflection. That need has prompted an academic response – the Dinner Church School of Leadership.