Do you find it difficult to find time to spend with people from church or your non-Christian friends? If the answer is yes, then Tim Chester has the answer. Eat with them.

If you immediately think that’s impossible, it’s likely you have confused ‘entertaining’ with ‘eating’. Why wait until the kids are in bed? Why hide the family away? Why not just invite them to share with your family a meal? Change the way you view meals and you suddenly find that you have 21 new mission possibilities without adding anything new to your calendar.

Chester regards the statement that ‘the Son of Man’ came eating and drinking as much about the method as anything and the opens up the significance of time around the table. In particular he sees meals as enacted grace, enacted community, enacted hope, enacted mission, enacted salvation and enacted promise.

Although I bought the book to help me continue to think through the breaking of bread, I really appreciated all the other insights into the value and importance of time around the table with those like you and not like you.

As a church plant we’re investing much of our time together around the meal table, but the temptation is to think this is a phase that the church should ‘grow out of’ instead of being a normative pattern for life and mission. There are any number of quotable lines that challenge a western view of hospitality as dinner party instead of the warmer inclusion into family life and Chester roots all the challenges in robust theology and the gospel.

With regard to the Lord’s Supper one passage will suffice:

The Lord’s Supper should be a meal we ‘earnestly desire’ to eat. We should approach it with anticipation, with longing, with excitement, with joy. The Lord’s Supper should be a joyous occasion, a vibrant meal with friends, a feast. Our earnest desire must surely affect how we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Today it has commonly become ritualized. We’re the group in town whose central meal involves a fragment of bread and a small sip of wine. How is this a foretaste of the messianic banquet?'(p.126)

Well, exactly.

A meal with Jesus is an excellent book that will open your eyes to building community, to fellowship, friendship, salvation and grace. It should help rescue you from a trap of busyness that leads to a shallow form of hospitality and introduces you to a more biblical practice of hospitality, one that is deeper, richer and in the presence of Christ. Recommended.

The Gospel Coalition have a helpful interview with Tim Chester that gives a good insight into the book