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When a ministerial colleague introduced Rev. Aisha Ansano and Rev. Emily Conger in 2019, they felt an immediate connection.
“At the beginning it was a lot of, ‘Here’s what I’m doing, do you do anything like this?’ Or, ‘Have you thought about this?’” Ansano says. “And it just felt really exciting to be able to be in conversation.”
Not only were they both working with youth, they were also the only Unitarian Universalist ministers they knew of who were creating a UU version of dinner church, an alternative to traditional pew-based worship. Dinner church, which can be held at any time of day, is a type of embodied worship that engages the body as much as the mind—through play, meditation, movement and, at dinner church, eating.
Conger and Ansano had both seen dinner church for the first time at St. Lydia’s, a Christian congregation in Brooklyn where “worship takes place at the table around a big, delicious meal that we cook together,” according to the website. Ansano was there in 2014, while Conger read the congregation’s dinner and waffle church liturgies online in 2018, then watched a service online two years later. Once they met, their kinship grew quickly, and in April 2020 the pair started Nourish, the first UU dinner church consultancy.
Their first clients were parish ministers exhausted by caring for congregations amid the pandemic, who hired Nourish to create streamed Sunday morning dinner church services. Today, some fifty clients, from congregations to the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association and the Liberal Religious Educators Association, have worked with Nourish. Conger and Ansano have led dinner church virtually and in person and taught religious professionals how to customize the practice—and they’ve advocated enthusiastically for any kind of embodied worship.
A Nourish service typically features songs and a meditative “mindful bite,” in which participants consider a bite of food and everyone involved in its production. During virtual services, people comment actively in the chat and share their thoughts and feelings in breakout rooms. In person, congregations cook together, order food, or have a potluck. People sit around tables, listen to reflections, sing songs, and talk in small groups. And, near or far, they eat together.
“I think people are not expecting what a powerful spiritual experience it can be to engage your full body,” Ansano says. “There’s actually really powerful liturgy and theology and ritual there.”
Dinner Church a ‘Hearty Ritual’
Rev. Emily Conger, Mag Belbirn (3 years old), Rev. Aisha Ansano, Karishma Gottfried, Rev. Martha Durkee-Neuman, and other religious professionals and their families singing “Earth My Body” with hand motions at dinner church for religious professionals at Conger’s home in Salem, Massachusetts, October 2022.
Conger and Ansano held a 2024 dinner church workshop at Star Island, a retreat center off the New Hampshire coast popular with UUs. It inspired Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson to lead a winter solstice dinner church for her congregation, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork in Bridgehampton, New York.
With a blessing, songs, and written conversation prompts, “It [was] different than us just coming together for a potluck,” Johnson says.
Conger and Ansano had emphasized relinquishing the need for perfection and leaving space for whatever happens. At South Fork, personal conversations unfolded. That’s crucial amid the loneliness epidemic, Johnson says: “Something like dinner church, where people have an opportunity and are encouraged to know each other more deeply, addresses that.”
An in-your-body spiritual experience “is deeply UU, even if it’s not what people are used to on Sunday mornings,” Ansano says. “This feels so in line with the way youth and young adults do worship and do church.”
She and Conger sense that dinner church and other outside-the-pew practices could help retain younger UUs. At the same time, “I was pleasantly surprised with how many seniors were so hungry for [dinner church],” Conger says of Longmont Unitarian Universalist Presence (the LUUP), a Covenanting Community of the Unitarian Universalist Association, based in Longmont, Colorado.
While serving as the LUUP’s minister, Conger created its original dinner church in 2018. The service has evolved into a Friday night catered-buffet UU worship service.
“At the end of the week, working people just don’t have it together to cook a dish and bring it,” says Margaret James, the LUUP’s pianist and program facilitator. Throughout the meal, children move around, and people chat; no one sits in rows facing the front of the room. And there are always leftovers for people who might need them.
“Providing the food is part of the ministry,” James explains. “At least a few of our folks are food insecure.”
Since their introduction to dinner church, Ansano and Conger have both loved its hearty ritual. Amid this moment of political uncertainty and fear, they particularly value its ability to deeply connect us through food, generating reflection and joy.
“We know that the act of gathering and caring for one another in meaningful ways is profound,” Conger says. “It is an act of resistance. It’s an act of revolution.”