Photo courtesy of St. Lydia's

The congregation gathers at the table at St. Lydia's church for a sacred meal.

October 9, 2012 | Volunteer cooks arrive at the Brooklyn Zen Center around 6 p.m. on Sunday nights. A chalkboard sign, the kind that might advertise a restaurant’s nightly specials, pops up on the sidewalk. As guests show up, they’re given a name tag, newcomers are introduced to the regulars, and all are invited to chop vegetables, set tables or fill water pitchers.

Around 7 p.m., someone strikes a gong and announces, “Come and gather around the candle!” The crowd of about 30 comes together, a volunteer taps out a rhythm on an African drum, and a song leader begins singing “Jesus, We Are Gathered.”

This is not a spirituality meet-up taking Christianity for a test drive. It’s not family-night supper for hipsters. This is church.

It’s St. Lydia’s, a church at once ancient and new, a self-styled “dinner church,” where worship, drawing on early Christian practices, takes place around a full, sit-down meal.

The church began in 2008, when Emily Scott, then director of worship at Riverside Church in Manhattan, realized that many young New Yorkers wanted to connect with a church but couldn’t “get their foot in the door.”

“I started to think, ‘There’s a hunger; there’s a need that’s not being met,’” she said. “What would a church for these people look like?”

Scott credits the Holy Spirit for the answer to that question.

“The idea of a church that was centered around the early church practice of having a meal together as Eucharist just kind of fell out of the sky,” she said. “It felt like it arrived fully formed.”

Establishing a congregation and shepherding its growth, however, has been an ongoing process, one that upends some traditional ideas about emerging churches and embodies apparent contradictions.

St. Lydia’s is a church grounded in both early Christian practice and modern urban living. It’s named after the woman in the book of Acts known for her hospitality and located in a city where hospitality can be a rare and radical act. The services are informal and welcoming, but they follow a structured and thoughtfully constructed liturgy.

Unlike some emerging churches, St. Lydia’s -- though founded as an independent church plant -- has deliberately chosen to affiliate with a mainline denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and is also in partnership with another, the Episcopal Church. Rather than embrace a non-hierarchical structure, it cultivates and develops leaders within the congregation and is going through a discernment process to create a governance structure. Yet it also allows for a certain fluidity in leadership and encourages even first-time attendees to participate.

When Scott started St. Lydia’s, she was “in this weird denominational no man’s land.” Raised Episcopalian, she earned degrees from Yale Divinity School and the school’s Institute of Sacred Music, but she wasn’t ordained. (She’s now a candidate for ordination in the ELCA.)

Core principles

At the core of St. Lydia’s life together is a set of principles that Scott developed at the very beginning, before the congregation ever met: “Telling Our Story. Sharing the Meal. Working Together.”

The “story,” Scott said, is both the gospel story and the story of God at work in congregants’ lives. The “meal” is the Eucharist. And “working together” conveys an almost monastic vision of work and community life, virtually as a form of prayer. And it all adds up to a church grounded in community and hospitality.

To young people who live in New York City, where kitchen space, home-cooked meals and dining room tables are hard to come by, those principles have great appeal.

“We live in an age where people interact through screens a lot, or eat standing up,” Scott said. “What we’re doing is sitting down and looking at each other, which is pretty countercultural.”

As informal and welcoming as the service feels, Scott, who trained as a liturgist and musician, has created a well-ordered service. The meal begins with a eucharistic prayer taken from the Didache, a second-century instruction book for Christians. Though not ordained, Scott is licensed to preside over communion at St. Lydia’s.

As Scott chants the prayer, she breaks fresh bread, passes it to the circle of congregants and invites them each, in turn, to take the bread, break it again and offer it to another with the words, “This is my body.”

Unlike in traditional liturgy, the blessing of the cup comes much later, at the end of the service.

“We’re blessing the entire meal as sacred and as a meal at which Christ is present in the bread and the wine and all the food, and in all of us,” Scott said. “We are Christ to one another at that meal. I often imagine that we’re all sitting around the table and that Christ is there, too.”

‘St. Lydia’s is reverent’

That sense of the sacred appealed to Phil Fox Rose, who visited other churches before he found a home at St. Lydia’s about a year ago.

“A lot of nondenominational and emergent stuff has an overtly irreverent, unstructured, even anti-church vibe,” he said. “St. Lydia’s is reverent.”

In keeping with the rules of the Zen Center, where St. Lydia’s rents space, the church uses grape juice, not wine, and requires all who come to remove their shoes at the door.

After the breaking of the bread, the congregation shares a simple vegetarian meal, such as rice or pasta with vegetables. Then Scott leads a Scripture reading and preaches a short sermon, after which people are invited to respond, drawing on their own experiences.

Following a song, prayers and the blessing of the cup, one of Scott’s favorite moments in the service begins, one in which the formed community becomes fully visible -- cleanup. Everyone joins in, washing and putting away the dishes, and then the service concludes with an offering, singing, the passing of the peace and a final blessing.

“It’s like jazz improvisation,” Scott said. “We create the structure -- it doesn’t change -- and then people can kind of riff on it.”

Mabel Bermejo, a Catholic who has come to St. Lydia’s for about a year and a half, appreciates the participatory service.

“It’s not passive; it’s very active,” she said. “It’s not like you’re sitting on a back pew. Everyone has a place at the table.”

Rachel Pollak, St. Lydia’s part-time community coordinator and only salaried employee, helps people find their place in the church, encouraging them to take a turn as deacon, lead cook, sous chef or song leader.

“I have a kind of ‘mother hen’ personality at church, because sometimes people need to be pushed and prodded to break free of inhibitions and habits of isolation that keep us from connecting,” she said.

An artist with both an M.F.A. and a degree from Yale Divinity School, Pollak also oversees St. Lydia’s garden, leads Bible study, and works out the rotating schedules.