Every dish at a potluck is somebody’s grandmother’s recipe. Church is a lot of families feeding each other’s kids.

Look at the table and you are looking at a row of households. Each dish came from somebody’s kitchen, made the way their family makes it, carried in by hand, and that is a great deal of private domestic life arriving in one room. A church at its best works like that: a number of families quietly feeding each other’s children and nobody keeping track of whose turn it was.

Ask somebody where their dish came from this week. The answer is usually a person, often one who is no longer alive, and the asking is its own small kindness.