Back at the turn of the century, I sat under moonlight on a charred log with a clutch of Sudanese women making coffee over an open fire.
It was the most absolute darkness I’d ever experienced. No one for perhaps a hundred miles had electricity. Before us, a circle of Sudanese church leaders with a sprinkling of rebel guards spoke quietly. Behind us, barely a mile or two, soldiers from Sudan’s army mustered in garrison towns, eager to overtake this area.
The lights of a star-filled sky suffused the arid ground where we sat, an encampment near the Ethiopian border of Blue Nile State. Surrounding villages housed thousands of Christian South Sudanese, who hunkered down in their huts amid an armed conflict with the government that was already nearly 20 years old by the time I arrived in 2000.
War survivors still drink coffee, and they want to show hospitality to guests. The women spread green unroasted beans in a shallow tin held over glowing coals. Under darkness they relied on the crack of the coffee beans to know when they were done. Once the beans had browned, they passed the tin around for us to smell then ground it fine using a wooden mortar and pestle.
One of the women set the jebena, a pear-shaped Ethiopian coffee pot, over the flame, sieved the coffee into it, then nestled it into the coals to heat. Soon the aroma rose in the night air, a multitude of herbs, caramel, and spice. A slight woman lifted the jebena and strained coffee through a mat of woven dried palm leaves into our small tin cups, serving the men first then us.
I wanted that thimble of coffee never to end.
A man began to sing an Uduk hymn. Everyone joined, an African harmony sung in five-tone scale that I imagined drifting out over this cloaked continent and rising to the heavens. I have the recording of it still. Listening a quarter century later I see the Sudanese faces shining with faith and joy. I taste the richness of the coffee and feel the peacefulness that could envelop a wartime night.
Whether by starlight, candlelight, sunlight, or overhead light, meals with Jesus transform our days. Yet sometimes we don’t realize we are having them. A simple coffee made possible by some of the poorest people on earth became a stilled moment of communion during some of my hardest reporting days.
Food and cooking “stop us dead in our tracks with wonder,” writes author Robert Farrar Capon in The Supper of the Lamb. “Even more they sit us down, evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity.”
The Old and New Testament writers understood this. Feasts are for remembrance, for strengthening our communities, for serving, and for welcoming strangers. Jesus straddled the opulence of the Roman world and the agrarian society of ancient Israel, and he shows his people how to feast at a groaning board or at a spare table with a piece of bread and a sip of wine.
Christianity Today’s Globe series began as a way to spotlight snapshots in the life of the church around the world. For this year’s Globe issue, we selected writers who could travel the world—North, South, East, and West—to see how the church is answering at quarter-century the ancient question found in Psalm 78: Can God set a table in the wilderness?
One way we know the church of Christ is alive in the world—despite news of scarcity, scandal, and division—is to see it feeding people literally and equipping them spiritually.
In this issue we meet a pastor in Haiti who feeds 500 children at a K-12 school despite gang-led roadblocks and the flight of Western aid.
We see how the church-run supply lines of Ukraine persist, then cross enemy lines to learn how Mennonite farmers for more than a century have worked Russia’s Siberian soil into crops feeding communities near and far.
In Vietnam we visit a once-seedy village of opium addicts, transformed through one-by-one conversions into a brimming market town that draws many visitors.
At a seed lab ministry in Thailand, Asians learn to revive local crop strains to combat food scarcity. Explains the director, “We’ve seen pastors come to us, saying, ‘We are planting a church to share the gospel, but of course we’re going to help our neighbors with food insecurity. Jesus met people’s physical needs, so why wouldn’t we?’”
Jesus indeed came to earth prepared to meet physical needs. This strengthened communities as it also was a way to the heart, the mind, and the soul. Meals with Jesus became material assurance and also metaphor.
At the home of Mary and Martha, at Peter’s house, and Matthew’s home. Out in a desolate place. In Cana, Capernaum, Bethany, and Jerusalem. By Jacob’s well in Samaria in the heat of day. On the sea at night. And there on the beach at the dawn of a new day.
We have a glad Savior who quit the table of the Upper Room and took on death so he could fry fish, break bread, and share wine—or water drawn from a well or fresh-roasted coffee—into eternity with us.
The stories here are only a foretaste of a global church that today is feeding and caring for neighbors around the world. Eat and drink up.
Mindy Belz is editor of the Globe Issue and is former senior editor at World magazine.
