Anna Woofenden - This Is Gods Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls

In this beautiful book, Anna Woofenden tells the story not just of a new church, but of a new kind of church. If you are close to giving up on the church, or if you, like Anna, feel an irrepressible seed of hope for the church growing in you, this is the book youve been waiting for. When you come to this sentence late in the book, youll dare to believe that it is actually true: God is making church all over the place, beyond the walls, on the streets, in the soil, and around the table. And even moreyoull want to be part of the buzzing, colorful, nourishing garden that God is growing wherever there are willing gardeners to join in the fun.

BRIAN D. MCLAREN , speaker, activist, and author of The Great Spiritual Migration

The story of the Garden Church is a story about redemption, new imagination, and embracing abundance. Anna Woofenden boldly sketches a personal story, not shying away from the realities of life in community and the intense challenges of the pastoral vocation, but offering a vision of expansive community where we all can come in our brokenness to be healed. If you are longing for a new vision for what the church can be, read this story of hope and courage and let the hope for beloved community grow and flower in you.

AMY BUTLER , public theologian and former senior minister of the Riverside Church

This book is a gift for those longing to hear how to restore the streets, rebuild the ruins, repair the breach, and raise up the foundations of a new church. The Garden Church is like a spring whose water does not fail. It is rowdy and elegant, ancient and new, difficult and true.

SARA MILES , author of Take This Bread and founder and founder and director of The Food Pantry

People often ask me how to get millennials to come back to church. Many of the answers are right here in this bookwe have to be willing to reimagine church, literally from the ground up, giving place to imagination and holy risk-taking. As Anna Woofendens gorgeous memoir makes clear, its both challenging and hopeful to sift through the compost heap of the inherited Christian tradition to find what will, with Gods help, spring forth into new life.

JANA RIESS , author of Flunking Sainthood and The Next Mormons

Planting a sustainable new church can seem like an impossible task, yet Anna Woofenden accomplished it with an empty lot and a dinosaur sculpture. Then Woofenden infused This Is Gods Table with her wisdom, showing us the practical steps without hiding the struggles. This book is a beautiful glimpse into the hard and generous work of growing a church, a garden, and a community.

CAROL HOWARD MERRITT , pastor and author of Healing Spiritual Wounds

In a time when the church seems marked more by Weve never done it this way before than by We can dare to take chances with Gods love, Anna Woofenden delivers a book that tells an important story about taking chances. Everyone who reads This Is Gods Table especially those who care about the future of congregational lifewill discover that there really is enough right under our feet to make church together, and that God is already blessing our wildest ideas about the church.

PAUL D. FROMBERG , rector of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

Tired of This is what the church used to be stories? Does your imagination of what church can be need a new lens? Then This Is Gods Table is the book you need. Anna Woofenden offers readers a riveting account of what it means to lead a new church movement with conviction, vulnerability, and most of all, hope. We all have much to learn from her.

ELIZABETH HAGAN , pastor and author of Birthed and Brave Church

In This Is Gods Table , Anna Woofenden joins God at work by sowing kindness, planting gardens, and growing an unconventional church on a vacant lot. Profoundly lovely, wise, challenging, and grace-haunted, it is a story every pastor, congregant, and Christian should read to discover what it might look like to seek the peace of the city and end up forever transformed.

COURTNEY ELLIS , pastor, speaker, and author of Almost Holy Mama and Uncluttered

With stunning clarity and refreshing humility, Anna Woofenden reminds us that God is making church all over the place. Woofenden chronicles the gestation, birth, and growth in grace of the Garden Church with poignancy, honesty, and generosity of spirit. Her pastoral wisdom reminds us that even in the face of scarcity, there is always enough as the people of God persist in a heavenly way of being on earth. This book will nourish your soul and till the soil of your imagination to envision the church in a fresh, life-giving way.

STEPHANIE LOBDELL , campus pastor at Mount Vernon Nazarene University and author of Signs of Life

At once a memoir and an ethnography, a story and a sermon. Through the lens of this small but mighty garden church, Anna Woofenden advances the tradition of Christian innovation while elucidating Gods enduring care and relevance for us all. A joyful ministry about which to read!

HARRISON BLUM , director of religious and spiritual life at Amherst College

When Anna Woofenden felt Gods prompting to plant a church, she didnt necessarily expect actual planting to be involved. But down on her knees, with hands in the dirt, she faithfully tended both crops and a congregation to life. This Is Gods Table shares the story not just of the Garden Church, but of a community strengthened together through its hunger. It tells the story of a town where allwhether pastor or parishioner, housed or homeless, longtime resident or new to townlearn to feed and be fed, thanks to an unassuming plot of land and the power of the Holy Spirit.

KENDALL VANDERSLICE , author of We Will Feast

Herald Press

PO Box 866, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803

www.HeraldPress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Woofenden, Anna, author.

Title: This is Gods table : finding church beyond the walls / Anna Woofenden.

Description: Harrisonburg, Virginia : Herald Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045481 (print) | LCCN 2019045482 (ebook) | ISBN
9781513804835 (paperback) | ISBN 9781513804842 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781513804859 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Garden Church (San Pedro, Los Angeles, Calif.)--History. |
San Pedro (Los Angeles, Calif.)--Church history. | Church.

Classification: LCC BX8741.S26 W66 2020 (print) | LCC BX8741.S26 (ebook)
| DDC 277.94/94083--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045481

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045482

THIS IS GODS TABLE

2020 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22803. 800-245-7894.
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019045482

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-5138-0483-5 (paperback);
978-1-5138-0484-2 (hardcover); 978-1-5138-0485-9 (ebook)

Printed in United States of America

Cover design by Reuben Graham

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

Portions of chapters 3, 7, and 10 appeared in the January 16, 2019, issue of Christian Century and are used here with permission. Portions of chapter 8 appeared in Brethren Life and Thought 62, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 201718), and are used here with permission.