Every Friday I buy some halal meat to go with our pizzas, since we get a number of Muslim young people from our neighbourhood coming for an action movie and to cook their own pizza in our oven. I actually didn't buy any this week, since we had so many other friends coming. We had lots of kids, South Africans,good friends, and neighbour kids we haven't seen before, and Amerca's best pastor, Rev. Paul Jackson of Glenwood Community Church who blessed the food.
Pizza party is not church for us, but it is one of the weekly loops in our lives that allows others to enter our life of celebration. We are dependent on others to throw different kinds of parties to allow different parts of kingdom living to find expression. It is also an element of regularity for our family and our transient lifestyle. We have pizza every Friday, even when traveling. We got the idea from an International Teams guy (Tim Barnes) in Illinois who eats pizza and watches a football game each week wtih his family and friends. I have heard that a lot of people do this on a regular basis.
PREDICTION:
I believe that FOOD and cooking are as essential to emerging/organic church than what music was to contemporary/seeker church. I also predict that in the next few years, as emerging churches stop emerging and settle down into their calling, that we will see a resurrection of the church cookery books in the tradition of the Mennonite and Amish churches. Although these will be web based instead of print.
I have discovered that one of the secrets of a good party is keeping people out, but then sometimes that is really hard to do. So we just let people in and let the house fill up.
The movie (Timeline) was really lame, but the ladies went for a walk and a prayer in the park while the men looked after the thousands of children (my wife counted 19 kids that were in our house). Luckily we have a monstrous backyard, comprising about 10 feet X 10 feet of prime London real estate.
The Pizza was great. One of those times when all the ingredients were just right and you knew the pizza would be good by the smell of the dough in the kitchen. But there was no halal meat, so Salman went back home and came over with more ingredients for his pizza.
