The Welcome Table

This story also appears over on The Remarkable Ordinary, specifically as issue #10. I’d encourage you to subscribe there: you’ll get short stories of ordinary Christians engaged in remarkably ordinary acts of kindness, hospitality, and integrity.

I go to a church with name tags. We’re big enough to need them, but small enough to hope that, by using them consistently and in the long run, most people won’t need them to know the names of most others most of the time.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash (cropped)

Since we have name tags, we have a welcome table. There, at the folding, plastic-topped, white, 6’ Lifetime table just like the one that gathers dust and cobwebs in your garage, members and regular attendees find pre-printed sticker name tags. Newbies, though? For them, we have a greeter, and that greeter writes their name on a tag and welcomes them to church.

The first Sunday my wife and I visited Redeemer OC was in September 2008. We had moved to Southern California only months earlier, and we had resisted trying Redeemer because it was a not insignificant distance from our home. But we wanted weekly communion, and the nearer-by churches with weekly communion didn’t fit for one reason or another. So we gave in, and drove from Fullerton to Newport Beach one Sunday morning.

That Sunday morning, Kay—not her real name—was working the welcome table. Kay knew immediately that we’d never been to Redeemer. She acknowledged this in a way that communicated that the church cares about connection. She was, as we learned she always seems to be, warm and inviting. She asked us our names, wrote our name tags, and welcomed us to church. Kay’s hospitality was simple, the kind that acknowledges your newness, but without the sense that you’ve just walked into a panopticon.

If that had been all Kay had done, we would have been grateful. That was enough to make us feel like we belonged, that perhaps this was a place we could see ourselves returning.

Kay, though, didn’t stop with name tags and a welcome. She asked where we lived—Redeemer is what you might call a regional congregation, so people come in from all over Orange County. We told her we drove down from Fullerton, and without hesitation Kay grabbed our arms and dragged us over to the Deweys—also not their real name—a couple around our age, who also resided up in North Orange County, in the town next to ours. She made the introduction, told us to keep talking, and disappeared back to her position behind the welcome table.

There would be others who needed name tags.

The following Wednesday evening we found ourselves in the Dewey’s home, for a church small group. And we’ve never looked back.

Since Kay greeted us and grasped us by the arm, and ignoring travel and illness and a global pandemic, I can count on one hand the number of Sundays we have failed to pass by the Redeemer welcome table. Our friendship with the Deweys is, these days, old and sweet, though our paths cross less than I would like—for a variety of reasons, they’ve wound up in a different church, closer to where we live. Even our children are friends, children that didn’t exist back when Kay grabbed my wife and me by the arm. Through and with the Deweys, we’ve grown together with others as well.

Our roots at Redeemer have grown deep and strong. These friendships have sustained each of us through strife and difficulty individually, as couples, in our nuclear and extended families, in our communities, and even at Redeemer. Perhaps especially at Redeemer. We have celebrated together. Birthdays, births, baptisms, promotions, Christmases and Easters and everyday life. Together, we have laughed and cried and feasted and fasted.

None of this happens without our experience with Kay, an experience we now know is far from unique. There is a generation of Redeemer-ites whose first encounter with our church was Kay. And in almost every case, the story is the same. There is the warm welcome, the smile, the name tag, the gentle leading by the arm to make an introduction. The details vary, but those beats in the story are always the same.

That’s what Kay did. Kay wrote name tags at the welcome table, and in making name tags she made a community. At the welcome table, Kay made our church a church.

It’s been a while since Kay regularly worked the welcome table. Lots of newer folks at Redeemer maybe don’t know Kay, and they definitely don’t know how she’s bound our community together. But many of us do. We remember.

We will always remember Kay at the welcome table.