For churches
Where it sits, what it costs, what happens first.
1. Pick two hosts. Not necessarily your current leaders. Look for the people others already feel safe around — the ones who get told things. Two hosts, two tables; one table has no one to learn from.
2. Hand them the Host's Guide. Write your name and phone number on the front page of each one, by hand, before you give it away. That line is a promise, and it's the most important thing in the kit.
3. Let them gather 3–6 people. Friends, neighbors, coworkers, church people, not-church people. The hosts invite; you stay out of it. No sign-up sheet, no announcement, no bulletin.
4. First table within three weeks. Food kept simple, ninety minutes, the rhythm in the guide: Meet, Share, Grow, Act. The guide walks them through the first four gatherings story by story.
5. Tell us it happened. One line to comehungry.org/ask: "A table met." That's the only report we'll ever want, and even it is optional.
That's the launch. No banners, no sermon series, no kickoff Sunday. Two tables, started quietly, and your congregation finds out the way neighbors found out about the early church — they catch people talking.
Tables and Sunday. Tables are not competition for your weekend gathering and not a funnel into it. They're where your people live as the church between Sundays — and Sunday becomes the celebration of a family that already knows each other. Expect worship to feel different within a year, in the direction you've always wanted it to.
Your teaching and the tables. Your pulpit, classes, and convictions are the foundation tables stand on. At the table itself, the content is the stories of Jesus, told out loud and talked through with four questions — not a curriculum that competes with your teaching, and not a second pulpit. Hosts are guides, never teachers; when real theological questions surface at a table, the guide trains hosts to bring them to you. That's by design. You stay the teacher.
The open chair. Anyone can sit at a table — the neighbor, the skeptic, the daughter who quit church at nineteen — without believing what your church believes. Belonging comes first; it's the same wisdom that lets anyone attend your service while only members lead it. Your doctrine shapes the hosts and the foundation. The welcome stays wide. That's not a loophole in the model. It's the point of it.
Care and crisis. Tables will surface needs faster than any program you've run — that's a feature, and it needs a plan. The routing is simple and it's printed in every Host's Guide: the table loves people and walks with them; anything beyond a living room comes to the named contact on the guide's front page within a day. Decide who that person is before the first table meets. For emergencies, hosts are told plainly: emergency services first, then you.
Communion, baptism, kids. Whether tables share communion, and how, and whether baptism ever happens outside your building — your tradition and polity decide, and the model has no opinion. Tell your hosts your church's practice before they ask. Children at tables: wonderful, and governed by your existing child-safety policy plus the two-adult rule, no exceptions — the safeguarding guide has the checklist, and the church kit includes a template policy if you need one — which must be reviewed by your insurer or a child-protection expert before you rely on it.
What makes these tables and not renamed small groups. Five things: stories told, not lessons taught. Tables, not classrooms. Kids present, not programmed elsewhere. An act every rhythm — something done, not just discussed. And send, don't split — every table grows its next host and multiplies. A church can drop any of these and run perfectly good small groups. It just shouldn't expect the pattern's results without the pattern.
Free, forever, to any church: The model. This kit. The Host's Guide. The Canon of Fifty and every story prep. The safeguarding guide. Updates to all of it. No license, no membership, no subscription, no tiers, no revenue share, no "free trial." If you were ever asked to pay for any of these, something has gone wrong — and you should say so, loudly.
So how does anyone afford to build this? Here's the honest answer. The founder has been a pastor for nearly forty years and has served the same church for thirty. He started tables there, in his own congregation, before any of this was written down — so none of it is theory he is asking you to test on your people first. He also has a profession: he coaches churches and leaders, under his own name, completely outside this project. That work pays his bills; this project is his calling, and the two never funnel into each other. The project will never sell you anything and never turn the free things paid. Nothing here is gated: take every document without telling us who you are. If you do tell us you're starting a table — a name, an email, where you are — that is so a person can help you, and nothing else. It is never sold, never rented, never mailed at, and never handed to anyone. Ask us to delete it and we will. If you want a person to help you set it up, ask at comehungry.org and say what you need. Some of that is paid work, and the churches that pay fund equivalent help for churches that can't. No church is turned away for money. If yours is a church that can't pay, say so — that's the whole reason the commitment exists, and nobody will ask you to prove it.
Donations. The project accepts them, and they fund the work. They're plainly non-tax-deductible, and they buy nothing — no influence, no naming rights, no thanks beyond these words.
Weeks 1–3 — Start. Two hosts chosen. Your name handwritten in their guides. Tables gathered: 3–6 people each. First gathering happens. Imperfect is fine; met is the goal.
Weeks 4–12 — Protect the rhythm. Add nothing. The whole job in one sentence: check in with your hosts every two weeks, stay out of their living rooms, and resist every idea that begins "you know what would make this even better." The rhythm needs repetitions, not additions.
The three signs of health (what to actually watch for) :
The one question that matters at 90 days: is the table still meeting? Everything else — size, growth, multiplication — has its season later. These are the signs we'd watch; what your church measures is your business.
When something's beyond a table: the host calls you. When something's beyond you or the kit: call us. That's what we're for.
NextShepherding tablesChoosing hosts, walking the first year