Quitting a pastoral job to do ministry as a mere Christian
Why Kevin quit his job as a pastor SO THAT he could better minister to people through his work, how NOT being explicit about his faith has led to more conversations about faith than most people ever have, and 3 things you can do to bless the most pained workers in our culture.
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[0:00:05.4] JR: Hey everybody, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast, I’m Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians, those of us who aren’t pastors or religious professionals but who work as paralegals, pest control workers, and video game designers?
That’s the question we explore every week and today, I’m posing it to Kevin Finch, the founder and executive director of Big Table, my new favorite nonprofit, and you’re about to see why. Kevin and I recently sat down to talk about why he quit his job as a pastor so that he could better minister to people through his work.
We talked about how not being explicit about his faith has led to more conversations about the gospel that you and I have had, I don't know, in years, and finally, Kevin shared three things that you and I can do today to bless the most pained and hurting workers in our culture. I think you guys are going to love this conversation with my new friend, Kevin Finch.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:14.0] JR: Kevin Finch, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:17.3] KF: Thanks Jordan.
[0:01:19.1] JR: So, the story behind Big Table as I understand, as I’ve read it, kind of goes back to your days as a restaurant critic. And before we get to the details of Big Table, I have to ask because I have long wondered this, is being a restaurant critic all it’s cracked up to be? It sounds amazing, is this the greatest job in the world?
[0:01:36.2] KF: Many days, it is, and then, there’s the few days where you get food poisoning and it’s the worst job in the world.
[0:01:44.8] JR: How long did you do that job?
[0:01:47.0] KF: I was a restaurant critic, kind of moonlighted as a restaurant critic, not full-time for probably 10 to 12 years.
[0:01:55.8] JR: What a gig. I would love to spend a million years, maybe two, as a restaurant critic on the new earth, that’s going into my prayers, and every meal is going to be like that strawberry shortcake, right? Let’s go.
[0:02:07.3] KF: Exactly, yeah, exactly.
[0:02:09.1] JR: Hey, Kevin, your bio says that “Writing about people in the restaurant hospitality industry is what triggered your “Spidey sense” that there is a massive amount of unmet need hidden behind the smiles of those working in the industry.” Tell us more, what’s the story here?
[0:02:26.6] KF: Well, and you probably heard Simon Sinek’s or heard of his book the, Start with the Why.
[0:02:31.2] JR: Yeah, of course.
[0:02:33.3] KF: And, it used to be that I would say, we care for those in crisis that work in the restaurant and hospitality industry, and the response typically was, people understood but they didn’t see why that was needed, that was just like a, “Huh, okay, so, great. Good work.” Just in this last year, I’ve started to – when asked what I do, instead, I answer with a “Why” and say, “The highest concentration of need in our nation, speaking of the United States, is hidden behind the smiles of folks who work in restaurants and hotels, we care for them.” It completely changes the conversation from that point on, either they’re interested or they’re not but the reason for what we do is incredibly clear.
[0:03:19.6] JR: Educate us on that pain, why do you say this is the portion of our population that’s most pained at this cultural moment?
[0:03:28.7] KF: Well, and not just at this cultural moment, it’s always been the case when you think about it, and it’s not for any insidious reason. It’s because the restaurant and hospitality industry has always been the lowest rung on the employment ladder, and so the wages had been low. Actually, the highest rates of poverty in the nation of any working group are the folks who work in the restaurant and hospitality industry.
Just last year, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics put out a study that kind of ranks over 500 different occupations in the US based on income, and the 10 lowest-paying jobs on that ranking were all in the restaurant and hospitality industry. One study suggested that 43% of the folks working in restaurants are below the level that the economists say is needed just to survive daily.
[0:04:23.3] JR: Wow.
[0:04:24.2] KF: That’s almost half of those working in what is the largest industry in the nation when you aggregate restaurants, hotels, bars, coffee shops.
[0:04:33.5] JR: So, we can get lost in this data, right?
[0:04:35.8] KF: Yup.
[0:04:36.2] JR: It’s an overwhelming data, right? And say it’s this insurmountable mountain of a problem. Was there a story though? Like, was there an interaction, a person, a conversation that you have and you’re like, “Man, like, I need to step into this pain, I need to help solve some problems here.”
[0:04:56.3] KF: Funny that you would ask that and there’s plenty of stories along the way, but I don't know that I remember a story that triggered it initially. What happened for me, and I should out myself as a pastor for 15 years before Big Table.
[0:05:11.8] JR: Yeah, now is the time to do that, yeah.
[0:05:13.8] KF: Just say, and there’s something funny about that, that I’ll come back to you but I was moonlighting as a restaurant critic on the side, and it wasn’t like there were some striking story. It was just spending time with chefs, spending time with servers, writing about restaurants, asking questions that really was just a general – something kind of came to the surface.
That’s what I described as my “Spidey sense” or my pastoral spidey sense and went, “Gosh, it seems like a lot of these folks are living right on the edge” and it wasn’t just the poverty statistics. It was the highest rates of drug and alcohol abuse, massive divorce rates, broken relationships, all of these statistics but like you said, you can get lost in the statistics. So, it wasn’t like, “Oh, I see this, I need this.”
It was just, “Gosh, it seems like there’s something wrong” and I started poking around, realized all of these statistics that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, it was way worse. But at this point, I am a pastor. I know how to do that job and it is a job and I’d come from a family of pastors, that’s probably why I ended up pursuing ordination myself was –
[0:06:29.1] JR: Yeah, family business.
[0:06:30.5] KF: My dad, it was the family business. My dad, my grandmother, my cousins, my uncles, it literally was a joke that when we’d all gather, whoever wasn’t ordained had to pray for meals.
[0:06:43.1] JR: That’s good.
[0:06:45.1] KF: So, I joined the family business. I think if people were to grade me, I was a pretty decent pastor, but I have always just loved food, and got this opportunity when I moved to Spokane, Washington in ’99. After about two years, was asked by an editor of a local magazine, the lifestyle magazine to start writing restaurant reviews.
They like my stuff, and I loved it. It just felt like this incredible gift to get to slip out of my normal role and do something else, and I was an English major s, writing was also a delight. And they were paying me to eat, which was just so much fun.
[0:07:25.3] JR: What a country.
[0:07:26.1] KF: Yeah. But when I realized there was a need in this industry, my great sense of Christian guilt or religious guilt, I don't know that that’s necessarily Christian, kind of kicked in and I decided I was going to tie then what I made as a restaurant critic to whatever organization in the country who was caring for folks in the industry. The challenge was, I couldn’t find any. I thought there would be something local, there wasn’t anything in Spokane.
I looked across the state at Seattle, nothing, started poking around the West Coast, eventually was looking at the entire country, and I found – speaking of the fact that here in Florida, there was one small piece of chain in Florida, where the owner was a Christian, and he would hire a young pastor to work his shift on Friday or Saturday night with his crew, just to be a chaplain to the staff.
[0:08:20.0] JR: Yeah.
[0:08:20.4] KF: And I thought, that was kind of interesting, but that’s probably in four or five restaurants, somewhere in Florida and there was a church in Chinatown, in San Francisco that would put on a pot of coffee and put out a plate of donuts at about 10 or 11 at night. So, when the cooks coming out of the Chinese restaurants got off shift, they could come and sit in the church, have a cup of coffee, eat a donut, and read papers in their native language.
That was it, in the nation, for people focused on caring for folks in the restaurant and hospitality industry. And at that point, there were a million and a half nonprofits registered with the IRS.
[0:09:00.9] JR: Wow.
[0:09:01.7] KF: And it was this Emperor’s New Clothes moment for me when I said, “Isn’t anyone seeing what I’m seeing?” And the truth was, no one was but I didn’t know what to do. Back to, again, I had a pretty focused skillset. I was a pastor. That was 2006. In the fall of that year, probably late October or early November, my family went to visit in-laws and so I was home alone, and in the middle of the night, and I was a person who at least at that point in my life, slept wonderfully well through the whole night.
But that particular night, at two AM in the morning, I went from being completely asleep to fully wide awake and on alert, and it was so abrupt that I climbed out of bed, I walked to the foot of the bed and it was just standing there in the dark, just listening, “Did the doorbell right? Did a window break, is someone trying to get into the house? What woke me up?” And this, by the way, fits way more, my Assemblies of God upbringing than my Presbyterian years as a pastor.
[0:10:06.1] JR: Yeah.
[0:10:06.5] KF: I hear a voice and the voice was very clear and very specific, and the voice said, “Kevin” addressed me by name, “I need a pastor for the restaurant industry, are you interested?” And it was a question, it ended with a question, statement, and then a question, and I knew I had to respond. So, standing there in the dark, I answered, and this is a direct quote, “Uh, yeah?”
[0:10:37.4] JR: That’s so good. Sure.
[0:10:40.5] KF: But then, I asked a question back, “What would that look like?”
[0:10:43.7] JR: Yeah.
[0:10:44.2] KF: And the reason I asked that question is, obviously, years of being a pastor, growing up in the church, I knew the story of Samuel. I knew that when you hear a voice in the middle of the night, there’s a chance that you might be talking to God but what I was thinking in that moment was, “If this God, God is absolutely clueless” because the one job that would be a guaranteed failure would be to be a pastor to the restaurant and hospitality industry because I’d been writing about the industry for five years.
Any time anyone in the industry found out that I was a food critic or a food writer, everyone kind of leaned in. It was the kind of conversation where everyone’s voice drops a couple notes and they lean in and they say, “So, tell me about that new breakfast place that just opened around the corner?” or “Where do you go for pizza?” or “My girlfriend’s coming to town, I want to take her to a really nice meal but I don’t have much money. Where should I go?”
[0:11:44.8] JR: Yeah.
[0:11:45.5] KF: After probably five, 10 minutes of this conversation, someone would say, “Dude, man, you got the best job in the world. Can you pay the bills as a restaurant critic?” And I’d laugh, I’d go, “Uh, no, I can barely pay for the food I just ordered.”
[0:12:01.6] JR: Yeah.
[0:12:01.7] KF: So, because we’re so job-focused in this culture.
[0:12:04.7] JR: Yeah, sure.
[0:12:05.2] KF: The next question, “Well, what else do you do?” And without thinking, I would say, “Oh, I’m a pastor.” Instantly, the end of the conversation anytime I was talking to anyone in the restaurant and the hospitality industry. It was like cockroaches when you turn on the light, everyone would just scatter. I could clear a table in 30 seconds and where I realized this was the issue was, this has happened several times, I’m in a bar in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, listening to a band play.
[0:12:33.5] JR: So, that’s what it sounds like, I’m in a bar in Coeur d’Alene Idaho. Okay, got it.
[0:12:40.5] KF: Sitting in a table in the corner, and everyone at the table is someone who works in the industry, and it comes out that I’m a food critic and we start talking and we’re discussing restaurants in Coeur d’Alene Idaho. And then I have this moment where I go, the next question that they’re going to ask me is, “What else do I do?”
[0:12:56.4] JR: Yeah.
[0:12:58.2] KF: And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to sit here and listen to the rest of this set by myself at this table.” So sure enough, that was the next question and instead of saying I was a pastor, I didn’t lie but I said something vague, I said, “Oh, I’m in public relations.” And they go, “Oh, okay, so what about Tacara? That Japanese place, what do you think?”
[0:13:23.2] JR: Right, right, right.
[0:13:24.8] KF: No break in the conversation.
[0:13:25.6] JR: Right, right.
[0:13:26.7] KF: So, as I’m driving the 45 minutes back across the state line to Spokane, I’m just puzzling over this, and I thought, “I need to ask someone why it is that any time I mention I’m a pastor, no one in this industry will talk to me.”
[0:13:42.9] JR: Yeah.
[0:13:44.7] KF: And the woman who years ago, when I was in high school, taught me to cook, I would go over to her house once or twice a month and she would teach me to cook something else, a whole other wonderful story. Her daughter was a college student at Whitworth University in Spokane, and Annie was a Christian. She was also a server. So, I thought, “Gosh, I’m just going to call Annie.”
[0:14:07.6] JR: Yeah.
[0:14:07.8] KF: And see what’s up. So, the next morning, I call Annie. I say, “Annie, why is it that anytime I mention I’m a pastor, no one in the industry will talk to me?” And I kid you not, there was a moment of hesitation in her voice, she said, “Kevin” and I remember, she’s a Christian. She says, “As a server, I hate Christians.”
[0:14:28.7] JR: Yeah.
[0:14:28.9] KF: I hate them.
[0:14:29.9] JR: Yeah.
[0:14:30.8] KF: And then, she went on to say, “They’re the most demanding customers that ever walked into the restaurant. They’re the stingiest tippers that ever sit at my tables and they take the tables for too long often to study the bible. I hate Christians. In fact, we beg not to work on Sundays. It is the worst shift of the week.” And that was just like a bomb dropped and it then immediately made sense and obviously, you would know, and I know too, there are wonderful people who are Christians, who are generous tippers, who take care of theirs but –
[0:15:05.7] JR: But by and large.
[0:15:07.3] KF: By and large.
[0:15:07.4] JR: The reputation, perception, whether or not it’s reality.
[0:15:10.9] KF: Is exactly that. And it’s like, “Well, how would you know that?” I’ll get back to the middle of the night in just a moment but how would you know that at that moment? Well, probably, it’s because you prayed for your meal. For a server who is working nights, weekends, and holidays and probably isn’t showing up in church, it’s someone who comes in that may be how they’re dressed, maybe the time in the week they show up, but probably it’s because they bow their head and prayed for their meal, which Christians typically think of as this wonderful witness in the community.
[0:15:39.3] JR: Right. Right-right.
[0:15:40.7] KF: And yet, then, when they treat that server like dirt, when they leave a tip or they leave a track, in tract in place of a tip, there’s one that actually looks like a USD 20 bill folded over.
[0:15:53.8] JR: I’ve seen this, It’s the worst thing ever made. This is terrible, yeah.
[0:15:55.0] KF: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s probably the tip that has created the most colorful language in the service industry of any – anyway. So, a little bit of a rant there.
[0:16:07.2] JR: So, you call Annie, she tells you this, what do you do?
[0:16:10.2] KF: Right. Well, I just go, “Oh my goodness, it totally makes sense.” But I should say this too. Now, when I speak to churches, I’ll say, “Here’s the deal. If you want to pray before your meal when you go to a restaurant, you absolutely should pray for your meal but if you pray, you had better pay, and I don’t mean 10%, I don’t mean 20%, you tip 30% if you dare to bow your head because what you’re doing is you’re making up for the Christian before you who prayed and stiffed that person.”
[0:16:46.2] JR: Yeah.
[0:16:47.7] KF: So, anyway, big-big tangent. I’m pulling back around to the middle of the night. me asking this question having heard this voice say, “Kevin, I need a pastor for the restaurant industry, are you interested?” That was the reason I responded, “Uh, yeah, but what would that look like?”
[0:17:06.6] JR: Yeah.
[0:17:06.6] KF: Because I’m thinking, if that job existed, I would love that job but that’s a guaranteed failure. And what happened was in the next moment, pitch black room, all of a sudden, there is a Bible that’s lit up in front of me and it’s opened to Acts chapter two, and as I’m reading the end of Acts chapter two on a page that I don't know if it physically existed in the room or not, two phrases just lit up on the page.
The first one was, “They ate together” and the second one, “If anyone had a need, they took care of each other.” And then the voice said, “That’s how you pastor this group of people.” Then the voice was gone, the Bible was gone and I’m just standing alone in the bedroom in the dark and having never had anything happen like this to me before or since, I wasn’t sure what to do but I thought, “It seems like this is important.”
Went downstairs, turned on the light, and wrote down everything I could remember, and then didn’t tell a soul, even my wife, for three weeks because I thought everyone was going to think I was crazy.
[0:18:12.9] JR: Yeah. So, I want to park here for a second and I want to come back to this story.
[0:18:17.3] KF: That was a long story.
[0:18:19.7] JR: No, this is fantastic. This is the story I want you to tell. So, I got to imagine there were a few things that made it problematic that your business card said, pastor. One is just the reputation of Christians in general.
[0:18:30.6] KF: Yeah.
[0:18:30.8] JR: But two, when you’re a religious professional, there’s an automatic barrier that’s put up between you and the mere Christians or just mere people out in the world, right? Because now, you’re not just a customer at the restaurant, right? And they’re not just your waiter or waitress, they’re a salvation project, right? Is that fair?
[0:18:54.6] KF: Yeah. I think that the church and this is, I’m just trying to frame it this way and I’ve not framed it this way before, but it seems like religion has become in some of its institutional forms –
[0:19:09.4] JR: Yes.
[0:19:10.1] KF: Transactional, rather than transformational, and so people would look at a pastor not necessarily because it’s true but as, “They want something from me, this is just a transaction and what they want is they want me to sell my soul to them.”
[0:19:31.6] JR: Yeah.
[0:19:32.5] KF: Or to who they worship. And in our current culture, I don’t think people respond well to something like that.
[0:19:41.6] JR: I know they don’t, right? And this is why I’m so passionate about the work that mere Christians do in the world because mere Christians are oftentimes, not always, but in a much better position to build relationships with the lost.
[0:19:54.2] KF: Oh, absolutely.
[0:19:54.5] JR: Because there’s not that assumed transaction at the table. It’s just, “No, we’re just two people. You’re serving me, I’m enjoying this meal, and we’re just building a relationship” right? And it just breaks down that artificial divide. All right, so fast forward, fun fact, you – so you wait three weeks. Fun fact, your uncle was the great pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson, which is – which just blows my mind. Did you tell Uncle Gene about this vision?
[0:20:24.0] KF: Eventually I did.
[0:20:24.7] JR: What did he say?
[0:20:25.6] KF: I was scared. Actually, that was a conversation – because he had and my study leave for a number of years as a pastor wasn’t to go to conferences or something. It was just to drive over to Montana and spend a week with Uncle Gene and Aunt Jen.
[0:20:42.4] JR: Yeah.
[0:20:42.3] KF: And none of the elder boards or senior pastors that I work for could question that.
[0:20:46.6] JR: Yeah, right, exactly.
[0:20:49.5] KF: “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’m just going to Montana, going to extend a week with Eugene Peterson.”
[0:20:53.1] JR: Yeah, exactly.
[0:20:53.4] KF: And I would walk in the woods, and so we’d had plenty of conversations over the years about the kind of holy call of being a pastor, and certainly in Uncle Gene’s mind, and you can certainly see it in his writing that wasn’t, “Build the biggest and best church.” That was, “I don't think you can be a pastor for more than about two or 300 people at the most.”
[0:21:16.2] JR: Yeah.
[0:21:17.0] KF: It’s much more of a parish live in amongst a small group of people, quiet, not flashy, that role. And I had served a couple of churches that were a little larger than that but I would have done it in a way that I was trying to live out what he – I agreed with so much of what he said.
[0:21:38.3] JR: Yeah.
[0:21:38.8] KF: So, I assume that when I told them about this sense of call to start something to care for the restaurant and hospitality industry, he would say, “Kevin, just keep doing what you’ve been doing. Be a pastor, be faithful with what you’ve been given. That’s what you should do.” I was almost certain that was what he’s going to say.
Instead, what he said – we were sitting at their table as it started to get dark one night and I just told him the story, he said, “Kevin, that sounds exactly like what you should do. That sounds like you.” And I think part of that was just – he and my aunt had – we’d spend enough time together and he kind of knew me. He had seen me grow up, he had seen how many pancakes I would shovel into my mouth down by the lake every summer when we had flathead pancakes.
[0:22:29.5] JR: Yeah.
[0:22:30.2] KF: So, there was something that fit in that and that was a huge gift. If he had had a different reaction, I probably still would have chosen to listen to what really felt like God’s call in my life.
[0:22:44.0] JR: Yeah.
[0:22:43.9] KF: But man, it is a gift when someone that you respect and that you trust confirms what you hear God is saying to you directly.
[0:22:52.1] JR: Yeah, amen. All right, so hey, let's fast forward to present day. We’ve been dancing around this, let’s talk explicitly about what does Big Table do, this nonprofit that you founded after this crazy call from the Lord. What does this nonprofit you founded do today?
[0:23:07.3] KF: What we do is exactly what that call in the middle of the night was. We create community around food and then we care for those who are in crisis, no strings attached. So, in each city, we do these amazing dinners that are five, six, seven courses cooked by some of the best chefs in the community, and there’s no cost.
The folks at the table are not folks in the community that could afford that meal, the folks at the table are servers and dishwashers and hosts and room attendants for hotels, chefs, managers, folks in the industry for one night become the guests. It’s this wonderful reversal where the folks who would normally be the guests serve for a night and the folks who have been working these dinners for years and years and years become a guest, sometimes for the first time.
[0:24:00.3] JR: This is a parable of the kingdom.
[0:24:02.3] KF: Exactly, it’s so fun. And at that meal, we don’t ask for money. We just say, “Tonight is a gift, it’s a gift for you, we know how tough this industry is” and at the end of the night, I’ll get up or one of our city directors, whoever is kind of MCing the night will say, “Do you know anybody that’s hurting? Because this meal is the most clear representation, it’s easy to take pictures of a dinner like this and all this wonderful food.”
But what we do day in and day out between these meals is care for folks in the industry who are hurting. Who do you know that we could care for? And at the very first dinner that we did, the heart of what we do is that referral. It’s not someone asking for help themselves. It would be you, Jordan, if you’re a guest in a restaurant builder relationship with one of your servers and realize they’re in trouble or hurting, you would be the one who would put in the referral at the big table and say, “Sally, who waited on me last night. I think she’s really hurting, could you reach out to her?”
Often, those referrals come from a coworker that sees someone struggling, a manager, someone in the industry, and what that does is it completely changes that relationship from the beginning. If you are the person asking for help for yourself, which I certainly experienced from the folks coming into churches over the years asking for help, you’re goal is to make yourself look as bad as possible to get to the front of the line to get them help faster or more than the person that’s going to come with their story next to say, “I need more help than this guy.”
What a weird bizarre way to do that but that’s what every nonprofit or almost every nonprofit in the nation is set up to do, where you come, you ask for help, try to prove how messed up you’ve made your life in order to be helped. For us, that referral means that their first contact with Big Table is us reaching out to them by text, by phone, or popping into where they work and saying, “Your friend mentioned that you’re going through a tough time, can I buy you a cup of coffee? And see if there is something we can do because we exist to care for you and others in our industry.”
[0:26:26.8] JR: And I want to make one thing clear because I think a lot of people are going to assume this, you are not sitting around this big table using super religious language, right? In fact –
[0:26:38.0] KF: No.
[0:26:38.5] JR: This article I read said your team is intentional about not using “unfamiliar and alienating religious language.” Talk about this.
[0:26:46.9] KF: Sure. Yeah, well, we don’t even pray for the meal because our goal is to meet folks where they’re at.
[0:26:54.9] JR: Amen.
[0:26:55.6] KF: Enter their lives, listen well, and intentionally value them. And then in that process, be paying attention for where the Holy Spirit is already at work in their lives.
[0:27:06.6] JR: Yes.
[0:27:07.4] KF: Coming out of the reformed tradition, which I jumped to, my big rebellion was to become a Presbyterian. There’s this wonderful idea of God’s sovereignty that God gets there first, that God is always before. So when we enter anyone’s life, our job isn’t to bring the gospel to them, our job is to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit is already at work doing in their life and get in step with that.
So, for us with our Big Table dinners, any time we meet with someone it’s that lead by listening, engaged in there, so at the dinners, there wouldn’t be anything like that, and it’s so intentional. I had a woman and this is a wonderful story, she was a server at one of our dinners in her section and we do serve wine at these dinners.
[0:28:03.2] JR: Like at the feast of the lamb.
[0:28:04.6] KF: Yes, that gets her. In her section was a chef that I knew pretty well but she didn’t. And I think at that point in his life, he actually was probably what I would describe as a functional alcoholic. It wasn’t impacting his job but he was drinking too much and as she is serving this dinner, she just sees him pounding the wine. At one point, we ask people to step away from the table for kind of an intermezzo, and what he did was he’s actually taking the glasses of people’s wine near him and pouring their wine into his glass.
[0:28:39.6] JR: Oh, yeah.
[0:28:40.3] KF: Then, the evening goes on, I get up, I tell them they’re welcome but I don’t present the gospel, I don’t give an altar call, and I heard secondhand from her that she was just like, “What are you doing? I thought this was a Christian organization, I thought you were?” And what I did was what I would typically do, I said, “Anna, let’s go for coffee” and actually, we actually met for lunch.
And I said, “Here’s why” and I explained a little bit about the industry, I explained a little bit about the history and I said, “I could have presented the gospel last week during the dinner but if I had, no one would accept an invitation to the next dinner.”
[0:29:20.8] JR: Never.
[0:29:21.7] KF: Because they would go, “Oh, there’s the string attached, there’s the catch. This is transactional, this is they want something from me and it’s: they want to present me with the gospel.” The fun part about Anna is she and her husband have been deeply involved in Big Table over the years because they went, “Oh, I get it.” And that, I think, I’ve not asked her but I suspect that was a pretty significant shift in her life to think differently about how the gospel moves into the lives of people who have either not heard of have been hurt in the past and are guarded against it.
[0:30:01.5] JR: Yeah. No, I love this so much. It’s serving first, sharing second, right? It is accepting that God is getting there first and our job is to listen and watch for where The Spirit is leading. I think you mentioned this in your pre-interview but you said something that really struck me. You talk about how you guys do track.
[0:30:19.4] KF: Oh yeah.
[0:30:20.3] JR: How often faith becomes part of the conversation with the folks that you’re caring with and when you told me the number, I was like, “Oh, five percent, maybe 10 percent of these conversations move at the spiritual” but you said it hovered around 50%, which blew my mind. Why do you think it’s so high? What are you guys getting right? And to be clear, just serving the meal is good in it of itself, right?
[0:30:48.8] KF: Right.
[0:30:49.5] JR: But in addition to that, you’re also having to have these spiritual conversations, why do you think that number is so high?
[0:30:54.7] KF: Well, and I would say, I don’t want that number to be too high.
[0:31:00.6] JR: Yeah, I get that.
[0:31:01.8] KF: Because if that’s the case, I don’t think we’re paying attention to The Spirit, we’re just kind of jamming the gospel into every conversation. You may have heard this story of the pastor who’s doing a children’s sermon, sits down with the kids on the steps in the front of the church, and says, “All right kids, what’s brown and furry and likes nuts?” One little girl shoots her hands up and she says, “Pastor, I know the answer is Jesus but that sure sounds like a squirrel to me.”
And I honestly think that we’ve programmed so many folks to say, “I have got to jam the gospel into any conversation before the Holy Spirit opens the door that if those numbers were higher, I would be concerned but the fact that they kind of hover between 40 and 60% year on year in any given city for us is exactly what we want to see, because we want our people to be just paying attention and sometimes that’s as simple as saying, after listening to them for an hour or an hour and a half and saying, “Man that is really hard. Would it be okay if I prayed for you either right now or sometimes it’s just this next week? I’m going to be praying for you.”
A lot of times, you can tell in a conversation if you’re not trying to get some packet of information across to someone, you can – I would almost call it a bid, where you bid to see how they respond. So for me, with anyone in the industry, I literally will joke, and I do this actually at every dinner when I get up to talk and say that this dinner is a gift, I’ll out myself and say, “Oh, you know, there’s one other thing you should know about me. You should know that I was a pastor for 15 years but anytime I mention that, none of you would talk to me.”
And with 48 people sitting at that table having had a glass of wine or two and six courses of wonderful food, they always laugh. The whole table laughs but it’s the laugh like, “Yeah, I wouldn’t talk to you.”
[0:33:16.2] JR: Right.
[0:33:16.7] KF: Once I’ve said that, I can go on to say this, “So, here’s the deal, if you’ve got questions about faith I’d love to talk to you, any of our team would love to talk to you but if you’re agnostic, if you’re atheist, if you’ve been burned by religion, you are completely welcome at this table because we are here to create community around food and care for folks who are hurting, period.” And I can’t tell you how much that frees people up once they realize you are a person of faith.
But you’ve not painted a target on their chest because of that, then they want to have a conversation with you, then they want to go, “Tell me how that works” or “What’s going on?” but they need to know that they’re safe first. If they don’t know they’re safe, the last thing they’re going to do is get into those deep waters where they've probably been hurt painfully in the past.
[0:34:19.9] JR: If you guys did these big table dinners as a means of sharing the gospel with as many people as you could, it would not be successful.
[0:34:29.4] KF: Nope.
[0:34:30.1] JR: You wouldn’t be having them. The difference is when you do it and see it as intrinsically good in it of itself and this translates to you, listener, regardless of what your work is, when you just go to work and serve your customers, and that is an end, and that is good and eternally significant in it of itself, it is when you do that well that ironically you get more chances to share the hope that is within you, right Kevin?
[0:34:54.9] KF: Exactly, yeah.
[0:34:56.8] JR: Hey, so speaking of a big part of the reason why we host the show is to remind mere Christians that the fact that their work does matter beyond evangelism. It matters in the grand scheme of eternity, it matters to God, and we probably have thousands of listeners working at the restaurant industry who are listening right now, what do you want to say to them about the God-giving goodness and dignity of their work?
[0:35:19.2] KF: I think, well when you look at the imagery in the scripture of where we end up, we ended up at a meal.
[0:35:25.8] JR: That’s right.
[0:35:26.8] KF: Where everyone is welcome, it’s the biggest table. There’s a little bit of a hint hopefully of the marriage supper of the lamb in who we call ourselves as Big Table, that there’s space for everyone at the table and you can’t see the visual of our logo but it’s a logo that has a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and for anyone, actually, I had someone point this out just yesterday, a server in a coffee shop who happen to be a Christian herself.
She goes, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there with that logo” and it’s true that anyone who is a believer will look at it and go, “Oh, communion, the Lord’s supper.” What’s fascinating to me is that anyone in the restaurant and hospitality industry who doesn’t have that faith context looks at that same logo and goes, “Oh, a party” because for them, you put together a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, you got a party.
And for us, if we’re doing our job, it is going to be both. It’s going to be this rich community where you meet God but also a party. So, I would say to those folks in the restaurant hospitality industry, you’re just ahead of the rest of us in doing what our hospitable God is inviting all of us to.
[0:36:40.6] JR: Yes. Yes, I love that. We had Aarti Sequeira, the Food Network chef on the podcast a while back talking about this passage in Isiah where the Father is preparing a feast for us, right? She said, “The Father’s hands are in the kitchen” which I love that imagery, right? And our listeners doing that work are previewing that or playing a trailer of that right now when you make those meals with excellence and love.
All right, so now, I want to turn the attention to the rest of our listeners, Kevin, who do not work in a restaurant but dine in them.
[0:37:10.2] KF: Yep.
[0:37:11.0] JR: We already talked about one practical thing we can do to bless the restaurant workers at each meal, you know, tip generously, right? What else? What else could we be doing to make waiters and waitresses flock to the tables of believers?
[0:37:28.7] KF: So, if any of your listeners go to our website, we have a little sheet you can download called, How to Care while Eating and Sleeping, which is –
[0:37:38.1] JR: Oh, this is awesome. Okay, great we’ll find it.
[0:37:40.4] KF: Very practical ways to do things and I’ll describe several simple things you can do that require nothing and then one that I really would love for you to try. One of the things you’re going to want to do is simply use names but use them not in a patronizing way, so when you get into a restaurant, one of your goals is going to be to ask for your server’s name. They may or may not have a name tag on, even if they’ve got a name tag on, don’t just use their name because of that nametag.
Ask them like you would in an introduction when you meet anyone else. “So, my name is Kevin, could you tell me your name?” and then throughout the meal use that, but don’t use that in the way that it’s typically used by a guest with a server, which is a little syrupy and a little patronizing, “Oh Sally, could you bring me another lemon slice?” There’s something about a tone of voice that’s different when you are seeing someone below you that you’ve got to just take out of it but use their name.
And then at the end of that meal, when you write on the receipt that will you know, use their name.
[0:38:54.9] JR: Yes.
[0:38:55.9] KF: Give them a good tip, 20% is pretty much the minimum in my book and then on that, write something, because hopefully you’ve had a little bit of a conversation with them and say – and I don’t know why I keep using the name Sally – but, “Sally, you’ve got a beautiful smile. Thanks for taking care of us today” and sign that. Our city director here in Spokane, Washington, he and his wife went to a little restaurant for dinner on their anniversary and he wrote a note to that server, their server that night on the receipt wasn’t back in that restaurant for a year.
A year later, they were there, and that same server was in the restaurant not serving them that night. She came over to their table and said, “I remember you. You wrote me a note on your receipt. I have that receipt taped to my mirror at home.”
[0:39:56.1] JR: Wow.
[0:39:56.6] KF: Think about the number of receipts that you’ve signed over the last month or the last year, ten seconds and you can communicate to that person that you care. It’s not again, it’s not a pitch, it’s not a, “You need Jesus” it’s just, “Thank you. I saw you. I see you” and the benefit there on that is not only does that server see that but their manager is going to see that as well, so you get a twofer on that.
[0:40:24.9] JR: That’s good.
[0:40:25.5] KF: I use my phone, speaking about names then, what I’d love for you listeners to do is pick a couple of restaurants and again, I’m the guy who loves all the new stuff. A couple of places that are your favorite places to eat and be intentional about getting to know the people there, go in early, go in late, not when they’re rushed so that you have a chance to have some questions and then when you notice something, write it down.
I have – every restaurant I go into that is in a community where I’m spending time, I create an entry in my phone for that restaurant and then note the names of the servers that I’ve met, of the staff that I’ve met there, and then some details about their lives as overtime I hear that so that I can circle back to that relationship the next time I’m in. And sometimes you have to figure out, “Gosh, how do I remember who it is?”
Like blonde hair but that hair may be a different color the next time you go in, so blonde hair, nose ring, big tattoo left forearm, you know?
[0:41:27.3] JR: That’s good.
[0:41:28.5] KF: But that kind of intentionality in relationship is simply at – that’s how our – Jill, who is our associate executive director calls our, How to Care while Eating and Sleeping, little thing basically just how to be nice. It’s that simple.
[0:41:45.1] JR: But it’s so rare.
[0:41:46.1] KF: Oh yeah.
[0:41:47.1] JR: It’s simple but unbelievably rare by Christians and non-Christians, right?
[0:41:51.6] KF: Oh, absolutely.
[0:41:52.3] JR: And we should be the ones showing remarkable love and care to those who we work with and dine with and buy from. Kevin, this is so good. Hey, we always wrap up every episode with the same three questions. Number one, if we were to open up your Amazon order history and look at which books you give away the most, what would we find?
[0:42:11.2] KF: Okay, there is a book called Rocket Fuel.
[0:42:15.0] JR: Great book.
[0:42:16.0] KF: That I love because of the way it has – so, in talking to other folks that are building an organization. That’s just a wonderful book. One book that I just recently read that I probably will be giving away is called, Cues, by Vanessa Van Edwards, which talks about both warmth and competence cues that we give off that together represent charisma and allow people to either trust or dismiss us.
[0:42:45.1] JR: Okay, that sounds super interesting.
[0:42:47.6] KF: And then this will probably be a first on here, it’s a cookbook called, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, by Marcella Hazan.
[0:42:57.3] JR: I love it.
[0:42:59.0] KF: One of the best simple –
[0:43:00.8] JR: What makes that great?
[0:43:01.7] KF: Best simple tomato sauce recipes on the planet.
[0:43:04.5] JR: There you go.
[0:43:05.4] KF: Three ingredients and a lemon-roasted chicken that anyone can do that is just brilliant.
[0:43:10.9] JR: I love it.
[0:43:11.9] KF: That’s a perfect wedding gift.
[0:43:14.5] JR: I love it. Hey, Kevin, who would you want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel influences the work they do in the world?
[0:43:21.8] KF: Sandra McCracken, wonderful musician-songwriter based in Nashville. I would certainly think she would be a wonderful voice.
[0:43:30.4] JR: Kevin, before we sign off, you’re talking to this global audience of mere Christians, some of them working in hospitality, some of them not. What’s one thing you want to reiterate to them before we sign off today?
[0:43:41.2] KF: This isn’t rocket science, it’s relationship. There is a fun little thing that they can do through our website again that’s called an Unexpected 20 envelope. That is incredibly powerful in that if they pick this up or there is a version that you can just print off as a PDF and make it your own house. The idea is that you would put 20 bucks inside this tiny little envelope and when you’re in a restaurant, when you’re in a hotel, look for a person who’s invisible that no one else is noticing.
And when you’re done, walk up to that person, and just hand them that envelope with USD 20 inside and say, “Thanks for what you do, make sure you look inside.” It’s not a tip, it’s a gift, and what that USD 20 does to a person working in minimum wage who may be below the poverty line even with that smile on their face is incredible. But what it does for your listener who does that is it opens their eyes to see people that literally they never saw before or never saw before as people. It will change their lives.
One of my favorite ways to use it is to having gotten to know my server by name. At the end of the meal, in addition to that little note that I’m going to write in my receipt, I’ll hand her the envelope and say, “I’m also going to give you this envelope in addition to a great tip. Would you give this to the person in the restaurant who is having the worst week?”
[0:45:07.4] JR: That’s good.
[0:45:08.1] KF: And then she or he gets to be a part of caring for someone else too. It’s amazing. So, all of that is simply relationship, some intentional tools that help you do what all of us can do anytime we just stop and take a moment to be intentional.
[0:45:28.6] JR: So good. Kevin, I want to commend you for being intentional with your work. I’m just blown away by your willingness to leave your career, this established family business of your career as a pastor in order to do ministry and be the hands and feet of Jesus serving some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. I just requested five of these Unexpected 20 envelopes that I am going to be giving out.
As soon as we hang up, I’m going to be making a donation to Big Table. Guys, if you want to learn more about the incredible work that Kevin and his team are doing, you could do so at big-table.com. Kevin, thank you so much for spending the time with us and our audience at Mere Christians today.
[0:45:28.6] KF: A delight to talk, thanks, Jordan.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:46:19.5] JR: Man, I love that episode. I just gave to Big Table, I hope you guys will too. Hey, I hope you guys are loving the Mere Christians Podcast. If you are, tell us. Tell us what specifically you’re loving, which episode you’re loving as you leave a review to the show on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Hey, thank you, guys, so much for tuning in this week, I’ll see you next time.
[END]