The Table That Kept Growing

In 2015, a small church in Clarkston, Georgia — a town sometimes called "the most diverse square mile in America" — started a monthly potluck they called the Long Table. Pastor Jonathan Wilson set up folding tables end to end down the fellowship hall. That first night, twelve people came. A Somali refugee family brought sambusas. A retired white couple from the congregation brought cornbread. A Bhutanese woman carried in a pot of dal she balanced on her hip.

Nobody shared a language fluently. They communicated through gestures, broken English, and the universal vocabulary of passing dishes and nodding approval. A Syrian teenager taught an eighty-year-old deacon how to scoop hummus with flatbread. The deacon taught him how to butter cornbread properly.

Within a year, the Long Table stretched out the front door and into the parking lot. Ethiopians, Burmese, Congolese, Vietnamese — families who had never set foot inside a church found themselves seated at one.

That is exactly what Peter discovered standing in Cornelius's living room. The God he had worshipped his whole life was not a tribal deity with a velvet rope. Peter declared it plainly: "God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him." The table of grace was never meant to seat only one kind of guest. It was built to stretch.