Gather round!
The weekly "roundtable" meal is a central rhythm of the Eden Fellows experience that each cohort shares. This shared meal and gathering is a time for fellowship, learning, discernment, and the formation of core relationships that provide the foundation of the cohort's experience together over the Eden Fellows year. It's the heartbeat of the program that keeps everything else going! Fellows is primarily about community, after all, and the formation of what we like to call “vibrant families of Jesus.”
This year, the roundtable gathering took shape as what we called “Fellows Fridays,” a couple of hours together on Friday afternoons. We kicked the afternoon off right, typically starting with a chance to cook a meal together. After all, cooking is one of those incredibly valuable skills that many of our fellows haven’t yet had the chance to master, plus working together to create a meal is a great way to build deeper relationships! Plus, we love good food—and we’ve even had enough of it this year that we’ve sometimes wondered if maybe we ought to call ourselves the Eatin’ Fellows instead. 😂
As we share our roundtable meal, we also share in an opportunity to check in with each other about how our hearts are doing, how things are going in our lives, and what we see God doing in and around us. This helps connect us to our own hearts as well as to each other and God, paving the way for continued conversation and explorations about whatever it is that God has put in front of us for that day. We pray, we read scripture, we talk over something that’s been a theme we’ve seen arising in our midst, we share in a spiritual discipline or explore some new content together... Wherever the time together leads, it’s always rich, a blessing to us all!
This kind of gathering is a simple rhythm. It doesn’t require a formula or an agenda. All it really requires is presence with each other before God, who directs our time together. But what a powerful practice that is, one that truly is revolutionary and transformative!
