Fellowship Meal

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

A potluck is a church meal to which everyone brings a dish: casseroles, fried chicken, deviled eggs, Jell-O salad, macaroni and cheese, sheet cakes, and the specialty someone has brought for thirty years. It's held in the fellowship hall, usually after a Sunday service, sometimes for a special occasion (homecoming, a farewell, a holiday) and sometimes just because. Everyone lines up, fills a plate, and sits at long tables with whoever's there. It's loud, it's unhurried, and it's where a great many people first felt they belonged to a church.

Variants include the Wednesday night supper (cooked by a team, not brought), the funeral lunch (provided by the church for the family), and the "love feast" or agape meal, a simple shared meal with roots in the early church.

Why people say it

The first Christians "broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts," and the church has never stopped. A shared meal does what a service can't: people talk, children run, newcomers get fed and questioned kindly, and the congregation becomes a family. Jesus ate with everyone; the potluck is the church doing likewise.

How to respond

If you're invited to a potluck, go, and bring something if you can — a store-bought dessert is completely acceptable. If you couldn't bring anything, go anyway; you'll be fed and nobody will mind. Sit with strangers; they'll introduce themselves. Compliment the cook of anything good and she'll bring you a container of it next week. If you have dietary restrictions, ask the person who brought the dish; there's always someone who knows what's in everything.

If you hear it in different churches

Universal, with local flavors. Baptists and Methodists in the South have "dinner on the grounds" and homecoming. Catholics have parish festivals, fish fries, and pancake breakfasts. Lutherans in the Midwest have hotdish and bars. Black churches have some of the best food in American Christianity and know it. Orthodox have the coffee hour after Liturgy, often a full meal. Evangelical megachurches have replaced potlucks with catered events, which some members regret.

Where does “Fellowship Meal” come from?

Acts 2:46 describes the first Christians eating together daily; the agape or "love feast" of the early church (Jude 12) was a shared meal alongside the Eucharist, discontinued by the 300s and revived by Moravians and Methodists in the 1700s. "Potluck" — the luck of whatever's in the pot — is a sixteenth-century English word for an unplanned meal; the American church potluck as an organized bring-a-dish event dates to the late 1800s and became a fixture of Protestant church life in the twentieth century, along with the fellowship hall built to hold it.

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