This series focuses on how food, feeding others, and being fed, reveal who we are called to be as Christians. This series involves weekly hands-on activities such as games, logic puzzles, and skits with randomly assigned cast members, paired with thoughtful reflective activities.
While each session is built around food, feeding, or being fed, it is always an entry point to complex concepts like mortality, worthiness, inclusion, and embodiment. This series is meant to challenge teenagers and leaders alike to consider how we might engage in our faith with every bite.
Details:
$75.00
Week 1—We Need Food
This week’s lesson is about finitude and the way God provides for us. Young people will play a game meant to invite them into the frustrating reality of their own limitations, and then reflect on the Israelites’ experience in the wilderness, relying on God every morning for manna. After reflecting on our cultural attitudes toward independence and exploring God’s intention in our finite design, students will be invited to consider all the ways God and our communities provide for us.
Scripture—Exodus 14:16-20a
Week 2—Feeding Others
This week’s lesson is about feeding and being fed, and in particular, Jesus’s call to feed the hungry without discrimination or condition. Students will be asked to consider their own internalized messages about worthiness and who deserves to be cared for, and called to consider the ways that offering unconditional mercy may make them more able to receive it. They will do an alignment activity that calls them to give away a treat “won” earlier in the lesson as a blessing for those in need, and reflect on how they are called to feed others next.
Scripture—Matthew 25:35-40
Week 3—Our Tables
This week’s lesson invites students to consider which tables they chose to sit at and which tables Jesus may be calling them to through his examples. This lesson opens with a playful high-school cafeteria game and utilizes the story of Jesus dining with tax collectors to challenge students to consider who we are called to community and the way it contrasts with cultural narratives that encourage tribal and partisan divisions and warn young people to spend their time only with the “right” kind of people. Finally, it walks young people through an imaginative exercise in joining those they consider “other” for a meal, helping them mentally rehearse a new way of being in the world.
Scripture—Matthew 9:10-13
Week 4—God’s Tables
This session explores the Lord’s Supper, particularly its relationship to humanness and the simplicity of food and table. The Lord’s table is one of the most formative tables we can sit at, and the meals we eat. We invite students to engage in a randomly cast reader’s theater of the Last Supper, attempting to unsettle any ingrained imaginations of the meal and see it in a new way. We ask students to unpack the layers of meaning in the meal and how those meanings intersect. In our theology section, we focus on embodiment, humility, and the choice Jesus made to share this sacred message, not in a temple, not with angels, but over a meal with friends. We invite them to take a symbol of communion with them as they leave, to remind them of Christ’s work in their world.
Scripture—Matthew 29:20-30
Holy Disruptions series are designed to delve into the unique experiences of today’s youth, spark deep theological reflection, and foster transformative discussions. Our three-part methodology empowers students to align with God’s vision and desires for the world.
Facilitate a disorienting experience – where students are most receptive to growth.
Invite students to investigate their reaction to the disorienting moment.
Ask students to explore what God says about it.
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