Turning Sunday Lunch into an Opportunity for Outreach
Restaurant servers often experience the Sunday church crowd as demanding, impatient, and poor tippers. Barnabas Day offers a simple way for Christians to change that reputation by treating servers with generosity, kindness, and the love of Jesus.
- Sunday restaurant service can shape how servers perceive Christians and Jesus.
- Barnabas Day encourages groups to intentionally thank, affirm, and generously bless their server.
- Simple acts of kindness can create meaningful opportunities for outreach in the local community.
By Tyler Edwards
It’s no secret in the world of restaurant employees that Sunday morning is the worst shift. The problem is not missing church, it’s serving the people who went to church.
Sunday morning consistently boasts the rudest, most demanding, least patient, and cheapest people.1 I once heard a waiter say, “When I work Sundays and I see a group bow their heads to pray, I know I can kiss my tip good-bye.” Having been a server for five years, I can say these critics have a point.
I’m embarrassed that we, “the church crowd,” have earned this reputation. Servers call us hypocrites because what we say is not consistent with how we treat them. This is the impression we are presenting—not just of Christians or of the church, but of Jesus. We call ourselves Christ followers, and how we live determines how people see him.
Our Solution: Barnabas Day
In an effort to live like Jesus and to redeem Sunday in the minds of those who must work, our church started a simple outreach called Barnabas Day. Here is what we do. We gather a group, I recommend 6-12, to go out to eat. Before going to the restaurant, we get a thank-you card for the server-to-be. During the meal, we make a point of learning the server’s name and something about him or her. We are nice to the server—patient, understanding, kind (all those fruit-of-the-Spirit things).
Before the bill comes, we write a personal note in the card, thanking the server for his or her service and expressing the love of Jesus. We look for one or two specific, positive traits in the server and we note these in the card. We tell the server that Jesus adores them, and we also think he or she is pretty special.
Each person in our group sets aside some extra cash and puts it in the card (this is in addition to tipping generously on the bill). Every person in the group signs the card, and we give it to the server when he or she comes to collect the bill. One person also leaves a card or information about the church, in case the server wants to know more.
The Result of Simple Generosity
What has been the fruit of these efforts? The first time we did it, the waitress who served us cried, as did a group of about eight other servers. The gesture impacted them. We have had several people come to the church as a result of this project to check out why we did what we did.
Jesus lived a radical, world-changing lifestyle. His church should have the same impact on the culture of its local community. Being a Christian is not about going to church; it is about living like Jesus. Outreach programs? Just love people like Jesus does!
1http://therestaurantmanagersrants.blogspot.com/2011-/05/sunday-mornings-bad-tips-fact-or-crap.html.
Tyler Edwards is lead pastor at Cornerstone Church in Joplin, Missouri, and is the author of Zombie Church: Breathing Life Back into the Body of Christ (Kregel Publications, 2011).
