The Table Church DC

"Women should be silent in the churches." For nearly two thousand years, Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 have been used to keep women in their place. Associate Pastor Heidi Mills starts with the night a youth group leader told her that a woman who feels called to preach is just being prideful. A self-described Paul defender, she reads 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, with its veils, hair, angels, and...

Paul opens 1 Corinthians 10 by asking the church to remember the cloud over the sea and the water from the rock. Then one word turns the passage: nevertheless. In his first sermon at The Table, pastoral intern Jonathan Holley reads 1 Corinthians 10:1-11 as a parent's warning to a church that thought it had arrived. The Corinthians had been baptized and fed, and they still wanted a worship that ups...

Food offered to idols sounds like the least urgent question in the Bible. In Corinth it was a question about money: meat was expensive, and most of it was served at banquets in wealthy homes and the city's temples, where the church's richer members kept up their social standing. Continuing Hot Takes in 1 Corinthians 8, Matt reads Paul's answer to the members who had reasoned their way to "an idol...

Content note: this sermon discusses sex, consent, coercion and abuse in relationships, and church teaching about sexuality that has harmed people. "The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does." Plenty of us heard that half of 1 Corinthians 7:4 used as a weapon. Paul keeps going: "Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does." In Cor...

Content note: this sermon discusses sexual harm, sex work, and a Bible verse that has been used against LGBTQ people. Purity culture taught that bodies matter because they can be ruined. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul says bodies matter because God raises them, lives in them, and has bought them. Pastor Anthony walks through the whole chapter: siblings with money dragging each other into court, a list o...

Content note: this episode includes frank discussion of sexual harm. Churches have a reputation for policing everyone else's behavior while ignoring the harm happening inside their own walls. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul confronts a community that looked the other way while a well-connected man exploited a woman who never gets a voice in the story. Then he asks a surprising question: what business do...

We live in an image-is-everything world. Influencers coach us on how to speak, how to present, and how to pitch ourselves to get ahead. Even in communities that prize curiosity and good questions, it's easy to trade the search for truth for the comfort of airtight answers. In this week of Hot Takes, our series on 1 Corinthians, Pastor Tonetta Landis-Aina takes on a letter many of us have complicat...

Remember group projects? There was the partner who vanished, the one who did all the work, and the crush that made everything complicated. Community can feel the same way: a room full of people you didn't pick and can't control. So what do you do when belonging gets messy? Kicking off our fall series Hot Takes, [Preacher] opens Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. That was a small, status...

Ever had a big, dramatic moment — a decision, a promise, a "this changes everything" instant — that didn't actually change much? Pastor Tonetta opens with a story about the most intense altar call of her life, and what her body remembers isn't the music, it's the fear of being surrounded and pressured to prove she'd "been saved." From there, she asks a harder question: what if real commitment was...

Every community has a guest list — and every guest list has an unspoken logic about who makes the cut. Tochi digs into why we default to inviting people who already look, think, and live like us, and what gets lost when we do. Using Encanto's "We don't talk about Bruno" and Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer as entry points, Tochi traces a throughline: families, institutions, and even religious spaces...

Why do so many of us secretly believe there are things we're not allowed to want — a school, a job, a kind of joy — because of who we are? Antonio unpacks how internalized limits get planted early, and how they quietly run our lives long after we've "made it." Drawing on his own story — from a debate opponent who couldn't picture him in college, to strangers who couldn't picture him as a lawyer —...

Remember 2020? The marches, the black squares, the sense that everything was about to change? Six years later, a lot of that momentum has quietly faded back into business as usual. This episode sits with an uncomfortable question: what's the real difference between what we say we believe and what we actually do with our time, our bodies, our money? Pastor Tonetta draws on an unexpected pairing — a...

We're taught that changing the world costs everything: burning out, giving until it hurts, treating joy as a distraction from the work that actually matters. But what if that's backwards? Drawing on two one-paragraph parables from the Gospels, Octavia Butler's Earthseed novels, and — unexpectedly — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this sermon unpacks how "sacrifice" gets weaponized to keep unjust systems...

In the summer of 1969, two completely different visions of the future played out at the same time — one aimed at the moon, the other rooted in a Harlem park packed with people who'd rather celebrate together than watch a flag get planted 250,000 miles away. This episode uses that split screen to unpack an old, uncomfortable story about ten bridesmaids, a late groom, and a locked door. Some of the...

There's an old story about a rich man who feasts every day while a man named Lazarus lies hungry right outside his gate. The rich man knows his name. He still does nothing. Trevor Went pairs that story with Octavia Butler's time-travel novel Kindred to ask a question that's harder to answer than it sounds: are you guarding the gate, or willing to break it open? This isn't about distant injustice —...

Ever feel resentful when someone else gets a break you had to earn the hard way? This episode digs into why rest, time, and success can feel like a competition — and why that instinct might be lying to us. Pastor Heidi uses a 2,000-year-old story about day laborers getting paid unfairly (or so it seems) alongside Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower to unpack how scarcity gets wired into our brai...

"I went down to the rich man's house, and I took back what he stole from me." Daniel can't get that protest song out of his head, but his relationship with imagination is complicated. He once prayed for hours in a lodge set up to block a pipeline across Native land in Minnesota, then watched the pipeline get finished anyway. When the system keeps winning, dreaming of something better can feel absu...

We're living in what feels like a dystopian novel — and Octavia Butler saw it coming in 1993. Her Parable of the Sower imagined a world of climate collapse, privatized towns, and a politician promising to "make America great again." When the future feels foreclosed, who gets to imagine what comes next? This message pairs Butler's Afrofuturism with what may have been Jesus' first parable: a farmer...

Every empire tries to control what its people can imagine, until the world as it is looks like the only world there could ever be. Jesus answered with stories small enough to hold in your palm. On All Together Sunday, with kids and adults in the room, Tonetta opens Dangerous Imaginations: The Parables of Jesus and Afrofuturism with two of the shortest parables in the Gospels, the mustard seed and...

Description: Most of us were handed a set of rules about sex before we were ever given a framework for thinking about it — and for many people, especially those raised in religious communities, those rules came wrapped in shame, fear, and silence. The damage is real, well-documented, and affects far more people than the church tends to admit. In this sermon, Bekki reexamines a familiar Bible story...

Most of us want the benefits of community — safety, belonging, mutual support — but bristle at the friction that actual community requires. This sermon confronts that tension directly: why do we wait until we're "rich enough" to give, and what does it really cost to be part of something? Pastor Anthony explores an ancient letter where a broke, disaster-stricken community begged to be allowed to gi...

Most of us carry more than we realize — not just stuff, but the anxiety that comes with it. The drive to accumulate, to secure, to hold on tight isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when we build our sense of self on things that can be taken away. In this sermon, Pastor Tonetta explores what it looks like to locate your identity somewhere other than your possessions — drawing on stories from...

What if one of the most important things we're carrying is something we forgot we had? In this week's installment of "Everything We Carry," Matt opens up 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 to talk about spiritual gifts — the ones we've buried, the ones we're nervous to use, and the ones that still work even after years in the bottom of the bag. He names the wounds many of us carry from places where th...

Most of us learned that power means control — over people, outcomes, situations. But what if that definition is exactly what's breaking us, and breaking the world around us? Preached by Pastor Tonetta, this sermon uses the story of Antoinette Tuff — a bookkeeper who talked down an armed gunman using nothing but honesty and presence — alongside the Pentecost narrative to reframe what power actually...

Most of us know we have some form of privilege — racial, economic, positional — but knowing it and actually doing something with it are very different things. What do you do with the guilt? The discomfort? The uncertainty about whether listening and learning is enough? Elder Daniel explores the story of Pharaoh's daughter — a woman defined entirely by the dominant system around her — and what it l...