A Place at the Table is the Fifth Avenue Ecumenical Outreach Partnership’s twice-weekly meal service. Every Monday and Wednesday from 1 to 2 pm, we serve about one hundred people, many of them familiar faces from the neighborhood around our corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street. As guests move down the line, volunteers and Ecumenical Outreach Partnership staff hand out bagged lunches, always with dessert, along with hygiene supplies.

The coffee station is the last stop in the meal line. Before heading back onto the streets of Midtown, most guests stop for a hot cup of coffee. Everyone takes it differently. Some want mostly milk with just a splash of coffee. Some ask for two cups, black, no sugar. Others have their own carefully calibrated ratio of cream and sweetener.  Some don’t say much at all, simply pointing toward the milk or holding up fingers, trusting you’ll figure it out.

Those preferences become familiar. So do the people behind them.

“Two cups of black coffee, right, Abraham?” “Morning, John.” “How’s that class going, Paula?” “Sam, did you ever get to see your sister?”

Many meal programs focus on food, and of course the food matters. But A Place at the Table is about more than handing someone a meal. We make the effort to learn people’s names. Stand near the meal line for fifteen minutes and you’ll hear volunteers greeting guests by name from the first hello to the final cup of coffee. Learning names isn’t just something nice that we do. It is central to this ministry.

We want our guests to know that we see them. Just as we build community as a congregation in an often anonymous city, we try to build community at A Place at the Table, reminding folks they belong by using their names and telling them we’re glad to see them.

Before seminary, I practiced law as a corporate litigator for ten years. I cared deeply about serving others through pro bono work and leadership on benevolence grants and community partnerships committees. But I also recognized a weakness. Much of my service happened at a distance. At another soup kitchen where I volunteered, I became known as the person always willing to wash dishes in the basement kitchen. It was important work, but it kept me at the sink instead of building relationships with the people we were serving. I was apprehensive about having to engage directly with guests.

As Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church’s Outreach and Engagement Intern, I’ve spent the past year showing up for meal service, often working at the coffee station. More than most of my classes at Princeton Theological Seminary, this experience has forced me to grow and stretch.

Serving at A Place at the Table means you get close to our guests. Sometimes guests are struggling with untreated mental illness, addiction, profound grief, or loneliness. I’ve been thanked, yelled at, and cursed out. Working with vulnerable populations requires patience, humility, and perseverance. Over time, you become less afraid, stop taking difficult interactions personally, and learn to look beyond behavior to the person standing in front of you.

Knowing names has made that easier for me. A greeting becomes a conversation. When you call people by name, it signals that you’re open to a relationship.

John wants my predictions for every New York sporting event, even though I’m never right and watch none of the games. Paula always has an update about school. Sam likes to tell me what’s new with his family. None of those conversations solve the problems that brought them to the meal line, but they remind people, and me, that they are more than the circumstances they face.

Christine Boyle, our director of outreach and missions, and our three Ecumenical Outreach Partnership social workers do this work every day, carrying relationships built over years. They know who needs encouragement, who might be in crisis, and who hasn’t been seen in a while. They are the ones doing the hard work of showing up every single day for these folks.

One of the things I love most is that we call the people who come to Ecumenical Outreach Partnership guests, not clients or recipients. Guests. That’s how we want them to be treated. After everyone has eaten, we keep talking about them, celebrating when someone gets housing, worrying when someone hasn’t been around, and praying for people by name. It sounds remarkably similar to the way our pastors talk about members of the congregation.

Everybody wants to go where somebody knows their name. Not because it fixes everything, but because being seen and known in this city matters. Greeting someone by name and remembering how they take their coffee reminds folks that they are beloved neighbors. Jesus showed us that tables can become places where relationships are formed and people remember that they belong. While we don’t have tables, every Monday and Wednesday we get to remind folks that this is a place where they belong.

Interested in volunteering? Learn more about A Place at the Table and the Fifth Avenue Ecumenical Outreach Partnership here.