Some of the richest Bible teaching happening in our communities right now is not happening in a sanctuary. It is happening at folding tables at our Stony Point site, over a shared meal, after burgers come off the grill.
Erin Feldges, who helps manage the site, has been leading it. The approach is simple and it is working: take one passage, slow way down, and walk through it word by word. Not concepts. Not a sermon. Just what does this actually say, and what does it actually mean.
They recently spent an entire evening on a single verse. Hebrews 10:24: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.”
One verse, one night. They talked about what it means to consider somebody. To think about them. To recognize that they are there. Then they got to the word some translations render as “stir up” and others render as “provoke,” and the conversation caught fire. Everybody at those tables knew what it means to provoke someone. They had always heard it as a negative, picking a fight, getting under someone’s skin. Then they turned it over together and found what the verse is actually doing with it: pushing somebody, on purpose, toward love. Toward good works. Provoking as encouragement. The same fire, aimed the other direction.
The next week they took verse 25: “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” The assignment at each table was to wrestle with what “the Day” means. The tables worked it out together, the second coming, the end of days. So how close are we to that day? One day closer than we were yesterday.
Then Erin told them he knew when that day was coming. You can imagine the reaction. He let it hang for a moment, then took them to Matthew 24:14, where Jesus says the gospel will be preached to all peoples, and then the end will come. Not a date on a calendar. Jesus was clear that no one gets the day or the hour, not even the angels. But a condition. And the condition has everything to do with us. The answer to “when” is tied directly to the question of what we are supposed to be doing in the meantime. Stirring one another up. Encouraging one another. Getting the good news to people who have not heard it.
One of our regulars, a man who has been part of the Stony Point community for years, looked at him when it landed and said he ought to get on the circuit with that.
His reaction points at something worth sitting with. As Erin put it, so much of this has been hidden in plain sight. Many of the people at those tables have heard scripture their whole lives as something recited over them, words with some special power in the saying of them, but nobody ever sat down and walked through what it actually means. Nobody ever treated them like people who were allowed to understand it. It turns out that when you do, they lean in. They argue about word choices. They assign each other homework. They come back the next week.
The study is not slowing down. Next up: the Lord’s Prayer, verse by verse, the same way. Not something you just say. Something you understand.
This is what we mean when we say the burger is the tool and the relationship is the point. Feed the Need Missions has been showing up at Stony Point every week for years, and food is always where it starts. But the goal has always been what happens at the tables afterward. Real relationships. Real conversations. And lately, a folding-table Bible study where the word of God is coming off the page for people who have been waiting their whole lives for somebody to open it with them.
We love because he first loved us. It is painted on the side of our trailer, and on Monday nights at Stony Point, you can watch it happen.
To everyone who supports this mission, thank you. This is what your generosity makes possible. Not just meals, though the meals matter. Weekly presence, long enough for trust to form, and tables where the word of God is opened with people who have never had anyone open it with them before. And this is just one story from one site. There are nights like this happening across all of our communities, most of them never written down. So we would ask you to keep praying for what God is doing at every site, every week. And if you have never seen it for yourself, come out some time. Any site, any night. You will not need anyone to explain it once you are there. Details at feedtheneed.org/sites.















