Should I own a house at 37 years old? Was it irresponsible to take off for 2 months to a Christian commune in Massachusetts instead of getting a side job to save up for a house? Isn't buying a house one of the central goals of your 30's?

These are some of the questions that made me hesitate about whether I should spend my 2021 summer at L’Abri Fellowship.

I decided to go. I wanted to do research on how to live in a healthy Christian community. I didn’t want to read about in a book, I wanted to see it practiced on a daily basis. I wanted to study the habits, customs, practices and details of L’Abri Fellowship, a place I had visited in 2019. The process of buying a house could wait.

During my first week there I realized that I would be eating dinner with the same people for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Part of the rhythm here is that we eat breakfast at 7:45, lunch at 12:30pm and dinner at 6:30pm. That’s 20 out of the 21 meals in the week(we eat one meal on our own on Thursdays.)

Eating 40 minute meals with 8 people is not the norm for me. How often do you consistently eat meals with the same people? In my normal Morehead City, North Carolina life I typically eat a scrambled egg, a bowl of Crispix and a cup of orange juice for breakfast. I always eat breakfast alone because I am always in such a hurry in the morning. For lunch I typically order take-out Panang Curry from the local Thai restaurant and eat it alone in my office----also in a hurry while multi-tasking something for work. Being a single guy during the year of COVID made eating alone more of the norm for me.

So you can imagine the first week of eating 20 out of the 21 meals with these new people was a much needed experience for me. Yet even more, I realized how intentional this practice was for those who run L’Abri Fellowship. I had stepped into the community that had a schedule and I was expected to show up on time and participate. I was asked to help prepare one meal per week and wash the dishes one time per day. That’s an easy life compared to having to prepare or order out every meal of the week. I often came to the dinner table in disbelief that it only cost $30 per night to stay at L’Abri.

At the Southborough L’Abri, the food is top notch and all homemade. This is not a meal thrown together. The workers at L’Abri take meals seriously. They typically cooked for about 15-20 people per meal. This summer I ate: ratatouille, beet burgers, thai chicken lettuce wraps, red lentil curry with homemade naan and carnitas. Most of this stuff I had never eaten in my life. And on a regular basis I would say “Man if I ate this at a restaurant this would cost $15 easy!” In this situation, the cooks want to make food that makes meals an experience that makes an impression.

With that in mind, you have to be very confident if you are going to cook for a large group of people. Right? Some people are hesitant to have a dinner party because they are insecure about their cooking skills. One day as I helped Sarah cook a meal and I asked her “It seems that if you are going to cook for a big group of people, you have to be confident in your cooking skills. Where did you learn to have confidence?”

Sarah said “Well, when I was a grad school at Regent College, they had a paid RA position to have someone cook soup for 300 students every Tuesday night. I applied and got the job. They had a gigantic caldron. So I learned how to prepare soup for 300 people. Cooking for that many people on a regular basis gave me a lot of practice.”

This all made sense. Sarah had previously put herself into situations where she had to challenge herself to cook and therefore cooking for large groups of people wasn’t intimidating to her. Both Josh and Sarah met at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada while studying theology. While their theological degrees are used to lead deep discussions at each meal, their hospitality skills are on full display multiple times a week as they prepare meals for students.

The Chestnuts are not the official “cooks” of Southborough L’Abri. They are two of the “workers” which in a way you might use synonymous as “pastors” or “counselors” since they regularly tutor students about their questions and give lectures about theological and philosophical topics. Cooking is not delegated to a specialized cook. If you want to be a full-time L’Abri worker-------you can’t just have a theological degree. You better know how to cook and be willing to do the dirty work.

Later in the summer I helped Sarah’s husband Joshua cook Korean Tacos. Part of the dinner table experience is to eat things family-style. The toppings for Korean Tacos are shredded pork, pickled cabbage, aioli sauce, pickled cucumbers, rice, pan sauce and carrots. We also had a side of sweet-potato fries. Family-style means that all the toppings are placed at the center of the table which requires you to wait for each topping to be passed around the table. With this habit-------it slows the meal down so that people take their time while they eat.

Many of the meals were slowed down out of respect for the cook, lasting about 40 minutes minimum. It allowed room for discussion for the people staying at L’Abri from all over the US. I met people from South Carolina, California, Washington, New Hampshire, Oregon, Mississippi, New York, Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, Maine and many other states. Smartphones were banned from the table, then again nobody really wanted their Smartphone at the table. Ben, one of the directors said “A few years ago we had to enforce a no Smartphone rule. But things have changed now and people are content leaving their phones in their room.”

Scheduled meals and activities, meeting people from around the country, no technology, slow pace of life, doesn’t this sound like summer camp for adults?

Someone once asked David Brooks, writer for the New York Times, what he would do if someone gave him $500 million dollars. Brooks says that he would create adult summer camps. Why would he do this? Brooks makes the argument in his article “Startling Adult Friendships” that American adults crave deeper friendships in a world where work and achievement is often prioritized. He says that while many adults do not say this out loud but instead they pursue friendship in other ways:

“People these days are flocking to conferences, ideas festivals and cruises that are really about building friendships, even if they don't admit it explicitly. The goal of these intensity retreats would be to spark bonds between disparate individuals who, in the outside world, would be completely unlikely to know each other. The benefits of that social bridging, while unplannable, would ripple out in ways long and far-reaching.”

If Brooks ever wanted to create an adult summer camp, L’Abri would the clear choice for a template that could be used to execute such an idea. He says that in his ideal summer camp groups of 20-30 adults would gather from different demographic groups in which they would prepare all of their meals together and discuss big topics.

I experienced David Brooks’s adult summer camp idea on a daily basis this summer. L'Abri is Brooks's dream in reality partially because it is focused around meals where people discuss big ideas. Every person who comes to L’Abri comes with some kind of life question they are trying to answer. Every person meets with a “tutor,” a theologically trained staff member, who makes suggestions of books, practices, Bible passages and lectures. It is similar to what you might experience at a university if you did an independent study with a professor. And for me, my question was addressed one night during a dinner conversation with two other students who clearly addressed the question I had been diligently studying.

One person I met was John Dawson. He is a 45 year old Presbyterian pastor from Jackson, Mississippi. John made a quick impression on me showing up to dinner one night with a Metallica “Ride the Lighting” shirt on. Two days later, John showed up to lunch wearing a Gregory Alan Isakov t-shirt. Isakov is my favorite folk-singer of all time. All my stereotypes of Presbyterian pastors from Mississippi were thrown out the window.

At dinner one night John talked about when he “finished his dissertation.” I didn’t realize he’d written a dissertation in seminary; I was intrigued so I asked John what he focused. He said that he wrote his thesis on how justification and sanctification are connected. I was shocked. One of the questions I'd been reading about all summer was “After someone becomes a Christian, how does he or she become like Jesus?” That's another way of looking at the interconnections between justification of Jesus dying on the cross and the Holy Spirit's role (or an individual's role) in the sanctification process. How could it be that John wrote his entire thesis on the exact question I’ve been struggling to answer here at L’Abri?

I restrained my excitement for a moment, but before I could say anything another student jumped in and things got deep. Sitting there with us, was Christina from Washington, DC who is an incredibly sharp Georgetown graduate and current seminary student. (My favorite thing I learned about Christina is that she attended Chuck Norris’s 70th birthday party in Texas since her mom is an event planner there.) Christina asked John questions regarding his disseration and for a moment, I felt like I was listening to a theological podcast I’d run across on Youtube. I did my best just to listen and interject with questions. I am typically annoyed by seminary students and their theological rambles. I routinely avoid seminary types. However, at this moment I was encountering two incredibly humble and grounded students of theology who were thoughtful and wise. I admire both them deeply and am thankful for both of them. I wish I had an audio recording of this 30 minute conversation. To hear their thoughts on this question was deeply satisfying and refreshing.

For a sincere and serious conversation to happen, there must be time and space for it to develop. Because I had a space to ask serious questions, I think that also helped me laugh more. I wrote the following in a journal I kept in June 2021:

“I think one thing I’ve been able to do since I’ve been here at L’Abri is the ability to just act kind of goofy and laugh more. I think part of this is because there is a larger structure of things that is above me. Because of this larger structure of things above me, it makes it possible for me to relax a little bit and just talk about Phish, my favorite music, the NBA, tell stories, ask hard questions and what not.”

When I say “the larger structure above me,” I was referring to the hard work of the Chestnuts and other workers at L’Abri who helped create the culture of excellent meals and deep conversation. It also refers to the Christ-like desire of the staff to be servants to the students who show up and the consistent dependence on God through prayer. Whatever it was, I felt a freedom and peace that I had not felt in years and I am so glad I spent 2 months in Massachusetts.

Can this be translated back into the everyday adult grind? Maybe. The habit of having excellent meals certainly can. In a cultural moment where everyone seems to be mulling deeply in isolation about political, societal and cultural issues, it seems healthy to have a designated hour to let out deep thoughts and eat some good food seems needed. It makes sense on paper but I assume it just a matter of buying the food, setting a date, asking God for some help and inviting people over. I’m already in the process of doing this.