Why we set the table first
There is a man in Tirana who first walked into one of our community centres because his daughter needed physiotherapy. She has cerebral palsy. The waiting list for state services is long enough that most families simply give up. We had a clinic. We had a therapist. He had nowhere else to go.
He was not looking for a church. He grew up under communism, where faith was dangerous and shameful — religion was for the weak, or for foreign charities using it as cover. He had seen enough of both.
Four years later he is one of the most faithful members of Komuniteti i Besimit Tek Ura — the Community of Faith at Tek Ura. He leads prayer. He takes meals to elderly neighbours. By any measure that matters, he is a disciple.
He didn’t get there by hearing a sermon first. He got there by belonging first.
That isn’t the exception. At Tek Ura it is the pattern.
Belonging before believing
It’s a phrase we use a lot: belong before believing. It sounds simple. In practice it’s one of the more demanding things a church can commit to.
It means people are welcomed into the whole life of the community — the meals, the friendships, the help, the noise — long before anyone asks them what they believe. There is no moment where you have to sign up to the gospel to be allowed in. The belonging is unconditional. The believing, if it comes, grows inside the belonging rather than before it.
This isn’t new. It’s one of the oldest ideas the church has, and church planters in the UK have been rediscovering it for twenty years — at least since the Church of England’s Mission-Shaped Church report in 2004. People a long way from faith are almost never argued into it. They join something, they’re loved, they see something real, and eventually they ask who this God is that these people follow.
The ten things
Some research published last year has stayed with me. Researchers at Baylor University asked 27 families of children with disabilities what church had actually been like for them. They found 22 separate barriers keeping families like these from belonging — attitudes, buildings, other people’s willingness, whether anyone had been trained.
But this is the bit I keep coming back to. They identified ten things that had to be true before a family said they genuinely belonged: being present, invited, welcomed, known, accepted, cared for, supported, befriended, needed and loved. Not one or two of them. All ten. And where even one of those failed consistently, families quietly stopped coming.
I read that list and thought of every church I’ve known where a family with a disabled child drifted away without anyone quite noticing, because the belonging was never entirely real. I also thought of Tek Ura — not because we’ve cracked it, we haven’t, but because those ten words are the actual job description.
Which brings me to Marston Moretaine
Writing from Albania about what this means for a Baptist church in Bedfordshire is a risk. The contexts are genuinely different; the legacy of communism is specific to Albania and I don’t want to flatten that.
But the principle isn’t specific.
Every village in this country has people who will not walk into a church building to hear a sermon. Not because they’re against God — because the gap between their world and whatever they imagine is happening inside feels too wide. The person with no church background at all. The family navigating a diagnosis and feeling invisible. The man who’s been to prison. The woman who assumes her divorce disqualifies her. The teenager who can’t connect a worship song to anything in their actual life.
For most of them the question isn’t “will you come and hear the gospel?” It’s “will you let me belong first?”
The Table was built on exactly that conviction. A free meal, every week, open to anyone, no strings. In the first eight weeks, 83 different people came through the door. Most had never been inside a church. Some are now asking deeper questions. Some aren’t, and that’s fine. The table was set first.
Setting the table first isn’t a way of dodging the hard work of telling people about Jesus. It’s what gives that telling any chance of being heard. The man in Tirana didn’t have his ears closed. He had his heart closed — by history, by suspicion, by a lifetime of fairly reasonable grievances. Four years of belonging opened it. Nobody pressured him. He came to it himself.
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry.” — John 6:35
A question rather than a programme
You don’t need another programme. What I’m describing is a posture, not a method.
So here’s the question. In your church, is there somewhere a person who doesn’t yet believe can genuinely belong? Not a welcome team that smiles and hands out coffee. Not a rota. A place — a meal, an activity, a shared bit of work — where someone from outside faith can be known and loved and given something real, before anyone asks them to believe anything.
If there isn’t, it’s worth asking why. And worth asking what it would take to build one.
The evidence says that where belonging is real, believing often follows. Ten years in Albania says the same thing.
Set the table. The guests will come.
This is adapted from an article first published by Qendra Tek Ura, the Albanian charity Dan and Annie co-founded in 2016 and still lead alongside Vale Community Church. You can read the original here: What happens when the church sets the table before it preaches the sermon (Tek Ura, 7 July 2026).