The Table Church DC

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 the gifts were misused, and asks what it would look like for a community like ours to nurture them honestly: especially prophecy, the gift of bridging the gap between the world as it is and the liberated world that is to come.

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:7–11; Romans 12:6–8 · Series: Everything We Carry · Preached by Matt at The Table Church, Washington, DC.

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 is and what it's for. The case here is that real power moves toward people, not over them, and that the most radical thing you can do is speak, connect, and let go.

Watch or listen to hear three concrete commitments that might change how you show up — in your relationships, your community, and the world.

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 looks like to move from awareness to action. The framework he offers isn't about charity or allyship. It's about conspiracy: funding the revolution, betraying the systems that gave you your advantages, and what that kind of commitment actually costs.

New to The Table? This sermon is part of our series Everything We Carry. Pull up a seat.

We all carry things we don't talk about — grief, shame, exhaustion, ambivalence about money and power. Most of us walk into rooms and put on our composure, because that's what we've been taught is acceptable. But what happens when the weight of it finally has to land somewhere?

Pastor Tonetta draws on Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' and the book of Nehemiah to make a case that you can't repair what you refuse to grieve — and that rebuilding anything worth having requires more than individual optimization. It requires commitment to particular people, a particular place, a particular wall.

This one also gets honest about money — why progressive communities tend to go quiet about it, and what that silence actually costs.

You check your phone every 47 seconds. You say yes to everything and mean none of it. You refresh the news looking for a sign that something has finally gotten better. Somewhere in all of that, your actual life is happening — and nobody's really there for it.

This week, Pastor Anthony looks at a moment where Jesus' closest friends ask exactly the wrong question, and what it reveals about where our attention goes when we're scared, overwhelmed, or just trying to manage the unmanageable.

There's a distinction between what's yours to carry and what isn't — and learning the difference might be the most practical thing you do this week.

How do you keep living your regular life when the news is genuinely catastrophic? It's not denial — it's one of the most disorienting feelings of our moment. This week Pastor Anthony Parrott sits with that tension and refuses to offer an easy answer.

Drawing on a post-resurrection story most people overlook, he makes a case that small, ordinary acts — a meal, a text, showing up sad and confused — aren't a consolation prize for people without power. They're actually the model. And that staying at the table, even when you have nothing impressive to offer, might be the most honest form of resistance available.

New to The Table or just stumbling across this? You don't need a faith background to find something here. Come as you are.

What if the deepest problem isn't your worst habits or biggest failures — but your fear of death? And what if that fear is quietly behind almost every way we hurt ourselves and each other?

In this Easter sermon, Pastor Toneta Landisina draws on the story of Lazarus to reframe resurrection as liberation rather than sentimentality. She unpacks why scapegoating holds entire societies hostage, why "we don't need a them to make an us," and what it looks like to walk out of a tomb while the grave clothes are still on.

Whether you're a longtime churchgoer or someone religion has hurt, this one's for you.

When things feel out of control, most of us do one of two things: we retreat to what's familiar, or we come out swinging. But what if both of those instincts are actually traps — and there's a harder, stranger option that history keeps proving actually works?

In this sermon, Pastor Anthony traces a thread from an ancient prophet to a Berlin prayer service that helped bring down a wall, asking what it really looks like to resist something without becoming it. The answer involves a donkey, 70,000 candles, and the idea that showing up — openly, stubbornly, joyfully — is its own kind of power.

If you're feeling stuck between fight and flight right now, this one's worth your time.

What do you do when everything around you is collapsing — your community, your faith, your sense of home — and someone tells you to act like it's going to be okay? That's the tension at the heart of this talk, and it's not a hypothetical. It's the question Jeremiah faced in a jail cell while his city was under siege.

Trevor Wentt draws on the story of Jeremiah buying land he had no business buying, the Palestinian practice of holding onto house keys across generations, and his own improbable journey to becoming an all-state wrestler — to make a case that hope isn't passive. It's a practice. Sometimes it's a deed in a jar. Sometimes it's a barbecue.

Whether you're rebuilding your faith, navigating a world that feels like it's unraveling, or just trying to figure out what it even means to act with hope right now — this one's for you.

Something is wrong, and a lot of us are carrying it alone. Whether it's personal loss, political exhaustion, or the weight of watching your community get hurt — grief has a way of isolating us exactly when we need each other most.

In this sermon, Toochi Ngwangwa draws on the book of Jeremiah to make a case for grief as something meant to be shared out loud. From Jewish Shiva to New Orleans jazz funerals to Jesus walking toward the cross, the throughline is the same: mourning together is what softens us, connects us, and makes space for something new.

If you've been running from something heavy lately — this one's for you.