December 2025

Pastor Message: 

Millions of Imperfect Potlucks

I think I’ve come to love potlucks—those simple yet brilliant gatherings where so many cuisines and stories meet at one table. I’ve watched the curiosity people bring into these meals as folks from different churches set down their dishes, share food, and enter into conversation.

Sometimes someone brings kimchi to honor the pastor’s heritage. On a table full of familiar American dishes, it sits there like a Korean stranger in Wisconsin. I don’t know whether everyone likes it—and that’s okay. I never expect a potluck to be perfect or for everyone to love kimchi. What I cherish is how these imperfect potlucks create space within us—space for a new spice, a new story, and for one another.

I can’t help but think of the church. The church, too, is a community of potluck people. We do not gather around perfectionism, one race, one culture, one moral code, or one perfect theology that everyone agrees on. In truth—and sometimes painfully so—we gather as people still learning. Lifelong learners about God and about God’s creation, including each other.

To be lifelong learners is to resist the pull of black-and-white thinking. Many insist there is one “right” argument or theory and that everyone else must follow it. But I’ve grown uneasy with the words should and supposed to. Commands or certain assumptions that impose correctness often carry a quiet kind of violence. They can suppress our freedom to seek what is truly good and can even misuse power. A “good” that is forced without spaciousness rarely endures.

I have seen “right theology” and “correct arguments” bear fruit only when there is room—room to reflect, to wrestle, to imagine. Yet so often, those who hold such spaciousness in their hearts are misunderstood, dismissed, or pushed aside.

And so the imperfect potluck becomes a powerful image—a space where we encounter “the other,” those who seem strange to us, the ones we have been quick to reject or condemn—and where we discover in them the seeds of transformation. The imperfect potluck becomes the water that nourishes those seeds.

You may remember Jesus speaking of “living water”—saying, “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty” (John 4:14). And elsewhere he says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

In both promises, Jesus creates a space—and a time—where the thirsty find sustenance and the weary find rest; a place for reflection, renewal, and the chance to breathe again. This lies at the heart of his message: the Kin(g)dom of God as a way of life we can inhabit, and eternal life not only as a future promise but as a way of living already unfolding in our time.

For this reason, we need millions of imperfect potlucks. Many grow frustrated by how slowly the church changes—or that it sometimes seems not to change at all. But I believe the church is called to embody these imperfect potlucks: to become a people who bring their imperfect dishes, who sit together in grace, and who, through that shared table, learn to feed the world with love.

-- Pastor Hyunwoong