The Monday After • Aug 17, 2026
A Tea Break Before the Sermon
Darren Carlson
Well. I struck a nerve last week. Go back and read it here
Here’s the main thrust, stripped down: you can live a godly life without ever cracking a book, including the Bible. You cannot live a godly life apart from the regular gathering of God’s people. Full stop.
The educated pushed back hardest. Fair enough. I’m writing this sentence with 1,000+ books staring at me from my office shelves. But the folks outside the West mostly just nodded along. Their churches don’t run on reading God’s Word so much as hearing it. And discipleship was never meant to be reading a book together.
One message in particular struck me. Here it is, lightly edited:
Something happens formatively when Christian’s gather… and it’s hard for a western person to conceptualize a gathering that isn’t well structure which I think structure gathering are amazing and a lot is done in 1-2 hours. But imagine this: my church gathering is like this… noon people show up to start the food…. By 5, everyone is here (at a home), 6:30: we eat. 7:30 music. 8:00 BREAK FOR TEA, 8:30 teaching, 9:15: prayer, application, sharing. 10ish everyone leaves.
Now, it is very chaotic, unorganized but intentional and purposeful. Think about how forming all those scenarios—as men sit and have tea and talk, women cook together, everyone help cleans up… imagine the time to hear about the each other, pray for things, apply the Word, get into arguments, offend one another, see how the host family lives and operates.
I am not saying this the only or best way, but it is the natural means for many people. That 10 hours on a Friday does more for them than any book would.
That gathering has no bulletin. No six-week series with a workbook. It has tea and chaos. Can you imagine a tea break at your church before the sermon starts?
I still believe in books. I’ve built a life on them. But no book has ever caught me lying about how my week actually went. A kitchen full of women cooking together will. A porch full of men over tea will.
Just ask yourself: does your church’s structure, or the one above, shape people into disciples of Jesus Christ? I’m not against formal structure. But if you’re in a church where people show up in time for the sermon, consume it, and leave, maybe there’s something to learn from churches elsewhere, full of people who don’t own books, who can’t even read, and who still live faith-filled lives to the glory of God.
Structure isn’t the enemy. Absence is.
Twenty-four years ago, Amy and I moved to Chicago. Amy, my girlfriend at the time, ended up living across the hall from Ann Marie, a new believer. That year, we got a call from Camp of the Woods. They were looking for someone to run food services, so we walked across the hall and asked Ann Marie if that was something she’d want to do.
And the rest is history.
She moved, worked at the camp, met her husband, and now lives there year-round. We saw her last week.
God can do a lot with something as simple as moving across the hall in an apartment complex.
Fun fact: She was the manager of a Caribou Coffee in IL and made D.A. Carson (who ended up being my advisor at seminary) coffee every day when she lived in Chicago. Carson and his wife prayed with her as she moved.
There is a lot happening in the AI world. Here is something worth reading. I think I will write on AI use in the future. This is a good place to start.
Thanks for checking in.
Sign up here to receive Darren Carlson's The Monday After email. This weekly newsletter is designed to encourage your faith and share inspiring stories of what God is doing around the world. Each edition features a short devotional, a story that will give you a glimpse of His work in unexpected places, and a resource you might find helpful.
10.5.26When a Pastor Gets Everything, and Nothing Gets Done
Last week I sat in the wrong coffee shop for 20 minutes before realizing I was meeting someone else. I rushed to the right one, apologizing on the way in, and still ended up having a great hour of mutual encouragement with a man I admire. After the meeting, I looked […]
9.28.26The Pharisees Read the Same Bible
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus keeps returning to the same pattern: "You have heard that it was said," and then, "But I tell you." He is not correcting the Old Testament. Jesus is on the hillside correcting what the religious teachers had done with it. "Eye for eye, and […]
9.14.26When the Towers Fell
It took 99 days to extinguish the fires. Last week we marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. My parents' generation remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed. I vaguely remember the Challenger exploding on television. But for Generation X and many millennials, 9/11 is the event in American […]
9.7.26On Therapy Culture
A woman in her 20s at your church has an Instagram bio that reads, before her name, before a single photo: ADHD. Anxiety. CPTSD. Not what she loves or enjoys. Just a diagnosis to frame her life. The rising generation has received more therapy than any generation before it. The journalist […]
