Each offers a different perspective on what this new faith community means to them. In this final piece, I will share reflections from Noon Service members Mary, Patrick, Kyle, and Drew. There is genuine warmth and a spaciousness here that allows people to enter at their own pace. It emerges from a deep understanding of what it is to feel unwelcome as you are, and the related pressure to conform to community expectations in the Christian traditions from which many of us have come. Radical hospitality is at the heart of the Noon Service ethos. Noticing if someone is left out, someone will make space or ask a question that keeps the conversation flowing. Although the hosts have opened their home, the whole community exudes a distinct hospitality, paying attention to the cracks. Some of the folks here have known each other for years, some just came for the first time tonight. This is a Moveable Feast, a monthly potluck dinner hosted by various members of the Noon Service in homes, an open space for conversation and relationships to emerge and grow.

A toddler wanders around offering sticks to anyone who will take one, clearly at ease in this community. Others are eating on the steps, and in the grass. It’s Saturday night and s group of us are gathered on the back deck of a house in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood-a potluck meal spread over the kitchen countertops and people gathered in chairs and squished together around a table for six that is currently holding about 10. The person going out? The stranger coming in? We are the crack where the story gets interesting. In a series of 3 articles, leaders of the community draw on their experience cultivating the Noon Service community over the past 2+ years to offer reflections on fresh expressions emerging in the Episcopal Church during these strange times. The Noon Service is a new worshiping community of Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, Ohio.

In the shelter padraig