This was spiritual comfort food. Like a softer and less spiky Nadia Bolz Weber. I love them both and this book is going on the shelf beside Pastrix.

Scott, an ELCA minister, plants new churches of the nontradtional variety. Her ideas, writing, and actions flow in a similar vein to Sara Miles in Take This Bread and Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell. This memoir, nurtured by the love and friendship of Nadia Bolz-Weber and the late Rachel Held Evans, tells of her founding St. Lydia's Dinner Church in the Gowanus neighborhood of NYC and also reveals some intimacies of her personal life. This is a marvelous time to read the stories that remind us that speaking truth to power is our work, and it works, and its our job to keep hope alive and don't quit. I happened to read today on Good Friday this passage that spoke strongest to me. "I’ve got it under control. Then my mom got sick, and I didn’t have it under control at all. There was nothing I could do to achieve my way through this situation. No way I could work harder to change her outcome. Then the hurricane hit, and I didn’t have it under control. Then Trump got elected. Then your sister was deported. Then the cops shot your son, your daughter, and didn’t even get taken off payroll. Then the rent gets raised or the job falls through. Then the sky goes dark and the fabric of life is rent in two. Around you, the city is falling. On those Good Fridays, it is God, not we, who stitches us back together. And God offers not a bunker that will provide imagined safety, but a road to walk: uncertain and exposed. Grace shows up, not in the ways we try to hold it together, but when we finally let go. Why do you look for the living among the dead? the angels ask." Disclosure: I received a free advance reader version of the book. #ForAllWhoHunger #NetGalley

Thank you to Convergent Books for giving me a digital galley in exchange for feedback.

Emily Scott was the pastor of St. Lydia's, a church in Brooklyn that practices "Dinner Church." Dinner church meets in the evening, not the morning, and combines the tradition of communion with a loving community meal in a ritual that seems simultaneously very new, and very much what the earliest church did. St. Lydia's is also a small, caring community of people who feel alienated by traditional church, doing their best to figure out how to be a progressive church in their neighborhood.

In a lot of ways, St. Lydia's reminds me of my own church, so that was nice.

It's easy to see how much Scott is influenced by Nadia Bolz-Weber, but I really like Bolz-Weber, so that wasn't a problem for me while I was reading. I enjoyed reading her simple, tender stories of starting a new church and exploring new ways of being a church.

A lovely book a book of caring for your neighbor.A church that shares with its community through food and faith I wish everyone would read this inspiring book and follow in its path our world needs it.#netgalley#foral who hunger,

What a fantastic picture of a church following the heart and mission of God. I especially loved the section on the meaning of the days surrounding the Easter season. It was very powerful. Thanks

I have mixed feelings about this book. The gist of these feelings is that while I don't agree with Emily's theology in several places, I loved her writing and her transparency and feel like disagreeing with her is akin to criticizing a friend.

For All Who Hunger is the story of a church and the story of a church planter, but it's more than that. It's a story of someone who loves God. It's the story of someone who loves people and wants them to know they all matter to God. It's the story of the struggle inherent to someone determined to follow Jesus while seeing the world as it is. And it's a lot more than I can put into words.

Emily's writing made me feel like I was there with her, listening to her over a cup of coffee or reading her journal entry from last night. That is not something I often feel when reading a book. It is also not a conversation I am used to hearing and wished I could have more like it. The beauty of a book is that it acts as a pause in a conversation. Emily's book disrupted my thoughts and showed me a different way of seeing the world. I need more conversations like that, but too often they are impossible to have because we are so polarized in politics, faith, and social arenas. For that, I am thankful to Emily. She allowed me to listen to her story, her world, her experience. And even if we never see eye-to-eye, I hope to have more conversations and hear more stories like hers that challenge my worldview and remind me how much God truly loves the world.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and have reviewed it willingly.

I was only a few pages into Emily M.D. Scott's "For All Who Hunger: Searching for Communion in a Shattered World" when I realized that I'd already become quite fond of the somewhat nerdy, incredibly intelligent, and richly human Lutheran pastor who started a dinner church in New York City called St. Lydia's Dinner Church and served as its founding pastor for several years.

"For All Who Hunger" is about that journey, but it's also about more than that journey. It's about Scott's own journey through the loneliness of feeling different, starting a church, desiring companionship, and ultimately searching for the same communion that she so passionately wished to provide for her congregants.

I loved every moment of "For All Who Hunger" and can honestly confess I grieved its ending because it felt like the end of a relational journey with an imaginary friend who'd become very real to me. I don't know Scott, but I felt like I did by the end of the book and "For All Who Hunger" immersed me in her occasionally inspiring and occasionally awkward yet nearly always awesome spiritual journey.

The book starts with warmth, such incredible warmth, as we become engaged with Scott's love for the congregants who gather with her and trust her with their spiritual lives. You can feel it, really feel it, that Scott feels so incredibly privileged by that trust that I sit here with a tear running down my face even recalling her words.

In every book that I truly love, and I truly love "For All Who Hunger," I find some person or place or thing with which I connect on a soulful level. I must confess that in this book it was a delightful older woman named Ula, who found herself always embraced by the community of St. Lydia's despite being, at times, persnickety and difficult and all those other labels we like to use for people who've been unloved for so long that they don't know how to respond when love knocks on their door and refuses to go away until they answer.

I'm a paraplegic/double-amputee with spina bifida with a chaotic faith journey that includes having been raised Jehovah's Witness and having been kicked out of two different churches including the aforementioned JW's. Just three months ago, I lost the remainder of my left leg following hospitalization for dehydration and infections and am inching back ever so closely to going back to work. I identified greatly with Ula's spirit and I resonated deeply with Scott's passion for her and the difficulty in leaving as I sit here facing the loss of my own pastor, the delightful Rev. Anastassia, who sat with me for two hours prior to my most recent amputation simply holding the hand of someone with a fear of touch and gently refusing to let go.

I admired Scott's weaving together of both her intellect and her tremendous sensitivity throughout "For All Who Hunger," most admiring the vulnerability with which she wrote about her desires for relationship and her experiences in exploring the worlds of dating and sexuality while also living as a Lutheran pastor who, as it just so happens, also happens to be a human being.

There is simply so much to love about "For All Who Hunger," a book that beautifully shares the St. Lydia's journey from beginning up until Scott's departure. She currently serves in Baltimore as the pastor of Dreams and Visions, a church she also founded.

Scott beautifully and honestly shares the successes and not so successful moments of her church planting journey, while also eloquently bringing to life its personal, emotional, and spiritual impact for her. She is transparently self-aware and yet equally adept at sharing knowledge, theological insights, biblical exegesis, and inspirations from other philosophical and theological figures.

While "For All Who Hunger" has lessons for all interested in church life and church planting, it will likely most resonate with those who have a more open and affirming theology as St. Lydia's was and remains an LGBTQIA open and affirming congregation and, at least it would appear, Scott remains committed to ministry to the nerds, misfits, outcasts, and others who are so often left behind by organized religious bodies.

With remarkable honesty, insight, strength, and vulnerability, Scott has crafted a warm and wonderful book that serves as a spiritual memoir but also a reminder of the ability of a pastor and of a church to serve and be communion in a shattered world that so desperately craves it.

This reminded me so much of the wonderful book, "Take this Bread" by fellow pastor Sara Miles. A beautifully written, compassionate memoir about a woman called to love outsiders. I loved it.