About Us

Welcome!

Describing a community of people in a few paragraphs is always going to fall short. The best way to understand The Table is probably to share a meal with us, ask questions, and see what kind of life we are trying to practice together.

Still, this page should give a sense of who we are, what matters to us, and why we’re trying to build a Jesus-centred community of faith in Dublin.

Want to know why we call ourselves the Table?

Who Are We?

The Table is a Jesus-centred community of faith in Dublin.

We are trying to create safe spaces where people can explore the life and claims of Jesus, wrestle honestly with questions and doubts, and learn together what it means to live in God’s Kingdom.

We are not trying to build a church around performance, hierarchy, guilt, or religious pressure. We want to be a community shaped by welcome, mutual participation, shared meals, and life in the neighbourhoods and networks where we already live.

What Matters to Us?

These are some of the convictions shaping the kind of community we are trying to become.

We believe leadership in the church should be shared and collaborative, never used to exercise power over others. We want women and men with a diversity of gifts, perspectives, and experiences to discern together where the Father is leading us.

We believe collaborative, non-hierarchical leadership creates healthier communities, develops healthier leaders, and reflects Jesus’ call to serve rather than control.

Read more about our leadership philosophy on Bob’s Substack, A Journey in Liminal Space.

We believe church should be a safe place to ask questions and express doubts. No one benefits if people feel they need to pretend or perform.

The Table seeks to be a place where people are free to wrestle with questions about Jesus, faith, Scripture, church, suffering, justice, and more. We believe that many questions do not have easy, pat answers.

Often, the most important thing is learning to listen well — to God, to Scripture, to one another, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable. We want spiritual conversation to feel natural and honest.

God has invited us to be part of his story of Good News. As we live that out, we invite others into that story. We do not have a list of dos and don’ts that we expect people to order their lives around. We want to help them order their lives around Jesus and help them discover their identity in him and his story.

Churches often focus on how many people attend on a Sunday (in person or via Zoom). We believe “What you draw people with is what you draw people to.”

Rather than drawing people to be passive spectators at a religious service, we will invite people to join Jesus’ mission in Dublin.

We believe that the gathering of the church is important. However, we desire to create a model that views what happens on Sunday to be one part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, not the most essential part.

We serve a God of love and believe a church should never use guilt, manipulation, fear, or shame to encourage behaviour. We desire to connect people with Jesus and attempt to meet people with grace, forgiveness, and encouragement to learn what God is saying to them. Sadly, many among us have been deeply hurt by the church and its leaders, and we seek to help everyone find healing and forgiveness.

We are more interested in making disciples than building a religious organisation. A church can draw a crowd without people becoming more like Jesus. But, when people learn to follow Jesus together, a faithful community is the natural result.

For us, discipleship is not a class or programme. It is learning the way of Jesus in ordinary life — around meals, in prayer, through Scripture, in honest conversation, in service, and in shared responsibility. We want to help one another become more fully human in the way of Jesus: people who love God, love their neighbours, and help others do the same.

Hospitality is at the heart of why we are called The Table. In the gospels, a large percentage of Jesus’ ministry takes place around a table — welcoming, breaking down barriers, offering forgiveness, teaching, healing, and revealing God’s love.
For us, hospitality is more than being friendly. It means opening our homes and our lives. It means sharing meals, making room, listening well, and creating spaces where people can belong before they have everything figured out. We want to receive the hospitality of God and then extend that welcome into our neighbourhoods, friendships, and everyday lives.

Our Lenses

The purpose of a lens is to bring something into focus. Our theological lenses are major themes in Scripture that help us see where Jesus is leading us and where our focus is to be directed.

No lens is perfect, but these help shape how we understanding of God’s character, our life together, and participation in God’s mission.

These 5 lenses are integral to how we view life.

We believe the Kingdom of God, or God’s rule and reign in our world, is the overarching and integrating theme of Scripture. We believe God’s kingdom is an “upside down kingdom, where the first are last, the poor are blessed, and we gain our life by losing it.

We are committed to demonstrating the good news of God’s kingdom and to bearing witness to the “already and not yet” of the kingdom through our words and deeds—through healing (physical, emotional, and social), doing justice, and bringing freedom to those held captive by evil.

We believe that Jesus is the perfect picture of who God is (Hebrews 1:3), and he is the centre of our life and faith. Our purpose is to be a demonstration of his love and mercy to our community and to invite each person to orient their lives towards him.

We believe that one of the clearest statements in all of Scripture is that “God is love”. (1 John 4:8). We are grieved by those who portray our loving Heavenly Father as an angry vengeful deity focused on punishment and seek to share the love we have experienced from him. We believe that God is also a God of Justice who is a defender of the poor, the marginalised and the powerless.

We believe that God is and always has been at work in our world, and he invites us to participate in his rescue mission of seeing the reconciliation of all things in Jesus, and specifically reconciliation between God and humanity (Col 1:2; 2 Cor 5:20).

A key way to describe Jesus’ followers in Scripture is as a “Nation of kings and priests.” God invites us to act on his behalf in our world and, as priests, to serve as mediators between God and those around us—reflecting and directing worship back to him.

This lens may also be summed up with the phrase, “Everybody gets to play.” We believe that every person has been created in the image of God and has unique gifts, talents, and passions that they can offer. While “church” is often considered a place people go to “get from God”, we believe that the church is to be a place where we come share what God has blessed us with.

The Table’s Leadership

The Table is led by
Bob and Elizabeth Wilson

Before moving to Dublin in 2012, the Wilsons founded and then led the Vineyard Church of Ithaca for 13 years. Elizabeth was the Worship Arts Pastor, and Bob was the primary teaching pastor. While in Ithaca, Bob and Liz both served as University Chaplains at Cornell University.

The Wilsons have three adult children and one daughter in secondary school.

In addition Bob works part-time for Jobcare, a Christian charity in Dublin, where he manages the IT Support and Content Creation teams. He writes at bobwilson.substack.com, and is active in the Dublin Improv community.

Elizabeth teaches music lessons in local schools and privately. She is also a member of the Croabh Seán Treacy.

The Wilsons enjoy board games and having a house full of people.