Jesus' time was in some ways a simpler time than ours, a time when God, home and community were related priorities. The table was the center of the home and the place of community: feasting and celebration, sustenance and refreshment, fellowship and hospitality, resting and planning all took place at or around the table. The workbench - another sort of table - served as the place for repairing broken tools to usefulness and for modifying and expanding the house as the needs of the family and community grew.

When Jesus met with his disciples for observing the Passover, he used a room in someone's house and reclined at the table. As Paul went about the business of expanding the Kingdom by establishing churches, he set them up in people's houses, where there was community, fellowship, intimacy and interdependency.

Paul (and Jesus, for that matter) made it clear to those he taught that we are made new in Christ in order to be participants, not spectators. So he set leaders in place at the churches he had established: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, each bringing a unique perspective and a profoundly different anointing intended by God to address a different need. No one person was to be responsible for all the work of ministry.

The Carpenter's Tables comprise the church-planting ministry of The Carpenter's Apprentices. Our goal is not to establish large, seeker-sensitive, "purpose-driven" churches; following the Biblical model, we desire to establish smaller, Spirit-sensitive, Spirit-driven churches. These churches are not led by a single superman, typically identified in regular churches as the "Senior Pastor". Rather, under the apostolic umbrella and prophetic confirmation of The Carpenter's Apprentices, teams of ministers having different gifts - and who have been called together by the Holy Spirit - establish small house churches: each called "The Carpenter's Table".

As we train up leaders in our discipleship and ministry schools, we identify those with leadership gifts and train them to use them - NOT to take on responsibilities for gifts they do not have. Pastors are not expected to be evangelists, teachers are not forced to speak prophecy, prophets are not asked to be pastors, and certainly no one is responsible to be all these things.

The Carpenter's Tables also embrace individual ministries, such as itinerant evangelists or prophetic ministers, whose call is to be a voice for God in the world.

Currently, there are Carpenter's Tables in Marlborough, Massachusetts and Raleigh, North Carolina. A third is planned for the Charlotte, North Carolina area sometime in 2007. Links to these will soon be available, so please check back often!