Sundays on Covenant College’s campus are noticeably quiet. Cars come and go for church, students rest outdoors or in their rooms, and even the meals in the Great Hall seem slower.  But, on one hall, around five in the evening, people gather for some no-so-quiet fellowship.

For many students, it's important to engage in meaningful fellowship on Sunday between the days of intense academic work that make up the rest of the week. One of these students is my roommate, junior Acacia Buschbach. “Over the last two years,” said Acacia, “I’ve just been learning about how important food is to building relationships and building culture, and how just sitting down at a table has so much effect on how we interact with people.” Over the past year, she expressed a desire to start making Sunday evening meals for people as a way to encourage hospitality and sabbath fellowship on the hall, Rowan. 

Acacia, now RA of Rowan, started her plans for what we began to call Soup Sunday when the new school year started. We made posters inviting people to our common room at five on Sunday to enjoy a meal together, including a Venmo code to help Acacia purchase what she needed. The first Sunday was quiet, but to Acacia, it was enough to know people wanted to come. “I just made two crock pots, it wasn’t that much, and people came. I thought, ok, maybe this could happen more often. I was hopeful for what it could bring to Mac [our dorm building] and Rowan as a whole, and to the individuals that came.” 

Now, every Saturday afternoon, Acacia begins her preparation: Walmart shopping, dicing vegetables, cooking meat, and letting bread rise. By four o’clock the next day, there are four to five crock pots of warm soup on the stove or countertop. (The two crock pots quickly became too little.) When five o’clock hits, people begin to trail in, enticed by friends or the smell of soup in the hallway, and as the sun sets straight through the window that looks over the mountains, we say a prayer and start eating. In a few minutes, the room is packed with people sitting on chairs, couches, or the floor. “Soup has evolved from a single crockpot from Goodwill and twenty people, to people from all four dorm buildings and off campus coming to eat soup. I typically now cook for around 80 people and in the past couple of weeks it has been completely gone. Usually, between 60 and 75 people are filling the common room and the hallway.”

From the preparation, largely done by Acacia, to the conversations that happen over cups of soup, to the dishes and clean up afterward done by any number of friends, these evenings have become an essential part of Sunday fellowship for a good number of students. Acacia recognizes the tradition’s importance. “It has become a staple for Mac, for a lot of people to see their friends and to see people they don’t usually see on the busy day-to-day. It’s just a time to come together in fellowship and I want it to be a place where anyone can come and feel welcomed.” This tradition on Rowan is just one of many that halls on campus have adopted to create a meaningful community with the students they live alongside.

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