Local church invites neighborhood to Thanksgiving dinner

Here comes the neighborhood.

That, at least, is what Paul Dudley and the rest of his One Community Church congregation are hoping. Otherwise, they’re going to have a serious Thanksgiving leftover problem.

The church is staging a free turkey and trimmings dinner this Sunday at 1 p.m., and has delivered an invitation to every house in the general vicinity of The Plaza, where the church is based.

“We got a good response,” said Dudley. “We’re figuring over 100 people.”

I’m focusing on this event amid a full slate of neighborly and charitable acts performed this season because it’s a little unique. Indeed, what One Community Church is doing might be compared to what the Pilgrims orchestrated back in 1621. Dudley, like Massachusetts Bay Colony governor William Bradford, is a relative newcomer to the area — but that didn’t keep him from inviting the neighbors.

The church dinner was scheduled for Sunday to avoid conflicting with all the free food being given out on Thanksgiving Day. It is not, however, intended to lure One Community’s neighbors into the Sunday service through the savory smell of herb stuffing.

“There’s no connection at all,” Dudley said. “We just want them to come and eat.”

After all, the slogan of the church is “love without agenda.”

We could all use a little love (not to mention cranberry sauce and gravy) at this point in history. This might be the most nervous we’ve been since Christmas 2001, when we worried that perhaps a terrorist or two might show up for our holiday dinners. That anxiety has now receded, to be replaced with the less definable goblins of economic ruin.

Of course, things weren’t exactly carefree for those brave souls who were clinging to the edges of America in Virginia and Massachusetts in the early 1600s, and their concerns were a bit more basic than unemployment and recession.

Health care? They had to worry about dysentery, the bubonic plague and Indian arrows.

Climate control? If their crops didn’t grow, they would starve to death.

Immigration? They were the immigrants.

In those days, a government bailout was the ship that arrived — usually months later than expected — with fresh supplies.

Nevertheless, the Massachusetts colonists caught a break in the summer and fall of 1621, and the harvest was plentiful. So they decided to share.

The members of One Community Church found their harvest in supermarket aisles rather than fields, yet the impulse is the same. With a twist.

“The idea,” Dudley said, “is for a family from the church to sit with every family from the neighborhood.”

Not to browbeat them or try to change them into something they aren’t, but to learn about them as they are.

“Our mission is to help people,” said Dudley, “and you can’t help them if you don’t know anything about them.”

So the church members went out in the fall and washed windows and performed small fix-it jobs all around Midtown. They held a flea market at which everything was free. And when some people gave them money anyway, they used it to buy beds for some local families they had learned were sleeping on the floor.

“The idea is to find out if people of different faiths, races and attitudes can sit down with each other and share a meal,” Dudley said. “I think they can.”

Apparently, that’s what William Bradford thought, too. Without him, we would never have had Paul Revere, “Cheers” or the Boston Red Sox.

Or Thanksgiving.