06/02/2026
Bishop Victor David's Message from Anglican Montreal June 2026
From a Shared Meal to Witnessing of Christ's Love
In March, I invited you to join me and my team for a special fundraising dinner on May 1, 2026. Your response was a delightful surprise to me, especially as so many of you generously supported this initiative. I would like to thank each and every one of you for attending and for making this evening an exceptional moment of fellowship and friendship.
Prior to sharing the results of this project with you, let me first elaborate on its rationale and the reasons or motivations that led us to carry it out.
I was fortunate enough to spend nearly ten years as part of a community that helped me reconnect with my cultural roots—the ones that taught me the importance of family gatherings over a meal. Over the years, these gatherings have provided me with the most meaningful and memorable moments of our shared journey with God. Those very moments were occasions when God’s Word became more tangible. They were truly the embodiment of the deeply rooted connection between the human and the divine. The joy that filled our hearts helped us overcome conflicts and disagreements that any community—whether Christian or not—may experience.
But beyond this community, sharing a meal remains an important bonding factor within all human societies. Sharing food is a powerful, universal act that turns the simple act of eating into an opportunity for deepening human connections.
Meals are a prevalent element in the Holy Scriptures, and one of the best-known accounts of Jesus sharing a meal involves a few loaves of bread and a few fish being distributed to 5,000 people (Matthew 14:13-21). What seemed impossible to human eyes became a great miracle of God’s generous love, which embraces everyone without distinction. This has made eating together a fundamental value across cultures and throughout history, and for us Christians, it surpasses basic biological necessity to become a deeply spiritual act.
The spiritual sense of this act is what is referred to in another well-known account, that of the Last Supper which was the final Passover meal Jesus shared with his twelve disciples in Jerusalem before his crucifixion (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 13). During this meal, Jesus initiated the Eucharist (Holy Communion), identifying the bread as his body and the wine as his blood of the new covenant for God's new people—a people of brothers and sisters, friends, and human beings from all backgrounds.
At our dinner on May 1st, I noticed that some people were speaking English and others, French, Creole, Swahili, or Spanish, and so on. We didn’t need to speak the same language to understand each other, the food did all the talking as it had the power to transcend cultural and language differences. The proof of that is simple. We didn't need to know the name of a dish or how it’s traditionally prepared to appreciate its flavors. Only our mouths and our tongues knew the truth and were able to reassure us.
From this Spring Dinner, we raised nearly $5,000. As announced, these funds will be dedicated to support our youth ministry in building a strong sustainable future. We would also like to assure you that the Bishop’s Dinner remains very much on our agenda and that we are still planning to have the pleasure of inviting you to it in the fall. We are considering maintaining the overall format, with a few adjustments. Further information will be communicated in due course.
Thank you so much for letting us hear the stories behind each dish and every menu item. We’ve learned a lot about each other, our families, our cultures, and our personal journeys. I hope that after this gathering, we may transform what started out as a simple meal into a movement of friends committed to sharing the love of Jesus Christ throughout this diocese.
+Victor-David Mbuyi Bipungu
version française ici https://www.montreal.anglican.ca/latest-news/2026/6/2/gi089ck3q8ujr0audfvgoyy0de5ltb
