A new church-run restaurant offers mostly vegan fare as a healthy alternative in a low-income neighborhood.
Seventh-day Adventists opened The Ark in a former Pizza Hut earlier this year. Adventists established meatless restaurants as early as the late 19th century in a bid to encourage healthy living.
For Adventists, who believe discipleship involves care for the body as well as the soul, meatless restaurants provide vehicles to bless the world. They also enable new friendships to take root as diners, wait staff and cooks share common passions.
The Ark’s main purpose is to promote good health and the happiness that comes from feeling healthy. The Ark offers midday meals six days a week and dinner two nights a week.
After lunch on weekdays, tables are routinely folded up and chairs reconfigured for free workshops on health-related topics such as therapeutic massage, hydrotherapy, smoking cessation and vegan cooking. Eating meat taxes the environment far more than a plant-based diet does.
Some patrons of The Ark are now rethinking how they relate to the natural world and other creatures--even if they are not signing on to Adventism, which encourages but does not require a meatless diet. For those seeking spiritual connections, Adventists are glad to share about their faith, but only if restaurant customers ask about it.
Outside of lunch hours, tables are sometimes cleared to make room for worship, Bible study or a prophecy seminar. But if all people do at The Ark is eat lunch, that’s quite alright.
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The Ark to get to their website.
