Rosaria Butterfield was a tenured professor at Syracuse University, a committed lesbian activist, and she had just published a scathing critique of the religious right in the local newspaper. She expected hate mail. What she got instead was a letter from a pastor named Ken Smith that she couldn't throw away.
The Letter That Wouldn't Let Go
Ken didn't argue. He didn't condemn. He asked questions — real questions, the kind that showed he'd actually read her article carefully. And then he invited her to dinner. Rosaria almost didn't go. But curiosity won, and she showed up at the Smith household expecting a trap.
What she found was a table set with good food, honest conversation, and two people — Ken and his wife Floy — who treated her like a neighbour, not a project.
Two Years of Tuesday Dinners
They kept inviting her back. Every week. For two years. Ken and Floy never pretended to agree with Rosaria's worldview. She never pretended to agree with theirs. But they ate together, laughed together, and slowly built the kind of trust that only proximity creates.
Rosaria started reading the Bible — not to critique it, but because she was a literature professor and Ken had made her curious about this text she'd dismissed. She expected to find what she'd always assumed: a regressive, incoherent document. Instead, she found something that read her more deeply than she could read it.
The Conversion That Surprised Everyone
In 1999, Rosaria gave her life to Christ. She later wrote "The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert," describing it as a train wreck — not a gentle discovery but a complete demolition of everything she'd built her identity on. The Jesus she met through Ken and Floy's kitchen table was not the caricature she'd been fighting against.
"They never treated me as an an evangelism project," she wrote. "They just loved me."
What This Means for You
Ken Smith's strategy wasn't really a strategy at all. He read something, cared enough to respond with kindness, and opened his home. No programme. No agenda. Just dinner, every week, for as long as it took. If you want to change someone's life, start by setting an extra place at your table.