For the Bunce sisters — Daryn, Lin, Kendall and June — church was a family affair, and their childhood centered around Coggins Memorial Baptist Church in Lexington, North Carolina. Their grandfather, Dearl, was the pastor. Their grandmother, Betty Lou, was the music minister before their mother, Anita, stepped into the role. And their father, Linwood, served as a deacon.

The Bunce sisters — Daryn, Kendall, Lin and June (top) — have created The Welcome Table to provide followers with regular devotions that explore the Christian faith, share personal stories and foster meaningful conversations across differences. Daryn Bunce Stylianopoulos (’03), above. Photos courtesy of the Bunce family

Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday nights were spent inside the red brick building for worship and fellowship. But Sunday afternoons were usually reserved for their grandparents’ house.

 Anybody who wanted to come for lunch after services was welcome to stop in, remembers Daryn Bunce Stylianopoulos (’03). The girls would dig into their grandmother’s scratch-made chicken pastry while eavesdropping on the stories that the adults shared around the table.

 “My grandmother was especially good at welcoming people to her table,” Stylianopoulos says. “It was a beautiful moment of what it is to provide space for one another, being around the table together.”

 Years later, in 2020, amid pandemic-era isolation and a divisive election, those Sunday lunches around their grandmother’s table helped inspire what the four Bunce sisters would create together — The Welcome Table.

 Their organization provides followers with regular devotions that explore the Christian faith, share personal stories and foster meaningful conversations across differences. It’s a unique expression reflecting Wake Forest’s Pro Humanitate motto, which helped lead both Stylianopoulos, who majored in anthropology and music, and Lin Story-Bunce (MDiv ’09) to Wake Forest.

 Regardless of the political or cultural climate, the Bunce sisters believe in the power of stories — both the telling of them and the listening to them. Not everybody in families sees eye to eye. “But we also still respect each other and still continue to hold each other with love,” Stylianopoulos says. “We knew it to be possible. It’s just having the opportunity and practicing it.”

Stories fuel life journeys

 Whether around the Sunday afternoon table with fellow churchgoers or at more intimate family gatherings, sharing stories was just what the Bunce family did. Sometimes those stories were lighthearted. Every Christmas, for example, the family members would recount how their grandparents met at Christmas time.

Sometimes, the stories were more weighty. Early on in his career, despite his success as a farmer, Dearl Bunce felt called to ministry in response to the injustices he saw toward people of color in his community.

He told his granddaughters about a burning cross that appeared in a field across from his church before a picnic he planned for migrant farm workers. Another story centered around the prayerful encouragement required for him to persuade deacons at another church he pastored in eastern North Carolina that they should host a Black choir as a part of their church’s worship service.

But those stories weren’t shared with a woe-is-me attitude. They signaled how the Bunces carried themselves in the world, Story-Bunce says. “You listen to them talk about it, and it just gives you a sense of, ‘Oh, that is part of who I am. Their story is part of who I am.’”

The sisters took those stories and life lessons with them as they embarked on their own journeys. Stylianopoulos, the oldest, left home first. At Wake Forest, she remained connected to her faith but fully immersed herself in Wake Forest’s music and anthropology scene. She joined the Wake Forest Demon Divas a capella group, Chi Omega sorority and Concert Choir, where she met her husband, Spiro Stylianopoulos (’01). 

Through her anthropology studies, Stylianopoulos gained a deeper understanding of how culture is constantly shaped. “As a young person, just out of high school, it was really helpful in allowing me to examine anew things I had taken for granted,” she says. And through choral singing, in particular, she discovered the power of collaboration. “Music is just a beautiful way of bringing folks together from all different backgrounds and perspectives,” she said.

 Story-Bunce, the second oldest, headed to Campbell University a few years later to play soccer and major in math education and religion. The sisters’ maternal grandfather, James Jung, was a longtime organic chemistry professor there.

Lin Story-Bunce (MDiv ’09)

A mentor at Campbell encouraged Story-Bunce, who came out as a lesbian in high school and is now married to her high school sweetheart, to apply to the Wake Forest School of Divinity, where she might find a more open and inclusive community. It was the right fit for her.

“I found Wake to be the place where, truly, people could be in a classroom and have different ways of seeing the world and the Bible and still engage in conversations that were loving,” she says. “I felt like, as a community, it was really this commitment to living out Christian faith in authentic ways.”

For both, Wake Forest’s motto, Pro Humanitate — for humanity — felt familiar and inspiring. They remember answering a similar question on their college applications: “What does Pro Humanitate mean to you?”

 “That was one of the things that made me feel like, ‘Oh, this is the right place,’ coming from the family that I came from,” Story-Bunce says. “It wasn’t just about what was happening in the classrooms. It was about how we were taking what we were learning in the classrooms and in the community into the world.”

Making a place for everybody

By 2019, the four sisters had spread their wings. Story-Bunce was serving as a pastor at College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro. She’s currently the pastor of worship and faith development. Stylianopoulos had earned a master of divinity degree from Boston University’s School of Theology and was serving as a pastor. She is now pastor of faith formation and the arts at First Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts.

Their younger sister Kendall Grubb, a singer, was based in Tennessee, working for a marketing and strategy agency where she is now chief operations officer. And the youngest sister, June Dare Bunce, was working as an actress and at their father’s law firm.

In late 2019, Grubb encouraged Story-Bunce to start writing devotions that were affirming for progressive church spaces. They’d tossed around possible names for the series and came up with The Welcome Table.

But as the world shut down and the political climate grew more contentious, the need became more apparent for a broader approach that could bring people together — even virtually — to learn from one other.

“You could just sense that things were very polarized and very divided, and folks just weren’t making space to have conversation with each other,” Stylianopoulos says. “They were just writing each other off, or they were staying in their silos and not allowing for respectful dialogue to happen.”

Grubb, now the Welcome Table’s CEO, again saw a need to do something, so the four sisters got to work in fall 2020, writing 28 reflections in the span of two weeks to share daily during the Advent season leading up to Christmas.

They launched The Welcome Table by asking their family to subscribe to the email newsletter to receive devotions, featuring Bible verses or a quote and a short reflection. They expected maybe 50 family members and friends to sign up. By Christmas, they had 700 subscribers. Today, as many as 2,500 have subscribed.

“What we all felt was that we had tapped into something that people were wanting or needing,” says Story-Bunce, who serves as the chief communications officer. Stylianopoulos is development director. June Bunce is project manager.

Over time, those devotions evolved to include guiding questions that encourage self-reflection or conversation with others. The sisters have also tapped additional writers, who serve up their reflections and devotions at The Welcome Table.

The personal stories shared in each devotion can be general. In one, Story-Bunce encourages readers to think about how they shine their own light in the world. Others can be deeply personal. Susan Chorley (’94), now a pastor in Massachusetts, wrote about what she learned about herself from a family member who came out as transgender.

“So much of what The Welcome Table offers is this sense that you don’t have to tell your story, you don’t have to believe a certain way,” Chorley says. “But it’s this sense of we can be together in it, and we can learn from one another.”

The Welcome Table maintains an active blog, newsletter and five self-published books, including a children’s book intended to encourage intergenerational engagement. While many subscribers dive into the devotions for personal reflection, some churches use the resources for small group study or the congregation. The sisters hope to establish a nonprofit in the next year, through which they might offer in-person retreats or a podcast.

Michael Lamb, F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character and executive director of Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character, met Stylianopoulos through a mutual friend in Massachusetts and shared a view that the world needs more spaces “for people to really engage respectfully, thoughtfully and gracefully across differences.” Lamb adds, “What The Welcome Table is doing is creating a real invitation to deep inner knowing that helps us recognize our own humanity, so that we can see and celebrate the humanity of others.”

Softening hearts, cracking the tension

 Five years after The Welcome Table’s start, divisiveness in the country remains, but the sisters carry on. “The Pro Humanitate that drew Daryn and that drew me into Wake Forest was this idea that we can do something to make a difference,” Story-Bunce says. “In my experience, the way people move and are changed and are opened up (is) by these little conversations, hearing someone’s story, getting to know someone, caring deeply about the way something affects another human’s life.”

They hope that readers, even momentarily, can take a break from the stress in their lives. When they read somebody else’s story or reflection, they hope that their hearts and minds soften and that the tension within them cracks, even slightly.

“When I get the email, it’s a little invitation for me to pause my day and have a moment where I touch peace through contemplation,” says Keith Menhinick (MDiv ’15), a religious studies lecturer at Georgia State University who has written for The Welcome Table.  “Whenever it pops up in my email feed, I like to think of it as a reminder to pause, take a little moment.”

Stylianopoulos hopes The Welcome Table will continue to fill that human need for connection. She often thinks about what their maternal grandmother, Patty Jung, said as she was dying from cancer: “We need each other.”

“Any way that you can connect with somebody else’s story reminds you that you’re not alone in this world,” Stylianopoulos says. “It reminds you that you share something in common with somebody else. … And it’s true. We need each other. We are a part of each other. We’re all we have, and whatever we can do to remind one another of that truth, it truly matters.”

Sarah Lindenfeld Hall is a longtime North Carolina-based journalist, former staff writer for the Winston-Salem Journal and The (Raleigh) News & Observer and founding editor of WRAL-TV’s popular parenting website. Today, she’s a freelance writer, regularly diving into stories about interesting people and parenting, health, education, business and technology topics.