Open Table Ministry
Open Table Ministry free store is open every Tuesday from 9:30-11:30 a.m.
As a first-year Master of Divinity student preparing for a career in medicine, Aaron Shirley had imagined his field education experience might involve a clinic, a hospital, or another setting where he could gain direct experience with patients. Instead, his placement brought him to Open Table Ministry in Durham, a nonprofit that walks alongside people experiencing homelessness.
He quickly realized he had landed somewhere that would shape how he understands his future patients.
Field education at Duke Divinity School moves students beyond the classroom and into churches, nonprofits, and other ministry settings where they put theological learning into practice while discerning their vocations.
For Shirley, M.Div. ’27, that learning is taking place among people who come to Open Table each Tuesday for clean clothing, showers, hygiene supplies, and a welcoming community.
“Ministry should meet people where they are,” Shirley said. “My placement has shown me that ministry ought to always be practical and active—to first listen and understand what someone’s needs are and then be moved by love and the desire to serve, to meet those needs effectively and sometimes creatively.”
Open Table began in the early 2000s as a roadside food ministry led by local congregations, Duke Divinity students, and outreach workers. It has since grown into a nonprofit that partners with Trinity United Methodist Church and the FreshStart Durham mobile shower truck. Each Tuesday, more than 100 people come through its doors.
In the fall of 2024, Shirley was the first Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative fellow to be placed at Open Table. At first, he was uncertain.
“There was all these other options for clinics and rural clinics and ways to get different kinds of patient experience,” he said. “And so when I was placed here, I was like, 'Okay...Amen.' But also, 'Let's see what this is going to hold.'”
“I showed up 6:45 in the morning on a Tuesday. And I started cleaning showers. And I knew right then I wanted to be here every single Tuesday for the rest of my duration here at Duke.”
He wound up continuing to volunteer at Open Table until his official field education placement there in the 2025-2026 academic year and summer.
The work has given Shirley a different understanding of what it means to care for another person. In Open Table’s free store, guests do not simply receive whatever clothing is available. Volunteers ask their names, learn their preferences, and help them choose what they want.
That ability to choose matters, and that attention to dignity connects directly to Shirley’s calling as a physician.
“Seeing those small acts of dignity where you're providing folks with an opportunity to have agency and make decisions and choose, in a safe environment, is huge.”
Shirley came to Duke after studying history as an undergraduate and writing his senior thesis on the Catholic church’s role in the development of medieval surgery. He had already decided he wanted to become a physician, but conversations with professors and others prompted him to consider broadening his education.
Then he discovered Duke’s Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellowship.
“As someone called to be a physician whose faith is central to their practice,” Shirley said, “I immediately felt the Holy Spirit telling me this was the next step.”
The questions that brought him to Duke are questions he expects to carry into medicine: What does it mean to care for a person whose life is vulnerable? How should a Christian physician understand suffering? And how can medical care account for the whole person rather than reducing someone to a diagnosis?
His experience at Open Table has tied right in to all of those questions—in a concrete way that involves real people.
“I think that to be healthy is to be whole and in community,” he said. “And so, the way we've allowed folks to not only just sleep outside, but to be on the margins of our society, we all have to push against that. And I think that medicine is a really great place to connect that.”
One Tuesday, a guest came to Open Table needing a birth certificate to enter a shelter. He had been adopted but did not know his birth mother’s name, and he was unsure which county he had been born in. Shirley and the guest spent more than two hours calling government offices, hospitals, and schools, piecing together information that eventually allowed them to identify his birth mother and order the document.
The experience reinforced something Shirley has learned throughout his placement: Sometimes caring for someone means being willing to stay with a problem longer than the system expects.
“Those are the questions I’ve been wrestling with is, how will I show up for my patients and be faithful to the call God has given me?”
His field education has also changed the pace at which he wants to move through the world.
Shirley was a competitive hurdler and sprinter in college. He is accustomed to speed and the next finish line. At Open Table, he has learned to slow down enough to hear a story and remember the name and person.
“And that only happens when we slow down,” he said. “And, that is a part of my formation, as well as being able to see the larger context in which folks who are experiencing homelessness have arrived at this point.”
