Many church ladies specialize in a dish. Dinner on the ground at Spearsville Baptist Church in Spearsville, Louisiana, wasn't complete without Aunt Ethyl Cherry's chocolate pie or her chicken and dumplings. Another woman always took baked beans. These are three traditional dishes. Dinners on the ground are a good place to swap recipes, to impress other members of the congregation with your cooking skill, to introduce new dishes or your innovation on a traditional dish.
Some churches have picnic tables set up.
Sometimes families bring sheets or blankets to sit on. Babies were bedded down for naps on quilts placed at their mothers' feet. . . . It was always hot and house flies and horse flies came along to church, too. If I had not been fortified with Grandma's good breakfast and the promise of a bountiful dinner waiting in boxes, tin tubs, splint baskets and trunks on the long tables under the trees, I could not have lasted out the sermon inside the church. Finally, and at long last the preacher closed his Bible, a benediction was said, and dinner on the ground was spread. . . .