Hospitality
Much is (rightly) made these days of the significance of
hospitality, of making newcomers feel welcome and of providing multiple
opportunities for fellowship in our churches. Living as we do in a café
culture, many churches are seeking to allow aspects of that culture to
transform the way they do church. Rapidly disappearing are the days of
providing a packet of biscuits and instant coffee in draughty church halls and
drab lounges after worship services. In their place we are seeing church foyers
being transformed into warm, light and spacious hospitality hubs where good
coffee and food are served both before and after the service, and in many cases
during the week too. Some churches are going further by allowing the café
concept to inform and change the very shape and content of their worship. Such
services tend to be informal and interactive, and they make a lot of use of
multimedia – PowerPoint, DVD clips and the like.
Hospitality serves important pastoral purposes of making
people feel welcome and providing places of belonging. Interestingly, the root
meaning of the Hebrew word for salvation in the Old Testament is “to be roomy”
or “to make room for”, or “to create space for”. I was reminded of this a few
years ago when I heard Dave Dobbyn’s song, “Welcome Home”, which includes a
wonderful line, as he alludes to the settling of immigrants to this country:
“See, I’ve made a space for you now.”
An integral part of hospitality from a biblical and
theological perspective, then, is about making the stranger feel welcome,
making space for those who are not like us. Indeed it even goes so far as to
include the notion of being reconciled to those from whom we may have been
estranged. The Apostle Paul made this a recurring theme in his correspondence
to fledgling Christian communities – e.g., Galatians 3:28. It’s not just that
Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free, all have their place – a form
of peaceful co-existence as it were – but rather, the very things that divide
them, allowing one ethnic group or class of people to dominate another,
dissolve, and in their absence a new reconciled and reconciling humanity has
been born.
It is this radical, transformative dimension to God’s
hospitality, on display every time Christians gather around the Lord’s Table,
which sets the church apart from every other organisation. Other community
groups may surpass the church in their ability to welcome newcomers and provide
fellowship, but every time Christians gather for worship and receive the “holy
bread of heaven which gives us life” (John Calvin), they are reminded of a
deeper and more profound dimension to hospitality – a dimension that originates
in God and overflows from the throne of Grace, overcoming sin, binding people
together in a reconciling embrace and serving as a sign of God’s intention for
the world.
Understood in this way, exploring ways of becoming more
hospitable will involve more than adding a café experience to church
attendance. In her remarkable book, Take This Bread, Sara Miles
describes the experience of early one morning in San Francisco, for no earthly
reason, wandering into a church, receiving communion, and finding herself
transformed – embracing a faith she had once scorned. Before long, she turned
the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled at the foot of the
church’s communion table to be given away. Within a few years, she and the
people she served had started nearly a dozen food pantries in the poorest parts
of their city. Her story graphically illustrates the missional potential of
Eucharistic hospitality. For those who feel confused or overwhelmed by all the
talk around being a missional church, I would say, concentrate first on being a
hospitable church. Properly understood, this will not make your church inward
looking; rather, it will sharpen you for witness and mission.
What would becoming more hospitable entail for your church?
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