Caminando con Cristo on Good Friday

By Jonathan Kindberg

This last week I had a post-holy week debrief with my leadership team from Iglesia de la Resurrección and Santa Cruz. As we went around the circle, each individual told their most memorable moment of Holy Week. To my surprise, almost every leader mentioned our Good Friday procession.

One of my leaders told how this procession helped them enter into to the reality of Jesus' suffering. One leader mentioned how it brought her back to her childhood days of walking in procession during Holy Week with her grandmother in Mexico.

   "These traditions are a part of our heritage, but when we come to this country they are lost. No one does processions here." For many it was the first time in years that they had been a part of one.

What exactly was this procession? On Good Friday, Iglesia de la Resurrección joined with our new church plant, Santa Cruz, to do an outdoor stations of the cross through neighborhood streets in Glen Ellyn. We sang and walked, pausing at various points for readings and prayers, marking each step of Jesus' journey towards Golgotha. Our journey began with a prayer: "Lord, allow us to walk with you in remembrance of these sacred mysteries" and between each stations we sang "I will walk in the presence of the Lord."

At the stripping of Jesus' clothes we prayed for the homeless and the naked. When Jesus' cross was taken by Simon of Cyrene, we prayed for immigrants and a just immigration policy. When his hands and side were pierced we prayed for all those suffering from violence in Mexico and Latin America.

The response from those we passed by was mixed. As we went by the first house, the windows which were partly open were quickly shuttered closed. Some passersby exchanged bewildered looks and hurried on their way. At another house, as we paused to do the readings for one of the stations, a man reverently knelt down at his window in prayer.

For all of us it was a vivid reminder of the public and scandalous nature of Jesus' crucifixion and death and of Jesus' invitation to walk every day and everywhere in the light of his presence. It brought all the more close to home our parish's mission statement:

"Walking with Christ, Transformed by him, Transforming the world.
Caminando Con Cristo, Cambiados por él, Cambiando al mundo."

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Hospitality and Space Sharing

By Jonathan Kindberg

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say, “I came as a guest, and you received me.” - Rule of St. Benedict

“After 30 days a guest becomes family.” - Arab proverb

Over the next 3 years the Mission On Our Doorsteps movement, which I help lead, is focusing on 4 key initiatives in which we hope to spark transformation: immigration, human trafficking, generational issues in immigrant churches and host and hosted church relationships. At the last conference I was privileged to help facilitate the host and hosted church relationship track and to listen in on what became a fascinating and engaging time of honest dialog between immigrant church leaders and predominantly Anglo church leaders who are hosting immigrant churches in their buildings.

The reality of multiple churches, including immigrant churches, sharing the same church building is increasingly becoming the norm around the country-especially in urban areas. In a study done of 617 congregations in Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, Massachussets 32% share worship space with at least one other congregation. These space sharing scenarios are pregnant with kingdom potential but also with the potential for kingdom conflict.

The theme of hospitality was one of the topics which arose in the midst of the conversations conversation between leaders at Mission On Our Doorsteps.

In the West we Anglos have generally lost the virtue of hospitality, a virtue highly valued and deeply practiced in much of the rest of the cultures of the world. Eating together in someone else’s home or simply drinking together an evening cup of coffee, a daily experience in the Global South, is becoming a rare thing in the dominant culture in North America. When hospitality is practiced, we have watered it down and made it “soft sweet kindness, tea parties, bland conversations and a general atmosphere of coziness” to those who are like us, as Henri Nouwen says in his book “Reaching Out.” We have forgotten the risky, costly nature of hospitality as a welcoming in of the stranger and hospitality to the other as a two way exchange in which the guest is receiving the gifts of the host and the host is giving room for the expression and reception of the gifts of the guests. Hospitality as mutual exchange and enrichment.

Christine Pohl in her work “Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition” states: “I believe that hospitality…means to give of yourself…(in) other types of services you can give of your talents or…skills or…resources…The tasks aren’t what hospitality is about, hospitality is giving of yourself. If hospitality involves sharing your life and sharing in the lives of others, guests/strangers are not first defined by their need. Lives and resources are much more complexly intertwined, and roles are much less predictable” (p. 72).

What would it look like if this kind of radical hospitality were to permeate the church today? How would our buildings be used differently? What if we all, Anglo and minority church leaders, began to see the “other” as a blessing to be received rather than a danger to be avoided? How would our relationships look with those whom we shared building space with? What if we began to see “the guest as a guest of God,” as a middle-eastern proverb states? I think this would radically change the nature of host and hosted church relationships and the face of the church today.

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