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.
In January 2012 a Greenhouse team from Chicago (William and Anne Beasley, Jens Notstad and I) went to El Paso, TX to lead a workshop for the Southwest Diocese In-Formation on church multiplication. It was quite exciting to see a whole Diocese desire the expansion of the church. I was also there for the formal launch of Rey de Paz, a Hispanic congregation at St. Clement’s church led by catechist Ken Hanna, who I have been coaching. It was a great privilege to partner in these ways with the folks of St. Clements and the Diocese of the Southwest!
“As many lament the decline of Christianity in the United States in the early stages of the twenty-first century, very few have recognized that American Christianity may actually be growing, but in unexpected and surprising ways [especially via the growth of the immigrant church]. The American Church needs to face the inevitable and prepare for the next stage of her history – we are looking at a nonwhite majority, multiethnic American Christianity in the immediate future. Unfortunately, despite these drastic demographic changes American Christianity remains…disconnected from both [this] global and local reality.” (Soong-Chan Rah,