What Hospitality Isn't: Why You Don't Have to Have an HGTV Home to Welcome Guests
For an introvert, the most beautiful words in the English language are “quiet evening at home.” My wife and I are both introverts, and we treasure our quiet evenings at home.
But we know that God has called us to an active neighbor-love that compels us to reach out to the people around us. That means we are learning how to practice the spiritual discipline of hospitality.
I have been talking about hospitality as the main strategy for us to reach the people in our lives. There was once a time when cold-turkey street evangelism, door-to-door canvassing, mass rallies and other impersonal approaches were effective means of introducing people to Christ. A basic understanding of the Christian worldview and the Bible and Jesus were more deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, so people were more open to entering into spiritual conversations with strangers.
But those days are long gone. People hunger for relationships, and it is in relationships that we have the best opportunities for fruitful spiritual conversations.
That’s why hospitality is so important. We are convinced that the best place to introduce our neighbors and co-workers to Jesus is not at a church event but at the kitchen table. In the words of Rosaria Butterfield, hospitality makes it possible for us to “make strangers into friends and friends into family.”
But as we think about hospitality, we need to make two crucial distinctions:
1. We cannot treat our neighbors as projects. I read recently of a non-Christian who told his Christian friend, “If we’re going to continue to be friends, you’re going to have to stop preaching.”
Ouch.
People outside of Christ are not projects to be completed; they are not mission objectives. They are spiritually homeless people who are trying to put their lives together as well as they can.
Their greatest problem is not their particular sin but the fact that they don’t know that God gave up His Son to bring them home.
And we can’t solve that problem by simply preaching to them; we must befriend them and pray patiently for the right opportunity to have that conversation, that moment when we can be one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.
The moment we begin to think about “evangelizing our neighbors” as a box to check, we have poisoned the whole process, and they will be the first ones to sense it.
2. Hospitality is not the same thing as entertaining guests. If we want to entertain guests, we will take our cues from HGTV and Martha Stewart and Pinterest. We will attend to every detail to ensure that our guests’ experience is splendid in every possible way.
That’s not hospitality; that is performance art. It focuses on the experience. That kind of performance has its place. Some gifted people love to dazzle their guests with their astonishing attention to detail, and it is wondrous thing to be entertained by a gracious and gifted host or hostess.
Hospitality is simpler. It is opening our homes and domestic lives to others. While there are details involved (we do want to make sure there is actually room on the coffee table for coffee cups and that there is toilet paper in the bathroom), the hospitable impulse is focuses not on the experience but on the guest: “Welcome to our home! We’re so glad you came to be with us!”
I remember something my mother once said about a woman in her church who always offered to host meetings in her home. That woman’s house wasn’t the tidiest (and the church ladies sometimes whispered their disapproval to one another) but my mother noticed and appreciated that woman’s willingness to open her home to others.
That woman wasn’t good at entertaining guests, but she was grandly, generously hospitable.
In her book Just Open the Door, Jen Schmidt makes the distinction this way:
The deep-seated worrying, the excuses, and the overthinking of a simple invitation should be warning signs, telling us we’re confusing social entertaining with hospitality. When we use our lives exactly as they are, desiring only to create a sacred space for our guests, we turn entertaining upside down, and it becomes radical hospitality.
Once on a mission trip, I asked my translator, a Cru staff member, how she came to faith. She told me about how her English instructor in university made it a practice to invite his students into his home. It was there she saw the way that Christian man and his wife treated one another, how they treated their children, how their children responded to their parents.
That was her first taste of the glory and the beauty of the gospel, and she knew she wanted to know more about whatever made that home such a lovely place. It wasn’t about her hosts’ meticulous attention to detail; it was that she had been invited into a Christian home and saw something beautiful and wonderful there. God’s Spirit used the hospitality of that Christian family to introduce her to the Good News about Jesus.
If we want to create the space and depth necessary for our neighbors and co-workers to open up about their interior lives, we must get to know them deeply and intimately, and we must let them get to know us as well. That will mean opening up our own lives and our homes to them.
None of this is natural or comfortable for introverts. But God hasn’t called us to be comfortable, He’s called us to do what Jesus did. Just as God sent His Son into our world, Christ has sent us into our neighbors’ worlds, not to be served but to serve.
Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor