Five Practices of Fruitful
Congregations – Week 1- Radical Hospitality
Midweek Meditation - September 26, 2012
BMC- Romans 15:7(MSG)
Introduction:
Hospitality
is a nice idea right? We enjoy spending
time with others. We enjoy good
hospitality when we are a guest at someone’s home. Some of us even see hospitality as a gift
that we personally have. We enjoy
hosting people in our homes for a meal or for an overnight despite the
additional work that it creates.
Hospitality
is a good thing, right? Even cultures
that do not know about Jesus have cultural understandings of the importance of
hospitality. So what makes this so
important that it would be named as one of just 5 Practices of Fruitful Congregations? Of all the things that we can be doing to
express our faith, why is hospitality so high up on the list?
We will
have time during our discussion portion of the night and on Sunday morning to
flush this out more fully; but one of, if not the most important, reasons that
hospitality needs to be such a central discipline of our faith stems from the
words of Romans 15:7. In the Message
version, it reads, “So reach out and welcome one another to God’s glory. Jesus did it; now you do it!” In the NRSV, it reads “Welcome one another,
therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
Each one of
us is a believer, each one of us is in church, each one of us is here at Bethel
because of the hospitality that we received from the faith community. That may have been from our family or from
others in the congregation or from both; but if we had not received a welcome,
if we had not felt accepted, if we had not experienced love; we would likely
not still be here in the church. With
few exceptions, we come to faith through the hospitality of someone who cared.
What is Radical Hospitality?
So what is hospitality? The author of our study defines it this way, “Christian
hospitality refers to the active desire to invite, welcome, receive, and care
for those who are strangers so that they find a spiritual home and discover for
themselves the unending richness of life in Christ.” (FPoFC pg.11) Hospitality welcomes those who come to our
doors and invites them to be a part of our church family.
But we are not talking about mere
hospitality, are we? We are talking
about “radical hospitality.” We are
talking about intentional hospitality that extends beyond the walls of our
church building and that may require us to do things a little differently when people
come to visit.
We are talking about hospitality akin to the instructions of
the master in Jesus’ parable about the great banquet in Luke 14. There we read that the master told his
servants to “‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the
town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’ ‘Sir,’ the
servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’ “Then
the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel
them to come in, so that my house will be full.”
We are talking about hospitality that in the words of the
author, “involves seeing ourselves as sent out by Christ and going out of our
way, even at the risk of a sense of awkwardness and inconvenience, to invite
people into some aspect of the church’s ministry. Hospitality is prayer, work, habit, practice,
and initiative for the purposes of Christ.” (FPoFC pg.14)
Stories from the summer
One of the
challenges and the blessings of our summer family renewal sabbatical was that
we worshipped in a different setting just about every Sunday. In the process, we struggled with our lack of
rootedness during those three months. By
the middle of July, our children began asking, “When are we going to go back to
OUR church.” To which I say to each of
you, thank you for making my family feel so much a part of this church family.
At the same
time, we had the opportunity to experience what it is like to be a visitor in a
number of different settings. For Beth,
growing up as a pastor’s kid and then marrying a pastor, this was a completely
new experience for her. And even for me,
my chances to visit a different church on a Sunday morning are few and far
between; but it is an important discipline that I commend to you on those
Sundays that for whatever reason you are not able to worship at Bethel.
We had a
variety of experiences. I will just
share three of them briefly. During our
week of camping at Hocking Hills, we went to worship with St. John Mennonite
Chapel which was literally within a half mile of the camp ground.
They are an
Ohio Conference church plant and on the Sunday that we went, they had about six
people from their congregation there to worship. We had 6 in our family. There was one other visiting couple and there
was the guest preacher because they do not have a pastor of their own. The guests outnumbered the regular attendees
and yet they were one of the friendliest congregations that we visited.
They met us at
the door and greeted us with more than a simple “Welcome to our church.” They gave us welcome gifts. They had a children’s story prepared even
though they did not have children of their own there. And they visited with us following the service.
On the flip
side, on another Sunday, we visited a larger congregation that had all of the
right things in place, but in the end did not seem as welcoming. They met us at the doors and shared with us
about their children’s programming and how to find it. They had brochures to hand out and helped us
to find the restroom when we needed it.
But when we
saw someone that we knew, the first thing out of their mouth was a puzzled
“What are you doing here?” Now, I’m sure
that this was a natural response given that I am a pastor in another
congregation. It’s not often that I can
visit other churches, but her words certainly did not feel very welcoming. The underlying message was “You don’t belong
here.”
This was also
a service in which they broke part way through for small group prayer. Now I know that I could have asked to join a
circle of people, but given that I am not the pastor there and that as an
introvert, that is not my natural inclination; I decided to see what would
happen if I just sat there. So I did, by
myself for about 15 minutes until the next part of the service. Now to be fair, the people around me may have
thought that I didn’t want to join a group.
They may have been trying to respect my space, but once again the
message I received was “You don’t belong here.”
Another church
that we visited has worship first followed by Sunday school. Even though we got “mugged” while we were
there, they gave us a church mug as a welcome gift, we felt very welcome by
their efforts to visit with us and get to know us after the service. And although we didn’t take them up on it
because of other plans, they invited us to stick around after the service and
attend Sunday school with them. Had we
stayed, this would have given them an extra hour to extend their hospitality to
us and to get to know us better.
Conclusion
Our faith
calls us to extend hospitality to those around us. Jesus calls us to go out beyond ourselves to
welcome in the “poor and the lame.” You
have heard some of our experiences with hospitality over the summer. Now I invite you to take the next 15 minutes
or so to talk around your tables about hospitality.
Each table has
a sheet with some starter questions.
Feel free to use them in any order or to go in a different direction as
the spirit leads. If one person could
serve as a facilitator and take some notes, I would be very thankful as it will
help me in my sermon preparation for Sunday.
A little before 7PM, we will have a closing prayer so that those who
need to go can while those who would like to continue to fellowship may do so
as well.
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