Dallas Willard has said that our churches are full of converts who do not intend to become disciples. Another way to put it would be this: Our churches are full of people who are there to receive the benefits of grace without knowing that they are receiving such blessings “in order to be a blessing.”

In such congregations, mission tends to be one of many programs done by the community, rather than to define the very purpose and character of the community. Mission sermons are preached now and again in order to mobilize action or resources for a particular outreach. People know that mission is a theme of the Bible, and they expect to hear about it now and again. But discipling is rarely focused on mission. It is primarily understood, where it is talked about, as a process of personal spiritual growth. . . .

Where missional renewal is happening, different kinds of questions are brought to the Bible. Congregations are open to being challenged, to looking hard at their deeply ingrained attitudes and expectations.

The missional approach asks: How does God’s Word call, shape, transform, and send me . . . and us?Coupled with this openness is the awareness that biblical formation must mean change, and often conversion. Christian communities may discover that their discipling will require repentance and that their way of being church will have to change.

– Darrell Guder in Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness

This is a short interview with Alan Hirsch during last week’s Exponential Conference in Orlando. When asked about church planting in America as compared to planting efforts in the UK or his own Australian context he states that church planting in the United States is ”too bonded to the church growth movement.” He goes on to say that the church in the West has not yet adequately considered the missionary nature of the church. 

In other words we in the West are too centered on how to get our individual churches to grow, primarily through attractional means, rather than seriously considering how to think as a cross-cultural missionary focused on reaching those who have no interest in attending our church functions. Let me know what you think about Hirsch’s comments.

If you are not familiar with Alan Hirsch be sure to check out “The Shaping of Things to Come” and “The Forgotten Ways.”  Also if you haven’t read TFW I have blogged through the majority of the book here.

Over the past couple of months I have been reading several books on the topic of biblical hosptiality. I am convinced that if the church is going to cultivate a missional ecclesiology we must understand the neccessity of biblical hospitality and embrace its practices.

The books that have informed my own understanding of biblical hospitality so far have included Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love  by Homan & Pratt, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition  by Christine Pohl, I Was a Stranger  by Arthur Sutherland and New Testament Hospitality: Partnership with Strangers as Promise and Mission  by John Koeing. The most recent has been And You Welcomed Me by Amy Oden.

What makes Oden’s book unique is that she presents a wide collection of early Christian texts that speak to the centrality of hospitality and its practices in the life of the early church. The range of excerpts come from letters, diary accounts, sermons, travelogues, and community records and rules.

In the beginning of the book Oden shares the common theme that runs through each of the ancient texts:

If hospitality is welcoming the stranger, this begs the question: who is the stranger? In this collection of early Christian texts, descriptions of hospitality and its constituents cover quite a scope. Early Christians talk about hospitality to the sick and injured, to the widow and orphan, to the sojourner and the stranger, to the aged, to the slave and imprisioned, to the poor and hungry.

At times it seems there is no class of people not included within the scope of hospitality. Perhaps that is as it should be, for there are many ways to construe otherness, in terms of health, economic class, family relations, nationality, or social status.

If we look closely at the specific categories of people who warrant hospitality in these texts, we will see that they have one thing in common: they are all vulnerable populations. They exist on the margins, both socially and economically. They can easily be ignored and seldom bring status or financial gain to those who reach out to them.

Oden concludes the book with a beautiful and important word on hospitality as a means of grace. She writes:

For me, the central insight is that hospitality is a means of grace. It is an avenue, path, or opening to God’s grace in the world in which we both receive grace and pass it on to others. Means of grace are often very simple acts: eating together, praying together, listening to God’s word, or simply being together in fellowship.

Such concrete experiences become doors that open to the grace that infuses the universe. Hospitality is a way of life infused with grace, a participation in the grace of God all around us, not a set of particular actions or behaviors. Hospitality is more a matter of becoming attuned to grace, and participating in its movement, than it is trying to create a particular atmosphere or situation.

Put this way, hospitality can start to sound ethereal and vague. For hospitality is indeed less than discreet deeds and more of an orientation embedded in the Christian life, a way of being in the world that entails acts of welcome and sustenance, yet is more than those particular acts.

This way of being includes mercy, justice, and recognition. All of these characteristics speak of communities and individuals with a mature spiritual awareness of God’s grace and presence. It may be that the best way to cultivate hospitality is to cultivate a deep awareness of God’s grace and the means that open to it. Only out of that awareness and gratitude can hospitality be genuinely practiced.

Leadership Network’s featured resource this month is the new book by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay titled “The Tangible Kingdom.” I hope to begin to read the book this week and offer a review soon. In the meantime here is a short interview that Leadership Network did with the authors. You should also check out both Hugh’s and Matt’s blogs for more discussion on missional living.

Here is a link to an excellent paper titled “The Missional Church and Missional Living”  presented by Howard Snyder to the faculty at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto. 

While the entire 15 pages are well worth reading, I found the last four pages (12-15) to be especially profitable. Snyder present a holistic approach to evangelism that is not limited to “conversion evangelism” but instead involves the comprehensive nature of the Kingdom.

I recently began reading “The Changing Face of World Missions” by Michael Pocock, Gailyn Van Rheenen and Douglas McConnell. The book focuses on the dramatic changes that have taken place both in global society and in the church and the implications those changes have on how the church does missions. In chapter three, titled “Religionquake: From World Religions to Multiple Spiritualities”  Van Rheenen writes the following about the church’s relationship with other world religions:

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theologians in the Western world sought to prove Christianity, to enshrine it as the queen of the sciences, or at least to give a rational foundation for believing God and the Christian way of life. In the new climate of the twenty-first century the most significant theological issue is the relationship between Christianity and the other world religions.

Later in the chapter he offers three very different ways Christians approach adherents of other world religions.

Reconciliation is based on the idea that truth is found equally in all world religions. Reconcilers employ inter-religious dialogue to arrive at common understandings of at least some truth.

Confrontation is based on the idea that non-Christian religions are demonic, estranged from God, contortions of ultimate reality as formed by God. Confrontational ministry is thus defined as a type of spiritual warfare. Confrontational methods may range from gentle admonishment and exhortation to prophetic denouncement.

Incarnation is based on the idea that God enables divinity to embody humanity. Christians, like Jesus, are God’s incarnation, God’s temples, tabernacling in human flesh (John 1:14; Phil. 2:3-8). Christians, spiritually transformed into the image of God, carry out God’s ministry in God’s way. Incarnationalists relate to seekers from other world religions personally and empathetically (as Jesus taught Nicodemus). Sometimes, however, they declare God’s social concerns by shaking up the status quo and “cleaning out the temple.” The end result of incarnation is a non-Christian world is always some form of crucifixion.

What do you believe are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Where do you find yourself when approaching other religions?

“We always treat guests as angels — just in case.”     
– Brother Jeremiah

“Hospitality begins at the gate, in the doorway, on the bridges between public and private space. Finding and creating threshold places is important for contemporary expressions of hospitality.”
– Christine D. Pohl

“If there is room in the heart, there is room in the house.”         
– Danish Proverb

“If you have a hospitable disposition, you own the entire treasure chest of hospitality, even if you possess only a single coin. But if you are a hater of humanity and a hater of strangers, even if you are vested with every material possession, the house for you is cramped by the presence of guests.” — Chrysostom

“Fear is a thief. It will steal our peace of mind and that’s a lot to lose. But it also hijacks relationships, keeping us sealed up in our plastic world with a fragile sense of security.

Being a people who fear the stranger, we have drained the life juices out of hospitality. The hospitality we explore here is not the same kind you will learn about from Martha Stewart. Benedictine hospitality is not about sipping tea and making bland talk with people who live next door or work with you. Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others.”
– Homan and Pratt in Radical Hospitality

Matthew 25:31-46, a crucial text in the history and practice of Christian hospitality, is startling in its implications for recognition and misrecognition. To some of the gathered crowd Jesus will say; “Come . . . inherit the kingdom prepared for you . . . for I was hungry and you gave me food . . . thirsty and you gave me drink . . . a stranger and you welcomed me.”

To others, Jesus will say, “I was hungry and you gave me no food . . . a stranger and you did not welcome me.” Both groups will respond similarly — Lord, when did we see YOU and respond that way? The connection between particular needy persons and Jesus comes as a total surprise.

– Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl

Hospitality should be understood as a way of life rather than as a task or strategy. It is easy to slip into viewing hospitality as a strategy for reaching migrants and refugees, or for that matter, for reaching postmodern youth or homeless people. But such an approach misunderstands the basic orientation of hospitality. Hospitality is not a means to an end; it is a way of life infused by the gospel.

– Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl

In David Dunbar’s latest issue of Missional Journal he speaks of the Missional Church as a much needed renewal movement; but one that should be characterized by humility and charity. This was a good reminder for me! 

This may help you understand part of what attracted me to the missional church. It too is a renewal movement. I see it as a moving of God’s Spirit within the Western church at a very critical time in its history. We find ourselves (most Christians probably agree on this) in a time of decline. Churches in the West are in trouble: internal dissensions, the failure and discouragement of leadership, loss of our youth, widespread negative perceptions of Christians by outsiders, and the death of many congregations. Just the kind of dry-bones situation where the breath of the Spirit often begins to blow. . . .

When missional leaders point out current problems in the church, they often appear to have an arrogant disregard for what God has already done–as if the Holy Spirit has been totally absent for the last century and nothing of eternal significance has really been accomplished! Good people thus feel attacked and undervalued, their contributions unwelcome and unneeded.

I suspect most renewal movements, whether by intention or misunderstanding, have conveyed such messages. To those who have felt attacked, I apologize. The point is not to discredit the sincere and often productive endeavors of the past, but to ask, “How can we be faithful to the gospel in the new cultural situation of the 21st century?” Of course any attempt to answer this question involves evaluation of our current situation and some level of critique of the current state of the church.

Read the rest of the article here.

“Hospitality is a way of life fundamental to Christian identity. Its mysteries, riches, and difficulties are revealed most fully as it is practiced.” — Christine Pohl

“The opposite of cruelty is not simply freedom from the cruel relationship, it is hospitality.” — Philip Hallie 

“Hospitality means inviting the stranger into our private space, whether that be the space of our own home or the space of our personal awareness and concern. And when we do so, some important transformations occur. Our private space is suddenly enlarged; no longer tight and cramped and restricted, but open and expansive and free.” — Parker Palmer 

“Those who receive you receive me, and those who receive me receive the One who sent me.” — Matthew 10:40

“When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers . . . become guests revealing to their hosts the promise they are carrying with them. Then, in fact, the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial and evaporates in the recognition of the new found unity.” — Henri Nouwen