“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems.

My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.”

– Henri Nouwen

Because of a major glitch involved in the 2.9 WordPress upgrade, the blog has been down for the past couple of weeks. But because of the great help from the guys at iThemes I am finally back up. So to get caught up a bit here are several links I have been hoarding:

Len Hjalmarson adds a bit to an excellent post by David Fitch on Instilling Missional Habits.

Len again with Dallas Willard on Incarnation.

Ortberg shares a great illustration of the incarnation.

How Religious is Your State?

Spiritual Warfare and Gospel Movements.

A good reminder from Dan Kimball to start with prayer in 2010 and to see church buildings as mission outposts.

Churches and Social Media from Drew Goodmanson.

Is There an Organic Church Movement?

Update: Andrew Jones and How to Spot a Church Movement.

Today I had the privilege to participate in a conference led by David Fitch. The combination of being a member of academia along with being a church planter gives Fitch an excellent perspective on doing ministry in a Post-Christendom context. One of the many helpful discussions today revolved around the importance of both presence and proximity in the ministry of the missional church. The discussion reminded me of this quote from Nouwen:

More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.

-  Henri Nouwen

My friend Georges Boujakly reminds us from Celtic Daily Prayer that hurry isn’t helpful for anyone.

Hurry is an unpleasant thing in itself, but also very unpleasant for whoever is around it. Some people came into my room and rushed in an rushed out and even when they were there they were not there–they were in the moment ahead or the moment behind. Some people who came in just for a moment were all there, completely in that moment.

Live from day to day, just from day to day. If you do so, you worry less and live more richly. If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly in those moments.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Celtic Daily Prayer

O Lord, I place myself in Your hands and dedicate myself to You. I pledge myself to do Your will in all things:

To love the Lord God with all my heart, all my soul, all my strength.

Not to kill, not to steal, not to covet, not to bear false witness, to honor all persons.

Not to do to another what I should not want done to myself.

To love fasting. To relieve the poor.
To clothe the naked. To visit the sick.

To bury the dead. To help those in trouble.
To console the sorrowing. To hold myself aloof from worldly ways.
To prefer nothing to the love of Christ. Read the rest of this entry

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.

“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

“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

Listening is always involved in hospitality. The most gracious attempts we can muster are meaningless if we do not actually hear the stranger. Listening is the core meaning of hospitality. It is something we can give anyone and everyone, including ourselves. It takes only a few minutes to really listen.

A young man who worked all during his high school years bagging groceries said that the vast majority of people who went through his line never looked at him when he asked, “Paper or plastic?” He said people did not meet his eyes, smile at him, or acknowledge him in any way.

What a tiny thing. Look up; look into the eyes of the young person and smile.

The former bag-boy said, “My mother asked me one day why I always hung around her, talking, after work. I didn’t know why until Mom and I talked about how I feel at work. I feel like I’m not quite human.”

This is what happens to the one who feels as if no one ever listens. Most of us cannot imagine such an existence, but there are homes and places where people are not heard. Children are often not listened to; they are viewed as objects to be maintained rather than real human beings.

Hospitality is a way to counter the thousands of times another human being has felt less than human because others didn’t listen. Listening is the power of hospitality; it is what makes hospitality the life-giving thing it is.

– Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love by Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt

Hospitality is not optional for Christians, nor is it limited to those who are specially gifted for it. It is, instead, a necessary practice in the community of faith. . . . Several aspects of early Christian life combined to make hospitality central to Christian practice.

First, shared meals were a significant setting for struggling with cultural boundaries in the early church, especially in working through the incorporation of Gentiles into the early communities. At meals together, tensions surfaced between rich and poor believers; meals provided the context for instructions on equal recognition and respect. Hospitality practices in the Christian community were to portray a clear message — that of equality, transformed relations, and a common life.

Second, the gospel initially spread through the ministry of believers who traveled widely and depended on the hospitality of others. Hospitality to those first missionaries and the reception of their message were very closely connected. . . . Hospitality was the practice within which early Christians met the needs of traveling missionaries and leaders, religious exiles, and the local poor.

Third, the early church regularly met for worship in the households of believers. In such a location, hospitality was a natural and necessary practice. It helped foster family-like ties among believers and provided a setting in which to shape and to reinforce a new identity.

For the early church, then, hospitality both participated in and anticipated God’s hospitality. Christians offered hospitality in grateful response to God’s generosity and as an expression of welcome to Christ “who for your sake was a stranger.” For them, hospitality was connected to the promises of God and to the presence of Christ. It condensed attention to spiritual, social, and physical dimensions of life into one potent practice which was fitting conduct within the household of God.

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

Hospitality, rather than being something you achieve, is something you enter. It is an adventure that takes you where you never dreamed of going. It is not something you do, as much as it is someone you become. You try and you fail. You try again. You make room for one person at a time, you give one chance at a time, and each of these choices of the heart stretches your ability to receive others. This is how we grow more hospitable — by welcoming one person when the opportunity is given to you.

- Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love by Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt