Becoming a hospitable church

If it is true that hospitality is a key element of our evangelism and that our communities actually suffer from their lack of strangers among them, what specific things can we begin working on to incorporate hospitality into our mission?

We can see our acts of hospitality as important ministry tasks, equal to the tasks of pastoring and evangelism. Our simple gifts of welcoming bring integrity to our words of witness. What we do and who we are in the marketplace speak as loudly as the Sunday morning sermon. We must never forget that.

Welcoming ministries must see their roles in a new light. All of the welcoming details – signs about where bathrooms are, name tags for the ushers, a follow-up visit from someone from the church – are acts of ministry. They are important ways of showing welcome and must continue. But these actions are only the tip of the iceberg. A congregation can wear nametags and bake bread for visitors and be as friendly as can be, and still never draw a stranger in. They will be friendly but not friends. The church hospitality committee must work with the church leadership to help the congregation redefine who they are as a body. This committee must work to educate the congregation about their own need of the stranger. They must help the church take a hard look at their attitudes. If this doesn’t happen, all the nametags in the world won’t make a difference.

The congregation needs to reexamine its welcoming rituals. How do church rituals, especially baptism and communion, communicate both receptivity and confrontation? First, they must be intentional. There must be overt welcome and invitation to join the church. The congregation needs to call people to commitment, call people to join the church, call people to begin a relationship with Jesus and call people to recommit their lives to God.

But our invitation can stop there. We must be intentional in our mentoring, our passing on of the faith. We need to tell the story in ways that fit the needs of the seekers. We can’t dilute the message, yet we must make the message accessible to the ones joining us. We must do this in many different ways and at many different times of the year. Seekers may experience the confrontation in Sunday school, in the worship time, in a small group session, in a mentoring relationship or in a variety of other places. The task may seem overwhelming, but to a congregation that sees their main goal as welcoming the stranger, the time and energy needed for the task seem right.

The actual baptism service needs to be tailored to fit the experience of the people being baptized. Allow them to help plan the baptism; ask them to pick songs and words that fit their experience. Make the language simple and accessible to all. Then, after one year, throw a party for all the newly baptized. Celebrate their welcome into the kingdom again!

We must be sensitive to the special demands of a postmodern society. Our pluralistic society frowns upon anyone who claims to know the truth. Absolutes grate against our sensibility. Christians find it difficult, then, to witness about Jesus. Hospitality is one answer to this dilemma. “Hospitality offers a way to be a Christian and yet communicate in inviting ways to the society around us,” says Mark Diller Harder. Hospitality emphasizes listening to the guest and supplying the needs of our guests – including their need to hear our values and beliefs. In true hospitality, the guests know where we stand, yet are free to accept our values or move on.

We must encourage a transfer of leadership. Real hospitality means ministry with people, not ministry to people. We can be very welcoming when newcomers first join our faith communities, but when it comes time for them to join the inner circle of the community, to be part of the power structure, many congregations start backing off.

There are many reasons why we don’t let new believers or young adults come into the inner circle of the community. They have new ideas that threaten us. They want to change that beloved carpet we picked out 20 years ago. They force us to share the power we worked so hard to get for ourselves at one time. We forget how we felt when we were the outsiders wanting to put that carpet on the bare floor in the first place.

But welcome lasts forever. We must welcome others because we love them, not because they fulfill our need to be needed. Hospitality says that we must share the ministry. To be a healthy church of the future we must not only share ministry but also actively cultivate the leadership skills of those who wait on the outside of the circle. Like Barnabas and Ananias we have the opportunity to nurture the next Pauls.

Michele Hershberger is chair of the Bible department at Hesston (Kan.) College.

This article is from A Christian View of Hospitality by Michele Hershberger. Copyright 1999 by Herald Press, Scottdale, PA 15683. Used by permission.