Making Room
October 2, 2008
A vital aspect of living missionally involves embracing biblical hospitality. Over the next several Thursdays (because Thursdays are for focusing on the “Participation in the Missio Dei ” aspect of the Missional Order) I want to share those resources that have challenged my understanding of hospitality. The first being the excellent book “Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Chrsitian 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.”
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4 Comments to “Making Room”
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Brad,
Thanks for the post. Timely, impactful and demands a verdict from us.
You quoted Pohl saying that “hospitality should be understood as a way of life rather than a task or strategy.”
Impactful truth! Challenging! to our thinking and to our ways of life. It’s challenging because we live such hurried lives. If we don’t make room (large enough periods of time, space, energy, and resources in our lives) for hospitality, it will not become a life-orientation for us. It will remain a strategy, an ineffective program that bleeds God-life from us and leaves us deathly anemic.
I am not sure that many of us realize that we live in the Kingdom of God and that a life devoted to the ways of the Kingdom is markedly different (different in kind) than a life that is not Kingdom oriented. We have a dilemma. On one hand we know hospitality is a primary orientation of God’s will/kingdom on earth for with-God lifers. On the other we have such a truncated view of the gospel that does not infect all of our lives but only the “spiritual” part. So, there is a bifurcation in understanding of sacred and secular. Sacred is what we do in church and secular is what we do outside. It is not so in the early church. The truth is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is an all-inclusive, inviting, relational, and hospitality-full life.
Brad, I loved reading this book and found it really helpful, yet I have never heard anyone blog on it before. Trust it would be you who’d be the first to do so.
It is so easy to think of hospitality as being an affable host to friends you invite round for dinner - I appreciate the posts insights and the two comments ….it has got me thinking
Rodney
I love the idea of hospitality as a way of life. I long for my life to be the kind of life that others can enter and feel at home, share their heart and be loved.
I also find practicing hospitality to be very hard in modern culture where one’s value is often attached to their ability to get things done. Seems to me being busy and being hospitable fight each other.
When I greet others in ministry with “How are you?’ The reply is often, “Busy.” I’d love to be able to answer that question with “Hospitable.” I bet it would garner few puzzled looks.