hospitality

I have been doing some additional reading today in preparation for a kirk session (leadership team) meeting tonight. I was especially struck by this article written by Graham Turner:

“Ours is a friendly church”

How many times have we heard is said that our church is a friendly church? And then we add, “there is always a warm welcome here for newcomers”.
While a polite and cheery welcome on a Sunday morning is a good start, the Bible is interested in something deeper: ‘hospitality’. In our culture this has usually come to mean being a good host and feeding people. From the Greek behind this word (philoxenos) we know that hospitality really means ‘love of strangers’. It is about welcoming these strangers into our lives, and being open to be welcomed into their lives. It is about having compassion and freely giving ourselves to people we do not yet know.
In his book ‘Reaching Out’, Henri Nouwen says that to reach out to strangers and invite them into our lives is at the core of Christian spirituality. But he goes on to say, “It is important to realise that our spontaneous feelings towards strangers are quite ambivalent.” This, he continues, is a form of hostility, usually pervaded with fear and anxiety, that prevents us from inviting people into our world. One of the fruits of progress on the spiritual journey is to see our hostility (or ambivalence) transformed into hospitality - that is, love of the stranger.
Robert Warren, once the Archbishop’s adviser on mission, said that people need a network to belong to. He added that research has shown, that if a new person to a church makes six friends (that is, more than acquaintances) in six weeks, there is a 98% chance that they will stay. This does not happen in many churches. Churches often say, “we are a friendly church”, but someone one once asked, “Yes, but how easy is it to make friends here?”
I encountered a single woman who came to one of our churches recently who said, “Do you know how hard it is to go into a church for the first time by yourself?” As someone else said, “If a stranger comes to your house, it is only polite that you speak to them.”
Our response to all this can be either:
a. defensive – i.e. “it does not happen around here,” or
b. managerial – i.e. “we need to put some new systems in place in our church organisation.”
I do not think it requires either of these. It certainly does not need more ‘oughts’ or ‘shoulds’ from the front of church about talking to new people after the services; because it is at root a spiritual issue, not simply a practical one. Instead, we need to feel what the stranger feels and imagine what it is like to be in their shoes. This is compassion – to share their pain.
Sadly, in our world the assumption is that strangers are a potential threat or danger. In God’s world, they are a potential encounter with the living Christ himself. So are you missing out?

What this article is saying to me, is that leadership isn't so much about getting together and making strategy decisions, so much as it is about living a virtuous, hospitable life which impacts on others.

Here's another excellent article on this theme of hospitality.