lifeasmission

A Bit More on Hospitality: Welcoming the Stranger

February 15, 2007

Not sure why I didn’t think of this the other day, but there is another vital component of what it mean to be the people of God linked to the idea of hospitality – welcoming the stranger.

Because of their experience in Egypt and God’s deliverance, the nation of Israel was admonished to always welcome the stranger (alien – Gen 15:13, Ex. 23:9). In Luke 10 Jesus sends the disciples out to announce the Kingdom of God and part of their task was to bless those who welcomed them as strangers/aliens.

Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs note this as a distinctive of the Emerging Churches that they researched and this, at least to my mind, is intrinsic to what it means to be missional.

Sidenote: I don’t throw that word missional around lightly. As I wrote about here, this word is fast being co-opted by the consumeristic trends of American evangelicals, thus necessitating that we be very deliberate about how we understand, use, and define this word. Being missional stems from a theological revolution resulting in not simply new mediums or methods of communicating the same gospel message, but a fundamentally different, thouroughly biblical, message of the mission of God in the world – the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom in and through Jesus, the way in which this mission of God creates a community called church, whose salvation is experienced here and now for the sake of the world. Being missional (and therefore missional language) is not something which can simply be added to church structures and practices – it either recreates from the inside-out, when rightly understood, or destroys from the outside-in, when wrongly understood.

Eric Jacobsen in his book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom, also has some great things to say about how the places we live in effect our ability to be the sort of people who are even able to welcome starngers.

All this to say that being hospitable people is not merely something we can hope to aspire to someday, but is part and parcel of the very identity of the people of God. It’s important.

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