Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times

On Wednesday, March 17, 2010, Christine Pohl gave a lecture titled "Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times: Promise and Peril for the Church" at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that lecture.

"In the ancient world hospitality was viewed as a pillar of morality on which the universe rested. Before inns and restaurants were available every stranger, whether they were rich or poor, depended on someone's hospitality. It was an expression of mutual aid, it's what you did for one another. And most societies in some way tied hospitality to the divine because it was important. They tied it to their gods. But only Christianity links it as closely to the divine as we see in Matthew 25, where Jesus describes the separation of the sheep and the goats. That separation is tied to whether or not people had responded to Jesus' hunger, to his thirst, to his need of welcome, his need as a sick person or a prisoner. Everybody in that story is surprised. The surprise was that somehow they were neglecting Jesus. And Jesus responds "As much as you've done it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you've done it to me or you haven't done it to me." It's an extraordinary response. There could not be a closer connection between encountering Jesus and responding hospitably to another person in need somehow.

Our welcome into the Kingdom is tied to the welcome that we have offered, based on Matthew 25 and on Luke 14:12-14 where Jesus tells his host (he's at a party) "When you give a party don't invite your friends, your family, and wealthy neighbors, the people who can repay you, but rather invite the poor and broken and despised into your parties and your lives and God will repay you." [1] Based on those two passages the ancient church was convinced that Christians had to open their doors to the poor and to strangers, because it was part of following jesus, but also because it was possible that jesus was the one who was knocking at the door. [2] So it was an extremely important tradition to the church, especially in those early centuries. It was also tied to the Hebrews 13:2 passage, the instruction to be careful not to neglect hospitality to strangers because in welcoming strangers we might just be entertaining angels without knowing it, which is a clear reference back to Genesis 18 in the experience of abraham and sarah. So followers of jesus are invited into a way of life that is distinctive. It's distinctive because of the expectation that our welcome to one another and to strangers, even to enemies, will reflect and reenact god's welcome to us in christ. And so paul in romans 15 reminds the community to welcome one another as christ had welcomed them.

Nowhere does scripture suggest that this life of hospitality is easy or safe, but neither does it suggest that it's optional or that it's a gift just for a few people. It's central to the life of faithful discipleship. But it's also infused with grace. The practice of hospitality roots us in some of the most mundane and basic aspects of human existence. It's about food and security, a place to sleep. It's about conversation and respect. It is about blankets and soup and pots and pans and long cups of coffee with a troubled person. It's also about refugees who need a home and a new family, a new place to begin. It's about the homeless woman and her children who need some support until they can get on their feet again. It's about the troubled teen who can't communicate with his parents but maybe would open up to someone else. It's about the elderly neighbor whose children and grandchildren live across the country, but needs someone to be with them after surgery. I think it's about a congregation who's present to a brother or sister who's really walking through the last stages of cancer and the congregation that comes alongside and walks with the family as well as with the person, making sure that food is available and that hearts are tender. Hospitality was a central practice of the church for centuries, but for a number of historical as well as sociological reasons a lot of the transformative character of hospitality got lost. So the boundary breaking, the identity shaping, the community building role of hospitality eventually kind of withers after about the first thousand years of the church. And during the late middle ages hospitality came to be identified primarily with lavish entertaining of the rich and powerful [3] and really ironically instead of helping people to transcend social and cultural boundaries and differences and to form new communities, it actually ended up reinforcing the boundaries. It was used to sort of reinforce power and difference and influence.

So the connection with equality, and with poor people, and with crossing social differences with god's presence was lost or nearly lost for centuries. This is really what had distinguished it in earlier times. During the Patristic period, the first five or six centuries of the church, christian leaders specifically contrasted what they called conventional hospitality and "christian hospitality," and this is really quite clear in the writings of Lactantheus of jerome and john chrysostom among many others. Conventional hospitality, the hospitality that was practiced by the larger culture, they said was "ambitious," you did it to get something in return, it welcomed those who had the ability to repay the favor in some way. And that had been the the greek and roman understandings of both hospitality and benevolence, that it was a way of reinforcing mutually beneficial relationships. But christian hospitality, these church leaders said, welcomed those who didn't seem to have anything or very much to offer, who couldn't repay and forge dynamic relationships with them. It really is based on jesus' instructions to welcome to the banquet those who were most likely to be excluded and on the promise that in ministering to them they might be ministering to jesus. It was really these early writers who insisted that the practice of christian hospitality was to be different and not look for benefit or reward. And yet because god was present in the practice there was a different kind of blessing or reward. And they were very willing to talk about that. You didn't do it to get something, but clearly there was blessing involved in the practice.

Another distinction of most of the earlier understandings of hospitality is that it was directed towards strangers. The greek word "philoxenia," which is one of the key words in the new testament for hospitality, actually has "love" and "strangers" in the word itself. It's not that welcoming family and friends was unimportant. It clearly is important and valued. But what was distinctive for christians is that the kindness and welcome we usually reserve for family and friends was to be extended outward, especially to people who were in need, and making a place for them within our own communities of love and support. So lactantheus would argue that nature and human relations required that persons do good to relatives neighbors and even friends, but then he went on to say "but the one who does it to a stranger and an unknown person, he truly is worthy of praise because he was led to do it by kindness only." Many centuries later after the eclipse of hospitality protestant reformers recovered dimensions of the practice especially in responding to the needs of protestant refugees, many of whom were fleeing and so on. So martin luther would write that when persecuted believers were received hospitably god himself is in our home, is being fed at our house, is lying down and resting. Quite the vision. Calvin was particularly aware of the importance of hospitality and commended christians who welcomed refugees. He wrote "no duty can be more pleasing or acceptable to god than such hospitality," which he described as sacred. And for calvin the demise of hospitality was evidence and expression of human depravity. however in their efforts to reform the church and to correct for previous excesses and developments in worship, luther and calvin did not recover the important place of hospitality in congregational life, in the church context. Instead they focused on hospitality in the domestic sphere, in the household, and then in the civic sphere, in the city. This actually made sense given the fact that they were worried about refugees. Refugees needed a place to stay, they also needed a city that would take them in, but it's important because this was a significant shift in the emphasis of the location, and in doing that the transformative power of hospitality was muted.

The most transformative aspects of hospitality happen in the overlap of household and church, where guest-host roles are more fluid than they would be in just a household, and where everybody sees god as the ultimate host. This was really the situation in the early church. Hospitality is eventually domesticated in the household. It becomes largely a matter of entertaining family and friends. That's certainly not what calvin and luther intended, but that was pretty much the trajectory in the civic sphere. The results are more complicated. Concerns about hospitality to strangers become some of the philosophical basis for the developing discourse about human rights in the early modern period. Concerns about the care for the poor and the vulnerable, that were understood in earlier centuries as part of the practice of hospitality, are eventually reshaped into social services. That comes a little bit later. But we really do see the development of various programs of social welfare, a more thorough development of hospitals, and then eventually social work. In the process care becomes much more bureaucratized and anonymous, distanced in a sense from the people that they were helping. In the economic sphere hospitality practices are gradually reshaped into the growth of the hospitality industry: hotels, restaurants, resorts, and so on. So what happens historically is that hospitality becomes very fragmented. It loses any sense of coherence so you don't think of all of those expressions of hospitality as actually being connected at their core, and hospitality as a significant practice for the church and for christian life is pretty much lost by the 18th century. The story of christian hospitality gets lost and what's left are pieces of the practice, scattered over different institutions and spheres of life, but not really central to the church.

Interestingly in the 18th century John Wesley recovered many of the practices of hospitality: the importance of shared meals, conversation, emphasis on welcoming the least, the importance of the overlap of household and church in the societies, the small class meetings, and particularly in the emphasis on the importance of visiting. But he didn't call it hospitality or really link the practices that he was emphasizing with the historic tradition because by that time in england the word hospitality had been emptied of moral meaning. It really wasn't a useful term. It didn't have theological significance. At that point it mostly meant entertaining and luxury. I'm not making an argument here that what happened to hospitality was the result of evil intentions or some ecclesial fall from grace. I think the changes were the result of pretty complex historical and social developments. But a consequence is that culturally and theologically we've lost a sense of hospitality's significance and its history. So in the church today if there's a hospitality committee members are usually in charge of the coffee hour or ushers or greeters or the parking lot. Usually not a lot more. If there is further discussion of hospitality in the church it's often about its potential as an evangelism strategy or program.

A recovery of hospitality is crucial to the credibility of the gospel. While rational argument and living and loving embodiment are not mutually exclusive apologetics, today people are often pretty cynical and dismissive about words if they're not embodied in a community. Robert Weber in his book ancient future faith writes that the most significant apologetic christians will be able to offer in the 21st century is the quality of life and welcome within the church. A community that embodies the experience of the kingdom he says will draw people to itself. He continues in this sense "the church and its life in the world will become the new apologetic. People come to faith not because they see the logic of the argument but because they have experienced a welcoming god in a hospitable and loving community." 

I want to shift now and think a little bit more specifically about hospitality as a dangerous practice, about the perils associated with practicing hospitality. And I think in some ways what end up doing is kind of exploring what's endangered when we practice hospitality. What is it we're trying to protect? I would say the first thing is our lives and our lifestyles. Hospitality breaks down the distance between those with certain kinds of resources and those who might need them. Our lives are more exposed when we practice hospitality, especially when we become friends with people unlike ourselves, people who have different assets or resources. If you have substantial resources it's hard to become good friends with a very poor person and to hold on to your excess stuff without being troubled by the differences. So hospitality forces us to live closer to our limits. A robust practice of hospitality in which we welcome people into our lives regularly, and share ourselves rather than just our resources, also exposes our frailties, our unhelpful quirks, and forms of self-indulgence. It undoes our attempts to protect or to project a certain kind of image, especially if there's a big disconnect between the image we're trying to project and the reality of our lives. Vulnerability and self-disclosure really are necessarily involved in hospitality. But as one of the guys i interviewed said "hospitality also stretches us." He said "you know, hospitality is making me bigger, it's increasing my capacity to love, i'm becoming more practiced at loving, but it does involve a dying to self." So it's a costly practice. It's filled with gift and beauty and grace. And practitioners consistently told me that they got more than they gave, which is probably the testimony of many of you who've offered a lot of hospitality. It's a mystery but it is also costly. And despite countless testimonies that hospitality is a wonderful practice, many of us are uncertain about embracing it because we're worried that people will take advantage of us, and that some strangers might be troublesome or dangerous (either as guests or actually as hosts).

To some extent there's truth here and we need to acknowledge these concerns and not brush them off. We need to find ways to address the real concerns and also to become willing to live with a level of uncertainty and risk. No doubt that we have to be attentive to protecting the vulnerable ones for whom we're responsible. But there are often creative ways to do that and i would just say that one of them is to make hospitality more public while also keeping it personal. Interestingly, people have always thought that it was easier and less dangerous to welcome strangers in previous times than it is in their own day. So luther argued that hospitality was easier for abraham because the strangers in abraham's day were less likely to be scoundrels, I have no idea why, but actually calvin made a very similar argument. And centuries earlier the church fathers argued that. There are some reasons that some of the risks are higher today, and partly that has to do with the changes in the household. Households are smaller and much more private, and hospitality is safer in the context of community. But with practice and commitment (again, and with some creative thinking) we can find ways to reduce the risk and make hospitality sustainable.

Hospitality is a potent practice. It can be misused in many ways. The early church documents criticized those christians who made a traffic of christ, who traded in christ: people (especially leaders) who lived off the generosity and hospitality of others were strongly criticized and warnings against christians who were idle or lazy or using hospitality run through the tradition. But the church found ways to handle these difficulties, ways to deal with the abuses and still be able to welcome strangers. They established structures that protected communities against gross abuse. Centuries later calvin wrote that it was crucial to relieve those truly in need, but that it was entirely appropriate to make inquiries regarding their circumstances. But lest we think that his view gives license to the scrupulous "needs tests" that we see sometimes in homeless shelters or the really intrusive scrutiny of persons where we insist on knowing everything about them before we do anything, Calvin also reminds us not to try to cover our stinginess under the shadow of prudence. If we start with grace and welcome, then we will be in better shape to handle the difficult situations where we have to make hard decisions. I really think that's key.

We have to start with god's gracious character and powerful generosity. If we start with the impulse to make room, to make room the way that god has made room for us [4]. If we start with grace, then we have a better set of resources to deal with the hard cases, I think there's a certain moral and theological authority that comes with faithfully offering welcome over the long term that allows us to discern the occasional times when welcome is unhelpful. Hospitality also can endanger our reputation, our comfort, especially if by welcoming certain kinds of people we challenge those in power or who have privilege. If we make a safe place for people that other folks would prefer remained invisible or excluded or ignored then the danger can be real. So hospitality can also endanger our experience of privilege, though in other ways hospitality has tended to reinforce it. Transformative hospitality requires a willingness to acknowledge our own neediness.

We have to be careful not to insist on always being the host. We do have a tendency especially sort of in middle class educated groups to assume that we have all the resources and whoever the other group is they have all the needs and that hospitality moves just one direction. And i think it's it's a real challenge, but terribly important to understand the importance of allowing other people to be host, to share their gifts, to see that the resources and the blessings flow in both directions. But certainly hospitality endangers our control over resources. If we open the door we can be overwhelmed, people respond to the experience of welcome and sometimes they come in an increasing stream. I think because of this fear we hesitate to even do any kind of significant hospitality, because we're worried about limited resources. We're worried about limited time or money or energy or a space. We're afraid there won't be enough or we won't be able to do it well enough. Resources are not infinitely expandable, though there are wonderful stories about how god supplies. But finding rhythms of rest and work (or welcome) in hospitality is important. Hospitality by definition is gracious and generously open-handed. It's very hard to think about closing the door or limiting the practice, and yet it's also necessary.

As Edith Schaeffer, the co-founder of L'Abri and a very wise practitioner of hospitality, has reminded us it's not sinful to be finite. There are limits, but god does supply in amazing ways. But it does mean that our hospitality will always be imperfect and incomplete even when it points toward god's love. And hospitality also endangers our plans and our time. In a task-oriented culture the opportunities to offer hospitality usually come in the form of interruptions. An orientation toward offering welcome really crashes into our emphasis on efficiency and measurable results and requires really that we reorient our priorities. We have to see hospitality much more as a way of life than a task that we pile on to already overburdened schedules.

Hospitality can also endanger a cherished way of life. It's actually complexly related to bounded communities. Hospitality depends on communities that have a rich sense of their own history, that have their practices and commitments and shared values, that make it a community into which people want to be invited, a shared way of life that's good and compelling. But as we welcome people who are different from us identities are changed, and it's not just those of the guests. The community itself is changed, sometimes in small ways (usually in small ways), but sometimes major. And figuring out which parts of identity and community are crucial to preserve, and which can properly be reshaped is an ongoing challenge. Negotiating those questions actually contains an element of real danger. Communities can be undone by closing in on themselves and keeping other people out. But they can also be undone by welcoming anybody and everybody without asking for any conformity or shared commitments or whatever. So interestingly hospitality depends on and yet pushes outward our communal boundaries and identity.

We talk a little bit about hospitality as resistance. When the larger society disregards or dishonors certain persons our acts of welcome and respect are potent alternative statements. When we welcome people into our lives, when we open the door to someone different from ourselves, we establish new relationships and connections. And this is particularly important when it's people that the world says aren't very important, aren't worth very much. In these cases welcoming the least or offering hospitality is an act of resistance and defiance. Several things happen when someone is welcomed, especially if the larger society prefers that they remain invisible. When they're welcomed how they feel about themselves is changed because our self-assessment is so closely tied to what other people think of us. But that kind of welcome is also a challenge and a witness to the larger community who then has to think about why this particular community actually found this person interesting or valuable so it thinks about its own assumptions as a community. It allows people who are overlooked and undervalued to be seen and noticed, and it allows their gifts to be recognized and appreciated. There is really nothing more dangerous than being invisible or having no place to contribute. This is not to suggest that hospitality is an alternative to pursuing justice, but i think it's an important aspect of pursuing justice in environments where food and shelter and companionship are interrelated. Weary and lonely people can be restored to life.

Years ago John Cogley described the restoration of people that he witnessed in a catholic worker house of hospitality. It's an interesting quote. He says "the security of the house, poor as it was, regular meals, a sure place to sleep, work to be done, the knowledge of being useful to others, and the casual but very real fellowship of the place - these things were enough. It was often as if you could see a change taking place before your eyes, like something visible happening, like color returning to a face after a faint." And he went on to observe "even the crudest hospitality can work miracles." And here he was talking about working with homeless men. Often when we think about transformation or liberation or reconciliation or wholeness we tend to imagine that a broad change can be brought about in one of two ways: either we aim at individual conversion from sin, or we aim at societal transformation from structural evil. But if we care about wholeness and holiness in persons and in society, then we will also need to pay attention to hospitality and friendship.

There is a level of human transformation that's tied to interpersonal relations, that's tied to gestures: friendship, eating together, being with those who have no voice, those who've been excluded, the most vulnerable people in the world whether homeless or refugees or people with grave disabilities or children from broken families or those who are outside of every relationship, every relationship in a sense has failed them, they're people without a place. And think about what a difference it would make if we were more intentional about giving each person a place of respect and value, not just a handout or a social program in the church, but a home and a place to contribute to share their gifts. Especially when we're in ministry or in relationship with vulnerable persons we have to resist the tendency to separate dignity from need. If persons come to us with significant needs it becomes quite easy, especially in a society that values independence and autonomy and success so highly, to associate need with a lack of dignity and to slide toward contempt and disrespect. We find ourselves subtly despising people for the help they need and we end up humiliating people while we're trying to help them.

Philip haley has warned about how easy it is to fill hands while we break hearts. Respect doesn't have to be drained out of relationships in which one person has substantial needs. Hospitality helps us resist the divisions between provider and recipient by recognizing that both are blessed in the relationship and that the resources flow in both directions [5]. There's also peril in hospitality because it's a fragile practice. Our acts of hospitality do not diminish necessarily our temptations to power or greed or ambition. It may allow them to be expressed more subtly, but hospitality can be a useful avenue to these things. That's what corrupted it in the middle ages and that's why it so often degenerates just into entertaining, because hospitality is effective in forging social relationships. Because it's such a profound form of human connection it can also be a very powerful vehicle for accomplishing our purposes, and so it can be distorted, especially by ambition. And here really the danger is that hospitality will be misused by the host.

Every historic period has had its temptations to seek advantage in offering hospitality. Ours is no different. We have our own versions of the "ambitious hospitality" that lactantheus and jerome and Chrysostom warned about. It's the entertaining that we see in the business world, the carefully planned dinner parties calculated to impress the selected important guests. Even the approaches that christian institutions offer to cultivate potential large donors, where we're really kind of using hospitality to get something else. In the church the instrumental orientation sometimes gets reframed as a question of stewardship. And so we ask "well, what will it accomplish if we do this hospitality if we welcome people? How will we know if it's effective? What are the results?" Hospitality is rich with blessing, but those benefits come as gifts. We should be wary of turning efforts at hospitality into what calvin warned was a form of commercial exchange. Today, if churches engage hospitality, substantially there's a tendency to turn it into a strategy, a means to another end. We are extremely goal oriented and concerned that our efforts are measurable, that they're demonstratively successful, and so quickly hospitality becomes the latest evangelism approach, or the "hot new strategy" for church growth.

I don't want you to misunderstand me here, hospitality is very effective, but if it's only a strategy it's also very short-lived. People are initially welcomed, but then they're dropped because the congregation moves on to something else. Or maybe they haven't really counted the cost that's involved in the welcome. When we use hospitality instrumentally it loses its mysterious dimension and "hospitality as a way of life" is undermined. There really are few contexts that are better for sharing the gospels in the setting of warm welcome, and people will come to a church that's welcoming, but when we use our occasional hospitality as a tool we distort it and the people we welcome quickly recognize that they're being used and then the cynicism about the church's interest in them becomes palpable and they feel as if they're victims of yet another marketing program or project. It's hard to resist the tendency to allow christian hospitality to be reshaped into a powerful blend of pseudo-intimacy and commercialization and instrumental thinking, all of which are very characteristic of our time.

And finally, hospitality is dangerous because it draws us close to god's mystery, because it is such a strange mixture of very ordinary acts of caring and the promise of god's presence within them it's full of surprise and mystery, as we noted earlier in the biblical text. It's connected to angels and to jesus' presence in distinctive ways. Anybody who is engaged in a substantial amount of hospitality knows about the sort of remarkable combination of the exhausting work at times, the crazy interactions, but also how unpredictable and wonderful it is, the unanticipated blessing, and that the needy person that you might welcome turns out to be someone who blesses you. When i have talked with practitioners of hospitality, with people who do it day in and day out, especially with the most vulnerable, with refugees or homeless people or whatever, the most frequently referring refrain is "you know, i went into this thinking i was helping them, but i've gotten so much more than i've given, and i think that such peculiar outcomes can really only be the work of god's grace. Under ordinary circumstances we don't host a potluck dinner, or make beds for unexpected guests, or scavenge around the neighborhood to equip an apartment, or sit down for coffee with a troubled friend, and expect heaven to crack open. We don't expect soup and angels to be mixed up in the same practice. I think we tend to carve up our days into the ordinary and the supernatural, the mundane tasks and the things we think really matter for the kingdom. But hospitality as a practice presses us to reconsider some of these divisions and to live into some of the mystery of the gospel."

Q&A following lecture: "Hospitality is a personal practice, it's mostly sort of face to face and warm. When you think about communities or places where hospitality is vibrant they tend to be settings that are a little bit more open and public, where there are more people involved. If you think about cultures in which hospitality is still fairly robust they tend to be places where there are community squares, where there's bigger extended families, people are around. When the practice is hidden there's a greater danger that people might take advantage of you, so just finding a way for more people to be around is a really key thing. Offer hospitality in a coffee shop, or on the front steps. Find space that is what you might call threshold space or bridge space, that's sort of in between the public anonymous world and the very private. It's very hard to welcome complete strangers into your home unless there's some mediating relationship in between, unless somebody knows them. You don't usually just take people directly into the home, but you can do it in more more mediated, more public space."

Source: Christine Pohl. "Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times: Promise and Peril for the Church" (March 17, 2010) "From genesis to revelation there are stories of hospitality, sometimes they're beautiful, sometimes they're disturbing, but the theme is everywhere."

Notes: 

[1] Compare with our role in "McGilchrist's Wager," Stein's "evolution of value," or Gafni's "more god to come."
[2] "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me." - Revelation 3:20
[3] See "Hostess with the Mostest" song.
[4] Compare with Nouwen's notion of a "free space."
[5] Compare with mutualism and Margulis' "symbiogenesis."