Summary: Mashed-Up in this Episode: Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl About the Author Christine Pohl is Professor of Church in Society at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, where she has taught since 1989. She studied at Gordon-Conwell Seminary and attained her PhD in Ethics and Society at Emory University. Dr. Pohl worked in various ministries for 11 years before attending seminary. She owned a Christian bookstore for six years and later worked in advocacy and refugee resettlement. She currently serves as an occasional advisor for homeless shelters and refugee programs. She has also helped plant four churches. Dr. Pohl is the author of several other books. She has recently completed a book entitled Living into Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us (Eerdmans, 2011). Big Ideas 'Hospitality' as a practice has gone from being the social expectation of personal generosity and welcome in the ancient world to an impersonalized, commoditized industry in the modern world. From the 1st-Century Didache to 20th-Century Catholic practitioner Dorothy Day, Christian leaders have prophetically called the church to welcome the stranger as one would welcome an angel or Christ himself. Hospitality comes into its own when the roles of giver and recipient, host and guest, are transcended, despite the perennial ambiguities, tensions, and blurring of necessary boundaries. Hospitality is a posture before it is a task. It begins with an enlarged heart, moves through words of welcome and thresholds of home and church into pot lucks, temporary shared living, and ultimately full absorption into the rhythms of a reshaped common community. Plunder We ought to keep the stories of past hospitality ever before us --- whether Bible stories or the writings of Edith Shaeffer --- to provide us with a 'cloud of witnesses' encouraging us that we are not alone in committing ourselves to hospitality. If possible, each household might consider copying Christians from Chrysostom to Calvin by creating a 'Christ room' in their homes --- a guest room ready to accommodate a stranger. "There is nothing like church food." "The front door of the home is the side door of the church." At the end of any extension of hospitality, the barometer of success is "Did I see Christ in the guest? Did they see Christ in me?" Liberating Good News The best thing about recovering the hospitality tradition is that, like all Gospel Neighboring, though we give with no expectation of anything in return, we always receive --- often from those we serve, but more importantly, always from Jesus. Christ uses our hospitality not just to bless our neighbor, but to enlarge our hearts and amaze us by his own saving, gracious hospitality. The Big Challenge In our age, we often have to go out of our way to even encounter a stranger in need of welcome. When we do, we are quick to make a referral to professionalized hospitality experts --- whether those be hospitals, homeless shelters, or individuals or churches who "are good at this sort of thing". We assume that it is the government's responsibility to be the safety net. But in taking this posture, we farm out our hospitality and avoid offering what our neighbors need most: a person with a face who will hear their stories, welcome them to the table, and empower them to press their own value into others' needs. As chuches, missional communities, and households, we will have to commit ourselves to fundamentally restructuring our relationships and even our physical buildings to facilitate the recovery of extended family communal rhythms before we are even in a position to offer the most biblically robust form of hospitality. Are we identifying, and taking, the first step toward this recovery in each of these contexts?
