Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine Pohl is about the practice of Christian hospitality. She elaborates on how and what hospitality is, what and how your friendliness grows, and how hospitality should be an act and gift of God’s grace.

“We welcome needy strangers into a home environment; we give them a safe place. I think hospitality as entertaining family and friends; that’s not what we’re doing.” This is how Christine Pohl starts her book. What a wonderful way to start a book! Start it with the definition of how we think of hospitality. What could hospitality mean and look like other than feeding people with great food and providing them with five-star entertainment? The welcoming of strangers and providing them with shelter was the definition and ministry of hospitality. The early church writers stated that sharing meals and love with people was proof of the truth of Christ. These strangers are made in the image of God. The true practice of hospitality is hard, but a vital aspect to the Christian life. Those who practice hospitality regularly become teachers of the old practice.

“Mistakes there were, there are, there will be. The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.” As Christine Pohl quotes Dorothy Day in her book. We can close ourselves up in our own little world and forget about the evil that is out there. We then fail to see our chance to minister to others by not inviting them into our homes for shelter, love, and food. Christian hospitality is a generous offering of what we have to others. How we offer ourselves and provisions should reflect God’s banquet. Hospitality was regarded as a moral practice and a necessary part of life. It was extending to the ones who had very little to offer. By offering help to the needy, you welcome Christ into your home.

Hospitality also grows our respect for one another and the friendliness that we show toward them. We can show the utmost friendliness by providing a good, hearty meal to show our care and respect for others. Now, a good meal is not the same as an elaborate feast. We do not need the latest foods to provide hospitality. Hospitality is a gift that should be offered with love, joy, and friendship. The strangers we have need more than just food and shelter, they need love, friendship, and opportunities to work and help the community with their gifts. They need more than our fine culinary and entertaining skills, they need us to show Christ.

Finally, hospitality is to generally be concerned about serving others. Offering hospitality is to live between the vision of God’s kingdom and the hardships of human life. “If we are genuinely concerned about the need of strangers, offering hospitality requires courage. It involves not only a willingness to take some risks in welcoming others, but it also requires the kind of courage that close to our limits, continually pressing against the possible, yet always aware of the incompleteness and the inadequacy of our own responses. At the same time, living so close to the edge of sufficient resources our dependence on, and our awareness of God’s interventions and provision.” There is no better context for sharing the gospel other than a warm welcome.

Hospitality is about helping and serving the needy. Once we think that hospitality is entertaining people, we will never be ready. We become better at hospitality the more we practice it. While it is fine to take a few days off to recover yourself after diligent, daily hospitality, hospitality should be our way of life. We grow in God as we show hospitality. “Our hospitality reflects and anticipates God’s welcome. Simultaneously costly and wonderfully rewarding, hospitality often involves small deaths and little resurrections. By God's grace, we can grow more willing, more eager, to open the door to a needy neighbor, a weary sister or brother, a stranger in distress.”

Cheers!

Chloe Elizabeth