Millennials of a certain age may remember a time—probably in high school or college—when a friend asked, “Okay, but have you defined the relationship?” You’d been meeting the same boy in the library for “study dates” for a month. Or you’d taken a girl to prom and then had “hung out” at her house a lot. Or maybe you’d just been texting someone non-stop for a week. But were you actually “dating”? Was he your “boyfriend”?
My generation rolled our eyes at the apparently clear-cut dating categories of earlier generations (e.g. “We’re going steady!”), but we were moorless when it came to clarifying romantic relationships, especially in their early stages. We endured months (or years) of uncertainty while waiting for someone to be brave enough to “DTR.”
We face similar challenges when it comes to thinking about hospitality, even when we narrow the field by calling it “biblical” hospitality or “Christian” hospitality. It’s been at least two hundred years since anything like the hospitality of the Iliad has been a way to win fame and influence, and consequently, the Western (or at least American) sense of hospitality has largely devolved into something only practiced by professionals (the hospitality “industry”) or into mere “entertaining” of friends and family.1
But if we’re going to talk about a renewed Christian vision of hospitality with any precision or depth, we need to have some kind of working definition. In The Gospel Comes with a House Key, Rosaria Butterfield pictures hospitality as a transformational process: “Radically ordinary hospitality is this: using your Christian home in a daily way that seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God.”2
This movement from stranger to “family of God” reminds us of the eschatological reality of home we discussed earlier this week. By making our homes living pictures of God’s kingdom, we open a door for others to come into the family of God.
I would be content to use Butterfield’s definition, but I’ll offer a few others as we continue to sharpen our ideas and practices:
Hospitality builds its home with the stranger in mind: intentionally, spiritually and physically making room for others to join the life of the household.
Hospitality sees every stranger as Christ in disguise, and diligently seeks to make a way to invite him into the life of the home.
Hospitality uses the riches of the home—meals, companionship, bedrooms, celebrations, gardens, and more—as resources for creating good for the stranger.
Hospitality hungers to enlarge the home, and seeks to draw the lost, the lonely, and the strange into the life of the household.
What do you think about these definitions? Do any particularly resonate with you? Would you offer your own definition of biblical or Christian hospitality?
Until we define the relationships at play—our own relationship to our home and household; our relationship to Christ; our relationship to strangers and guests—we won’t be able to discuss our actual roles, rights, and responsibilities towards one another.
Next week we’re going to begin discussing some of the challenges and obstacles we face when it comes to practicing hospitality. Keep these definitions in mind as you start to consider what creates the gap between the hospitality you imagine offering, and what you actually feel capable of doing. Until then, as always, I look forward to your thoughts.
For more on the history of hospitality, I highly recommend Christine Pohl’s Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans 1999) (amazon). I’ll be drawing from this book and offering a formal review in future newsletters, as soon as I can find my copy. Almost a year in a our new house and we still have at least 10 boxes of books we need to make shelves for…
I've been thinking of hospitality as a kind of tool for shaping the kind of home we want to have. If you want to have a rich and complex household as so many did in the early church, our hospitality also has to be complex. That could complexity of ages or of households. Let's have full banquet table!