Hospitality from the Front Porch

It's probably the best place to start.

In my last newsletter we tackled some hard questions about the safety of hospitality. We concluded, essentially, that hospitality isn’t fundamentally a safe practice, although it is a holy one. Although I didn’t actually quote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in that piece, I imagine that some of my readers were thinking about a line which often comes to my mind when I think about the dangers of hospitality:

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

Not safe, but good. Those are the terms we take on as followers of the King. I’ve already shared a few stories of the goodness that comes from opening our doors to “risky” strangers, and I hope you’ll share some of your own in the comments.

But today I want to speak very practically about what kind of provisions for wise, stable homes we can create that also advance our ability to welcome people in the name of Jesus. The first of these strategies is to begin your hospitality from the front porch.

As my stories of life at the Village have suggested, the most durable strategy for a resilient, welcoming, secure household is to fill your home with people beyond your nuclear, empty-nest, or singleton existence. Finding ways to cultivate “complex households” is a topic that has consumed much of my adult life, and one day I’ll write more about that. However, while the journey to a more complex household is a crucial part of the hospitality conversation, it is project for years, and likely to proceed with plenty of disappointment and frustration.

Front-porch hospitality, on the other hand, offers more options—small but significant—for beginning where we are.

I’ve already talked a great deal about bringing people inside your home, so why are we now moving out to the porch? For a few reasons. First, because I think that for both host and guest, a porch creates a space where welcome can begin with fewer expectations and less anxiety than the dinner table or living room. And second, because if you have concerns about the safety of hospitality (for example, if you live alone), then the porch can provide a place that mitigates many of the dangers we imagine.

If you actually have a front porch or balcony, then I what I am about to say should apply to those literal spaces. However, fret not if you don’t have a real porch. What I mean by front-porch hospitality requires only that you create some kind outdoor (or semi-outdoor) space into a beautiful, useful “porch” that invites the integration of your inside (private) life with the outside (public) world. Create a space where you and your family or friends are excited to spend time; dedicate certain activities to that space; and then watch and pray for ways to invite strangers into that space as an act of loving welcome.

Create a space

I was blessed to grow up with a proper front porch. Our family’s modest 1920s bungalow was in a working-class neighborhood, set close to the sidewalk and street. I was a child in the late 19080s and 90s, when most of our neighbors had already retreated indoors to the comfort of air-conditioning and television. My father, however, loves to be outdoors and loves people, so our porch was never just a pathway to our door: it was a place in its own right.

Hanging baskets of geraniums and petunias brought color to the porch, while a classic porch swing and a few chairs brought comfort. The porch was not stylish, but it was a really nice place to be, and so we spent plenty of time there: eating summer suppers, reading, watching thunderstorms. I was sitting on the front steps of that porch the first time I finished reading The Lord of the Rings, and it was the “stage” for countless concerts and play houses with other kids from my neighborhood.

From the front porch, you could say hello to passers-by, exchange a few words with your next-door neighbors as they came home from work (no big garages to drive into in those old neighborhoods!), wave at the school kids on their way to the middle school across the street, greet the postman. And if someone stopped to ask about the irises in the front beds, or to pet the dog, or to ask directions, the porch was a place you could invite them into; a place visible enough to mitigate major risk, but homelike enough to offer comfort and care.

Obviously, the built environment of my childhood neighborhood made a certain kind of “front porch” presence fairly easy, although even as a child I noted that few of our neighbors spent as much time outside or on the porch as we did. The front porch was not magical, but it created a space where we could communicate (mostly without words) important things to anyone who came by our home: we’re here, we’re not afraid of you, we love flowers, we’re paying attention to what happens in our neighborhood, and so on. From inside our home, we never could have communicated the goodwill and attention we had ready to offer neighbors and strangers.

Within our first year living at the Village, my husband and I built a porch onto the 300-sq ft RV we called home. We didn’t mind having our formerly homeless neighbors inside our “private” home space, but we found that many of them were much more comfortable outdoors. One morning we invited a neighbor in for a cup of a coffee, and after taking a few sips and casting nervous glances around the room, he said, “I thank you for the coffee, but I’d better go finish it outside. I don’t really remember how to be indoors proper.” After years of living in the woods, he was unsure what rules of “inside” domestic life he might transgress unwittingly.

Eating supper on the porch at Community First! Village, 2016

It can be really simply to create a space, even if you don’t have the resources or skills to construct a proper porch. Look around your home and find a place that is visible and accessible: front yards, front yards, garages, driveways, stoops, or even the little concrete space outside your apartment door can all serve. Find a way to make this space beautiful, and to signal that there is room for others to join: flowers, swing sets, chairs are a good start. Make the space tidy - brush away leaves, take away any random household things you’ve been storing there.

Spend time

Your porch won’t do you much good if you don’t spend any time there. Make sure as you set up that you are making it a place you, first and foremost, want to spend time. The best thing to do is to commit to basing some part of your daily routine on your porch. As the weather warms, perhaps you take your morning coffee outside, and commit to leaving your phone or laptop inside. Or maybe you decide to eat your summer suppers out on the porch a few times a week. Make the porch the place you grade the papers, or read the bedtime stories to the kids, or even take your afternoon nap.

Or perhaps you’re more of a “do-er,” and your garage becomes a kind of front-porch workshop, as you strengthen your woodworking or mechanical skills each evening with the garage door wide open, ready to greet or welcome someone who might be walking by.

Maybe you have a front yard full of grass that you can turn into a vegetable garden, giving you a reason to come out for work and pleasure through the growing months. (Some HOAs have nasty rules forbidding this kind of thing, to which I say it is time to practice some holy defiance!). Or you might decide to put the children’s swings in the front yard instead of the back.

Under COVID, our front porch was a set of folding tables we’d place in the yard each Saturday morning, filling them with produce from our garden. We’d advertise on Facebook and Next-door that we had food to give or trade, and we never failed to have total strangers come into our yard — not simply for the food, but to talk and “visit” as my Southern aunts would say.

You might feel awkward or conspicuous at first, but this tension is simply the feeling of growth. Remember that Lady Wisdom sends her servants out into the streets to find guests for her table (Proverbs 9:3-4) - the least we can do is step outside our doors.

Watch and pray

We live in a world where people are as reluctant to be received as guests as they are to serve as hosts. Trained to value others’ privacy as sacred, most people in America are timid about accepting the invitation of the porch (children, the elderly, and immigrants are often blessed exceptions to this timidity!). So you must be patient, and pray without ceasing. Pray as you set up your “porch.”. Pray as you spend time there, pray when you finally come inside. Ask God to send strangers in need your way, and imagine how you will welcome them and what you will say. Wave at the cars and walkers who pass by. Send your kids to greet the other children riding their bikes down the streets. Invite the lonely people you meet at church or the park to come get a transplant from your garden. Make up a big batch of lemonade to offer to the people walking their dogs.

A porch is a place where the risks of the strangers can be encountered but not absorbed: where you remain visible to other neighbors, where you still have the possibility for retreat behind stronger walls and doors.

A porch is a place where we embody both the security of the host and—simply by being out-of-doors—the vulnerability of a stranger. By spending time on or in our front porches, we display a portion of our real, messy lives to our neighbors, offering them an invitation to care for and welcome us. They see our children, notice if we are walking with a crutch or cast, learn our normal routines. Being known in this way can be an enormous resource. My son was sick last week, which meant we spent most of our time indoors. Today I received a text from an elderly woman who often walks in our neighborhood. It read: “Hi Bethany, how are you doing? Let me know if you need any help. I have not seen you outside the house when I go walking!”

Whether you live alone or in a large household, make this summer a season of front-porch hospitality. The welcome you offer may feel small, but like the loaves and fishes, we always wait to be stunned by the ways God multiplies even the smallest of gifts, or enlarges the tiniest of porches.

Does your home have a “front porch” of any kind? If not, is there a space you might be able to convert to this purpose?