Being Missional Made Easy

I pulled this article off of Allelon. If you haven't checked out their site, you need to. Too often we think reaching out to our neighbors and into our community has to be some big, complicated affair. Because we think so, we never do anything about it. It doesn't have to be complicated and difficult to reach out. All it requires is opening up your home. It seems simple enough, but in this cocooned and fragmented culture - simple hospitality makes a big impression. Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of weeks. In the past, our family has invited neighbors and international friends over to our house for Thanksgiving. It doesn't have to be Thanksgiving...but don't neglect the power of practicing hospitality.

The Missional Congregation: Practicing Hospitality

Contemporary western culture is characterized by high levels of alienation and fragmentation. In our families, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces, many live as strangers even to those they rub shoulders with on a daily basis. Typical responses to strangers include suspicion, withdrawal, and fear. Christian hospitality is the art of sharing with others the gracious welcome that we ourselves have received from God. It is therefore a profoundly missional practice distinguished from mere notions of “entertaining.”

Biblical Hospitality

Scripture describes hospitality as the way of life of the people of God. This hospitality is primarily the welcome we extend to outsiders, not to family and friends. In the OT it was particularly the outsider, or alien, who was the object of hospitality. Aliens were to be protected in the knowledge that the Lord himself loves the alien (Deut. 10:18) and watches over him (Ps. 146:9). Aliens live in a situation of high vulnerability to injustice and oppression; therefore, the Israelites are commanded to treat them like the poor, the fatherless, and the widows-- with mercy and justice (Lev. 19:10; 23:22; Deut. 24:17-22; Jer. 22:3).

The Israelites own experience taught them the appropriate response to strangers: “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt” (Ex. 22:9). What Israel has experienced from the Lord, she is to extend to others.

The NT also teaches the importance of hospitality toward strangers (Rom. 12:13; Heb. 13:2). It is a basic requirement for positions of ministry and leadership in the church (1 Tim. 3:2; 5:10; Titus 1:8). But it is in the ministry and teaching of Jesus that we are especially confronted with the profound implications of hospitality for mission. Jesus regularly received hospitality from others while at the same time extending to his hosts the welcome of the kingdom of God. Thus, the tax collector Matthew and the other “sinners” invited to dine at his home experience a welcome from Jesus that offends the religious sensibilities of the Pharisees (Matt. 9:10-13). Jesus’ practice of eating with the wrong kinds of people was an activity subversive to the social and religious status quo.

Hospitality is a critical component in the expansion of the kingdom. The hospitality offered to Jesus in the household of Peter (Luke 4:38-44) likely provided him with a headquarters for more extensive ministry in Galilee. The Lord’s commission to the 72 kingdom preachers exhorts them to accept hospitality from those who are responsive to the message of shalom (Luke 10:5-7).

Read the rest here...
(HT: ALLELON )