Hospitality Tension

I just fired up our espresso machine for the fall season. I drained the old water, rinsed the group heads with cafiza, and shined up the stainless steel. With the doors open the fall-ish morning breeze came into our house yesterday and I knew it was time to click the switch over to “on” and listen to the hiss of the steam boiler heat up to full pressure. 

In our house we have a La Marzocco Linea 3. It’s just stupid overkill for a home espresso machine. It’s a 3 group head for goodness sake. But… (brace yourself for the midwest ‘I got it on sale line’) I did indeed get a great deal on it. I bought it off my old employer because it needed a ton of work and I was willing to make that investment. It’s not something I’d run a coffee shop with but it’s great for in-home hospitality. 

This post really isn’t about my espresso machine. But I thought I’d start it off by telling you that my family and I love hospitality. And so we invest a lot of time, money, and tools into making the hospitality of our family excellent. The espresso machine is just one tool that we put in our family's hospitality tool box as we go about our work. 

I’m extremely grateful for all the ways in which we are able to welcome people into our home and help them enjoy food, drink, and relationships. God has graciously provided our family with a pretty large old home here in Clinton to fit people in, the skills to restore the home (it’s a fixer upper), and the desire to shape the home into a place of creative hospitality. And God has blessed our efforts. 

So far our home has been the anchor of our broader work of church planting. It has been the hub for relationship building. We began gathering our core team community group in our living room. We began our Sunday morning gathering in our living room. We drank coffee before the service in our kitchen. We host membership classes, counseling sessions, and leadership training. Our house has been the living room of the church for a couple years now. And it’s been pretty sweet to see the Spirit of God incubate our young church community right under our own roof. 

Our work has taught me some things. It has taught me that if God is truly present in our work of hospitality then he will attract people who are in need of hospitality. 

I know that sounds obvious. Biblical hospitality is literally the welcoming of strangers and loving them so much that they transform from strangers to friends. This is what God does with us spiritually. And it is what he is doing through the church physically. So when the church is physically creating hospitable places people will want to be at those places. And when the Spirit inspires excellent and creative hospitality more people will want to be a part of the hospitality experience.  It’s like in cartoons when a delicious, fresh baked pie is set on the window sill and the scent wafts over to a character and literally lifts them off the ground and draws them to the pie. This is what the Spirit is doing in the hearts of lonely and lost people when the scent of the Holy Spirit wafts from a hospitable church and is caught in their nostrils. 

You see this in the early church. Acts 2 gives us a pretty concrete picture of what the Spirit of God can do when biblical hospitality is put to practice. Deep fellowship between believers is experienced (2:42), new people are welcomed and added to the believing community (47), and a thick awareness (or aroma) of God saturates the church (2:43; 47). 

As a pastor it has been my goal to essentially invite people to “taste and see” Jesus. And I believe they have. I know I have. This has been rewarding. And it also has been exhausting. 

Our church plant is experiencing some growth. And this growth has taught me a big lesson in hospitality. The lesson is this: When hospitality is done right there will always be an uncomfortable tension in the community. It’s a tension you see on paper in Acts 2. But you don’t really know how uncomfortable it is until things tense up in your living room or kitchen. The tension is between fellowship and mission. 

Let me just illustrate this. At our church we have a solid crew of folks who have gathered together pretty consistently for a couple of years. They have become familiar with one another. Their intimacy is deepening. And so is their trust with one another. They are really becoming a community that truly belongs to one another. It’s special to watch. 

And also at our church we have new people entering into this community of belonging. New people who have never really known what it means to deeply belong to Christ or his church. And so they need to be invited in, welcomed, and shown love. There’s an awkward new kid in school phase. 

Do you see how these two groups of people can maybe experience tension? Do you see how they could have competing desires? Imagine a big rope with one end tied to the heart of the fellowship and the other to the heart of the stranger. The fellowship has a desire to go deep with one other. But the stranger just wants to belong. The fellowship has their attention on their own familiar needs, but for the stranger to be welcomed the fellowship needs to divert their attention to the stranger.  

Think of a small group setting. The fellowship wants to get beyond the surface and drill down into the deeper things of life. But for the fellowship to go deeper they need trust and stability. And when the stranger is welcomed into their midst the trust of the group is momentarily disrupted and the stability is shaken. It’s human nature for this to happen. It’s natural for people not to trust unfamiliar people. Who knows if they are a wolf or a sheep? For example, let’s say Betty Sue doesn’t know if she can talk about her marriage problems or questions she has about theology because she’s not sure if the new person that just arrived at the group will judge her for it. And the new person isn’t sure if the group will welcome him into what may turn out to be just another catty clique. And so the desires of the group as a whole are often in tension wherever hospitality is practiced. The desire of the fellowship to go deep pulls the rope one direction and the desire of the stranger to belong pulls the rope in another. The result is relational tension. And people, frankly, just aren’t that good at living in this tension. 

And so the temptation is to drop one side of the rope. It’s tempting for the fellowship to retreat into a ‘holy huddle’ and fence off their group from the awkwardness of new people. Because new people really do change the dynamic of the group. And people typically don’t like change. This is why it’s common for churches to stay the same for years. Folks just don’t want to deal with the uncomfortable experience of a revolving door of new and strange people. So they jam up the revolving door and seal off the group from outsiders.  

Tension can get let out from the other side as well. Sometimes deep fellowship can be dropped in an effort to prioritize new people. Taken to the extreme if an entire church culture is driven by the sole desire to reach new people then the culture is often experienced as superficial because the leadership is constantly catering to the lowest common denominator. And besides being superficial this culture can also feel unsafe to be in because no one has enough familiarity to build trust. And if there is no genuine trust between people, the reason for belonging to the group is almost always selfish and mercenary. For example, some people like coming to big church gatherings with high production because it feels very similar to shopping in a crowded mall. The mall is designed to make each customer feel individually welcomed as they shop, but ultimately the reason for that shopper to be in the mall is because they are shopping. So the mall caters to the experience of the individual as an individual. But the church has a different economy and a different goal. The church is full of individuals but they are not simply there to make a transaction. They are there to belong to another in this shared life with Jesus. And that’s why a mall community would make a poor church. And yet churches all over the country foolishly act like malls. 

Back to the tension. What I've learned, and am still currently learning, is that true biblical hospitality has to keep the tension. There’s no other way around it. If we are to be obedient to Christ our hospitality rope has to be taught. You see this plainly stated in Acts 2. The early church was a community of deep belonging, which was exemplified in their willingness to joyfully share with one another. And you also see this deep community radiating an attractive joy that draws in the strangers. But they didn’t stay strangers because it says they became believers and were added to their numbers. So the community was both deep and wide. 

It’s my conviction that modern day Christian hospitality should take this shape. The church should be both a deep well for believers and it should be wide in its invitation to non-believers. You see this in the metaphors the New Testament uses for the church. The church is both the body, which has to be deeply connected to function right, and it is to be a city on a hill, visible for travelers to see and accessible for them to visit. 

Christ himself perfectly demonstrates what it looks like to live in this tension. He had 12 disciples who were his closest companions. And while he cultivated a deep relationship with them he taught them to be “fishers of men.” They were constantly engaged in a lifestyle of evangelism and fellowship at the same time. 

This is really the heart of it all. A church community attempting to faithfully live out biblical hospitality will experience uncomfortable relational tension. But it is not an either or situation. It is both and. It is not a problem to solve but a tension to manage. A church that is faithful to the way of Jesus is both growing deep together while also seeking to bring others into that deep relationship. We are seeking to grow close to Jesus while also welcoming others to Jesus. We are seeking to grow close to our church community while also welcoming others to our church community. 

My encouragement to you is that the next time you're in community, and you sense the rope getting taught, instead of seeking to drop the rope, praise God. Rejoice! Because if the rope is tight that probably means Jesus is there pulling on it.