Last year—yes, Lockdown-2020—my husband and I read Rosaria Butterfield’s The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in our Post-Christian World. The timing could not have seemed worse! How were we supposed to host people in our homes and live out the beautifully bountiful form of generous hospitality that the Butterfields exemplify when many people in our community did not consider being closer than six feet to be a realistic option? We felt a little stumped and put many of our big hospitality dreams on the backburner for a little while.
However, after reading Butterfield’s book, we were convinced that God calls all Christians to hospitality and that it is a key way by which we could eventually share the gospel with people in our community. As we have worked through applying the calling of hospitality to our own situation, we have found that we could take a few first steps, even in a pandemic situation. The baby-steps of hospitality we have taken include: (1) Stop being busy; (2) ask for and accept help; and (3) spend time in the yard.
Stop Being Busy
It is hard to stop and get to know people if you are always running late for something. Butterfield repeatedly points out that hospitality takes time; it takes planned, set apart time for things you know will happen—a meal or Bible study meeting in your home—but it also takes time in the unpredictable moments—giving someone a last-minute ride or postponing your plans to stop and have a phone conversation.
Our culture elevates busyness and operates on a strict time schedule. Why on earth do we need an hour-by-hour weather forecast? (My phone’s weather app now tells me how many more minutes the rain is estimated to last!) This world strives for minutes and seconds because it is passing away. As Christians, we can operate in the comfortable leisure of having all of eternity before us and yet strive for the Christian productivity that Matt Perman identifies as “do[ing] all the good you can.”[1]
In order to enter into the Sabbath rest, be fruitful in good works, and make hospitality part of our normal, we must invariably cut back on the busy life our culture would carve out for us. This practice may mean living on one paycheck, forgoing the summer vacation, or opting out of after-school activities. If our weekly schedule has us out of our homes, out of our neighborhoods, even out of our towns on most days, how will we have time to become a haven for either our physical neighbors or our church family? We have attempted to make our first, sometimes difficult, step in hospitality to stop doing so much of what our culture says is “normal” so that we can strive for what the Bible presents as the new-man normal.
Ask for and Accept Help
I was taken aback when I read this statement in Butterfield’s book:
Ordinary hospitality works on the principle of tithing. God commands that we are either returning 10 percent of what he provides to us to our church or receiving aid from our church because we are in desperate need of help. Both giving and receiving bless the church. And if we aren’t giving or receiving—tithes or hospitality—we are robbing God. . . . We must be willing to practice hospitality as both host and guest, and we must see how the principle of both giving and receiving builds a community and glorifies God.[2]
Coming from a family that greatly values independence, I realized that receiving help from others with grace is a virtue I had never considered, much less spent time cultivating. However, I realized right away that receiving the hospitality of others—especially the brothers and sisters at our church in a town where we have no blood-family—may be one of the quickest ways my family could build relationships in our community. Having recently moved away from family and welcomed a second son into our home, we have found ourselves in need of childcare, the occasional pick-up truck, meals, and listening ears; according to Butterfield, allowing my church family to meet these legitimate needs builds gospel community.
It can be tempting to turn to the market to meet our needs—call an Uber, run a load at the laundromat while you wait on your new washing machine, or have an emergency pack of diapers delivered to your door; but when we allow the neatness and convenience of that temptation to always prevail, we may miss out on real community-building in our church body or physical neighborhood. When we ask others for help, we become open doors to return that help when that same brother, sister, or neighbor has a need. Even more profoundly, receiving aid from others is a living picture of our salvation—for we have nothing at all with which to repay Christ; we can only receive, humbly and gratefully. My attitude toward receiving help from others reveals to them my attitude about what Christ has done for me.
Spend Time in the Yard
Butterfield briefly discusses the utility and effectiveness of using outdoor space to reach your neighbors. “We do a lot of hospitality in the front yard,” she says.[3] She informs her readers of the design of well-to-do homes in New Testament times, utilizing open air courtyards for dinner parties and gatherings. She also tells the story of her neighbors who use their large carport for a “party patio” that seems to draw neighbors in. I barely took notice of her point though, until I realized how many of my own neighbors I’ve met just by spending time outside. I have tended to walk the same short circuit around my neighborhood, toddler in tow; after a couple dozen times passing the same houses, people start to come out and talk! I try to do the talking (though it starts out as just waving) when I sit on my front step while the same toddler plays in the yard, rather than awkwardly avoiding eye contact as the walkers in the neighborhood pass by.
A friend told me about an acquaintance she had that had recently moved into a new home. They installed a big-kid and toddler-sized playground into their fenced back yard and then informed the community that it was open for all neighborhood kids to use; the gate was unlocked. This story has me starting to consider how I can use the unique characteristics of our own home and yard to show hospitality to our community. Are there places neighbors can sit down for a talk, let their dogs or kids play for a few minutes, or even share a meal? My home does not have these spaces yet, but in the mean time my husband and I still sit on the front step and try to look available. We are fishing for men.
Rod Dreher laments the disappearance of front porches in his book, Crunchy Cons. Houses without front porches, he says, have “nothing to encourage neighbors to open themselves to street life. [Such] houses turn their backs to their neighbors. . . . Drive down a street of houses that have porches, and you get the sense that sociable people live here.”[4] I hope to have a warm and inviting front porch someday, but for now, I can at least occupy the outdoor space I do have and pray that God uses the encounters I have with my neighbors to eventually be able to invite them into my home and into His eternal Home. Walking the suburbia neighborhood and talking with passers-by from your front porch may not look the same if you live in the country; but country living also affords unique opportunities to practice hospitality.
Conclusion
As George Herbert reminds us in his poem, “Love (III),” our salvation itself is the deepest exhibition of hospitality from God to ourselves: “‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’/So I did sit and eat.” When we have experienced this infinite, eternal hospitality, it is a small thing to turn to our neighbor and offer whatever we have. Hospitality can sound fancy or complicated, but I hope you see from these three first steps that it can truly begin as simply as slowing down, relying on others, and being physically present and available.
[1]Matt Perman, What’s Best Next (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 75.
[2]Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018), 37.
[3]Ibid., 82.
[4]Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 99, 103.
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