Making Room Chapter 3

Making Room 3 • Sermon • Submitted 4 years ago

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Last September, I introduced the 7 Shifts The House of the Lord was making and preparing to make. For The House of the Lord to move forward needed to preserve and shift. We need to preserve the mission and purpose of the 46 years of ministry that has already happened while making some internal shifts to keep the church moving forward in the direction God wants us to go. (If you missed that meeting, let me know, and I can get you caught up on what the 7 Shifts are.)

The shift that we are prioritizing to work on in the context of Leader’s Meeting is the Shift from Gathering to Connecting. (Slide 2)

Shift from Gathering to Connecting: Attending church is not about consuming; it's about contributing to the life of the church and the life of each other.

To accomplish this, we are prioritizing connecting over gathering through Biblical Hospitality to reproduce resilient relationships. Therefore, hospitality is HOW we are going to shift from gathering to connecting. As a result of that shift, we will be a church that is Reproducing Resilient Relationships. To start, we took an honest at where we stood in terms of hospitality as a church and realized that there was much to be desired. We took as a call to repentance and took the last leaders' meeting as an opportunity to repent. We do not think that this moment of repentance would fix everything immediately, but we saw it as our first step in the right direction.

Today we are looking at chapter 3 in the book Making Room: Recovering hospitality as a Christian tradition. (Slide 3) Chapter 3 is A Short History of Christian Hospitality. This history is summarized by the words of Samuel Johnson (18th Century) “In a commercial country, a busy country, time becomes precious and…hospitality is not so much valued.[1]”

In this quote, we find the trajectory of this chapter. “Over the past few centuries, the scope of hospitality as a term has diminished; it now chiefly refers to the entertainment of one’s acquaintances at home and to the hospitality industry’s provision of service through hotels and restaurants[2].” (Slide 4)

When we started this conversation, engaging the biblical model of hospitality which is defined as welcoming strangers. We found that this is both a personal and community responsibility. This commitment to welcoming strangers is the birthplace of biblical hospitality.

At the personal level and the corporate level, the church, in many ways, was an example of what it meant to have care/concern for the poor and stranger. Consequently, by the fourth century, the locations of Christian hospitality expanded in several directions. Besides hospitality being provided by church and family households, there were now hospitals, hospices, and other specialized institutions. Essentially the fundamental concept for the work of many nonprofits, food banks, and shelters flows out of the church and family as models of biblical hospitality.

Over time, two unintended consequences happen as a result of this expansion.(Slide 5)

Care for poor people and strangers became more anonymous and less personal as these institutions “addressed needs for food, clothing, or shelter, rarely was the need for a place in the community fully met. Although physical needs might be met, needs for a social identity and connection are not only overlooked but sometimes intensified[3].” (Slide 6)

Increasingly, hospitality became synonymous with entertaining – a way of displaying wealth and reinforcing power and status. In our current context, we can see this in many of the messages coming from various churches because this is how our services became more about gathering people to entertaining them instead of connecting with people and connecting them to their place in the church community. Additionally, outreach in many instances has become more about displaying wealth and reinforcing power and status instead of ministering the love of Jesus by meeting needs.

As I finish framing up the conversation that we will be having in the breakout rooms, this isn’t about putting down institutional means of hospitality. But it is about reclaiming our personal responsibility in the process, which places us at a point of personal discovery. (Slide 7) To shift and move where God is directing us will only happen when we as a community, congregation, and family take responsibility for our personal transformation.

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