Hospitality

We must relinquish our passive approach to friendships. That’s the bottom line. We’re too passive in cultivating meaningful affection for one another. We wait for the relationship to come to us. We want it to be “natural” and to “just flow” or “click.” I suppose there is a thing as trying too hard, but I think most of us are far from that. We perhaps try too little. We’d rather the coziness of being alone with our own thoughts, interests, and “friends” from some yesteryear like high school or college. We don’t like the toil of getting to know others and opening ourselves up (much less prying into their lives) in a substantive, transparent way.

One correction to this is an active hospitality ministry.  The Scripture commands us to “show hospitality” (Rom. 12:13).  By hospitality, I mean the cultivation of a wide network of relationships in the church through any number of invitations, engagements, and entertainments. The emphasis here is on the wideness of the relationships, not the particular activity over which you build them. Some part of our people’s time must be given over to meeting as many fellow members as possible, especially members not like them (i.e., different age, social/economic class, family backgrounds, ethnicity).

We must teach our people to open up their lives by opening up their calendars and their homes. If our churches are going to be healthy enough to survive difficulties, then our people must have enough credit with one another—drawn from the tenderness of sharing meals and meaningful conversation—to trust and assume the best. We must know one another broadly enough and deeply enough to know when someone else’s apparent anger is really deep hurt, or when someone’s resistance is masking pride, or when a brother’s disappearance from the fellowship is likely a sign of trouble with sin. And we can’t see beneath the apparent in one another’s lives if we don’t actually cultivate friendships with others. An active hospitality ministry in the body is one way of doing that. Of course, church-wide fellowships are another. But the point is that we don’t want to “professionalize” fellowship and hospitality by reducing it to only those church-sanctioned events and failing to discourage active hospitality member-to-member, up-close and personal.

Discipleship
Most churches I’ve belonged to have not had active discipleship efforts in place. Some people in “natural friendships” find time to encourage one another, pray together, or have regular accountability meetings. These tend to be some of the more mature members who find their way to each other. But the majority of people are not in that kind of relationship, at least not with members of their church. They find a lot of encouragement and love from Christian friends at work or at other churches. But they find little stimulus and nurture from the people with whom they covenant together in the local church. In other words, when our main source of spiritual care (apart from sermons and public gatherings) comes from those outside our church, our affections are likely to be stronger for those outside the body than for those inside. This makes it easy for us to “quit” on others because they’re not the source of nurture and love anyway. This is why some people can easily leave the church at the first sign of trouble and find a home in a church across town. Their hearts were already elsewhere, with people that they loved more than their church family.

If hospitality builds wide relationships, then discipleship builds deeper ones. It’s how we teach one another to obey all Jesus’ commands and follow His ways (Matt. 28:19-20).  Given that, is it too much to expect that every member of the church has at least two intentional, spiritually-focused relationships in the church… a relationship with someone more mature that is building into their lives and a relationship with someone as or less mature into whom they are building? And this, I would suggest, should be in addition to those relationships formed in small groups. So add two to the number of folks in your small group.

We will be healthier if we take some responsibility for one another’s spiritual lives. The membership is to be the frontline of spiritual care. If our affections lie with another country or just with our unit (i.e., small group) then our first line of defense against splits will be easily overrun. The enemy will establish key beach heads, take over key forts and bridges, and lay siege to the city.

What do you think about the points Pastor Anyabwile is making in this article?

See Luke 14:7-15 [show]

See Luke 14:7-15 [show]