The Church as host - The Church's calling to hospitality - including hosting public life

I liked this little essay, dating from 2003, written by Elizabeth Newman, and published on the UK Gospel & Culture website - titled The Church as Host

I like to think of church as a resort and healthspa...

Eugene Peterson has suggested Christians might use the word 'hospitality' in place of 'evangelism'. Wilbert Shenk has urged the importance of the same theme. The early church fathers referred to the gift of hospitality more times than any other gift…

The pluralist 'hotel'

In a well-known passage, William James enthusiastically compares our modern situation (particularly in the university) to a kind of hotel. Innumerable rooms open out of a common corridor. In each room something different is going on, 'but they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms'[1].

The trouble is, in our own time the corridor is becoming narrow and bare. There is less and less of anything like a 'common room'. There are just people in their own rooms. Communities are reducing to like-minded individuals who see little reason to interact with those who are not like-minded and who lack either the means or resolve to negotiate differences.

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[1]As quoted by George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Oxford, 1997, p.45.

Comments

[Lorrna]

I liked the idea of the university,and the combined corridor until I remembered the stream of people going from A to B with little or no intereaction. and yes grey is the right colour to describe that.

All a bit bleak and depressing and not what the God of the universe had in mind at all. It's time we started to 'negotiate the differences' and allowed the colour to be restored. Might take some dying to self to get there, and that's the rub.