When I was a child, there was almost always someone I didn’t know at our Thanksgiving table. We regularly hosted students from the college where my dad taught, especially those who were far from home.
I never questioned the author of Hebrews’ instructions: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2 NRSVue). My childhood experiences of hospitality were safe, predictable gatherings that included a greater-than-average chance for dessert, if I was lucky. Entertaining strangers who might be angels seemed like a no-brainer.
While I am grateful for this early exposure to one form of hospitality, my view of the practice widened in divinity school when our ethics professor challenged us to consider the angelic encounters described in Scripture. Far removed from the strangers-turned-friends I had pleasant table conversations with growing up, the angels in Scripture may appear with flaming swords, such as those stationed east of Eden in Genesis 3, or with drawn swords, as the prophet Balaam recounts in Numbers 22.
The more I read, the more difficult and dangerous entertaining angels sounded. It was clear why angels begin so many conversations with “do not fear.”
In Genesis, I read how Abraham’s afternoon plans and the family budget went out the window after three visitors appeared and dinner preparations began by finding a calf in the field (18:1-15). Lot faces danger to his family and the loss of his home (19:1-29), while Jacob’s encounter ends with a permanent limp (32:24-31).
Similar stories in the New Testament recount Mary surrendering her bodily autonomy (Luke 1:26-38) and Zechariah losing his ability to speak (Luke 1:8-22).
The Christian practice of hospitality is about so much more than sharing a meal with people like ourselves. Entertaining strangers as angels in disguise involves risk, vulnerability and encounters with those unlike us. Some level of discomfort is essential. Yet extending hospitality is also a space of discovery and transformation, as our biblical predecessors experienced through their angelic encounters.
Theologian Thomas Ogletree writes: “To offer hospitality to a stranger is to welcome something new, unfamiliar, and unknown into our life-world. … Strangers have stories to tell which we have never heard before, stories which can redirect our seeing and stimulate our imaginations.”
We live in a moment where such connection and transformation are urgently needed. It is also harder and riskier to encounter those unlike us. Christine Pohl explains that as households have become more secluded and private, the risk to host and guest alike has increased.
Institutions play an increasingly important role in creating “third places” where people can connect. These social spaces, distinct from both home and workplace, are harder and harder to find, further limiting opportunities for transformative encounters with strangers.
Some places cannot safely open their doors to strangers in our current moment. The Christian practice of discernment must accompany extending hospitality in communities where particular vulnerable identities are being targeted. Yet in places where this is not the case, creating sacred space for encounter may be exactly what the church is being called to in “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).
One of the gifts of my work is that I regularly bump into stories of congregations across the country that are doing the hard, messy, scary work of welcoming strangers. I hear more and more stories of churches that are designing third places and drawing on their spiritual resources to create belonging, offer support and remind the world — and themselves — that our value is not in what we produce but in who we are.
The results are as different as the congregations that create them. Members of Mack Avenue Community Church in Detroit asked their neighbors what they needed and, in response, created a community space with a cafe and laundromat. The pastor of Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church in the small town of Folkston, Georgia, took the church outside, worshipping in parks, hosting community days and training cyclists in the town’s national wildlife refuge.
Holy Family Episcopal Church in Houston took an old a meat-packing warehouse and redesigned it to be a worship space that doubles as an art gallery, supporting local artists and welcoming community members all week long. North Decatur Presbyterian Church in suburban Atlanta hosted a community gathering after a government agency 3 miles away laid off a large number of staff. Congregation members made room for people to tell their stories and share resources. They also helped people find a sense of belonging and held their suffering in the larger story that the church tells.
I doubt any of these congregations would say this work is easy or that they’ve been trained to do it. They will likely name failures, lengthy timelines, fears and moments of discomfort as just some of the challenge they faced while deepening their practice of hospitality. Yet they continue to hold open this space. The transformative encounter is simply too important, too beautiful for them to stop.
On the day of Pentecost, the disciples were thrust outside the safety of the house and into a space thronged with strangers. Fire, wind, languages from across the globe and accusations of drunkenness swirled around them. And in that moment, the church was transformed forever.
Amazed and astonished, each one in the multinational crowd heard the good news in the language they spoke at home. Thousands were cut to the heart and received the promise of God for themselves. And the church did what it does best: it welcomed them in, shared its spiritual resources and affirmed their belonging and belovedness.
The Christian practice of hospitality is about so much more than sharing a meal with people like ourselves.
Familiar Bible stories can be some of the hardest to read as adults. The children’s Sunday school versions, with their accompanying crafts and upbeat sing-alongs, can obscure the full range of nuance and complexity in a given passage. Take the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.
In all the illustrations I’ve seen, the sun is out, the sower happily scattering seeds over an artfully textured ground. Given the bounty in the “good soil” harvest, the seeds that aren’t so lucky don’t seem to matter. The classroom drawings never fully capture the scope of loss present in the story — the seeds pulverized in the bird’s beak, withered by the sun among the rocks, strangled by the weeds.
Suddenly, this cheery parable fills me with discomfort. Why wasn’t the sower more careful? Surely there are ways she might have minimized the risk and maximized the yield.
I feel frustrated that the sower seems entirely unconcerned about failure. As she walks, she tosses handfuls of seeds to fall where they will. Some will grow; most will not. No attention is given to the soil quality. The sower simply keeps on sowing.
I’ve realized that this reading is challenging me to reconsider the parable’s lesson. Perhaps this story is more about consistent faithfulness and less about engineering results. But that is not what I want to hear in a moment of great change and uncertainty for the mainline church in America.
Congregations are aging. Membership numbers are declining. Churches are closing their doors and selling their properties at an unprecedented rate. This does not seem like the moment to be scattering our limited precious seeds with abandon.
And yet what if this is the exact right moment for the church to be taking risks and embracing failure?
Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn lead and teach at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. They help organizations innovate in a rapidly changing world by cultivating cultures of experimentation — what, for the church, could be seen as the spiritual disciplines of listening, humility, courage and holy playfulness all rolled into one.
In their book “Ideaflow,” they write, “What are the chances you’ll make an interesting discovery doing something in the exact same way you always have?”
I wonder what this imagination might do for the church. If doing what we always have is no longer working, could this be the moment to experiment and try something new? Sometimes an experiment will produce 30 times what was sown. Sometimes an experiment will fail. Often it takes many failures before a successful solution is found. Recall the story of the light bulb.
I believe failure is essential for vibrant congregations. But failing is scary. In order to survive, the church must create a culture where failure is expected, welcomed and even celebrated.
Utley and Klebahn offer some suggestions on creating this kind of culture.
First, individuals and groups need to feel a sense of safety in order to take risks. When we’re afraid that we’ll fail — or that we or our ideas will be judged, laughed at or dismissed — our creative ability withers. Our brains (and that infamous entity called the church committee) are masters at naming why new ideas won’t work. While this instinct can keep us safe, it can also be wrong. We don’t always know where the good soil is. Scattering with abandon creates opportunities for learning and even surprise.
To scatter with abandon, shift the goal from finding “good” ideas to simply getting as many ideas out on paper as possible. Get playful. Bring snacks and colorful Post-it notes. Ask a middle schooler to join the conversation. Pull your chairs into a circle or move to a space with lots of light and big posters on the walls. At this stage, the goal is quantity over quality. The only rule is that ideas cannot be judged or deliberated.
Initially, ideas might come slowly and feel obvious. Keep going! One leader who uses the ideaflow process told Utley and Klebahn that it’s always excruciating for her — but only at the start. “As soon as she gives herself permission to write something truly outrageous, ridiculous or just plain illegal,” they write, “the floodgates open.”
Second, make space in the schedule to fail. Utley and Klebahn write, “To learn something new, you must try new things, and experiments always have a risk of failure. To take that kind of risk regularly, you can’t chase 99 percent efficiency every moment of your day.”
Not every new idea will bring in more young people or help balance the budget. But when framed with intention, every new idea is a learning opportunity for a congregation. Start talking about the congregation’s latest experiment and the learnings it produced, regardless of how well it achieved the anticipated results.
Utley and Klebahn note Thomas Edison’s response to a friend who lamented Edison’s lack of results on a project despite his hard work: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
Not every project needs to be “the solution” as long as we are able to learn from it.
A few Sundays ago, I heard a pastor retell the parable of the sower and recount the harvest it produced as “thirty-, sixty- and even one hundredfold.” That’s how Mark 4 tells the story, but it’s not what Matthew says. Instead of saving the largest, most remarkable yield for the end, Matthew’s version says the yield was “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23 NRSVue) — concluding with the smallest. Even the smallest yield is worthy of note, Matthew seems to be saying.
Failure happens when we take risks. Our call is to be faithful sowers who scatter with abandon.
And yet what if this is the exact right moment for the church to be taking risks and embracing failure?
As a pastor, I went to plenty of meetings where we wrestled with how to attract visitors. We talked about lots of ideas, but I never actually asked a visitor.
Last year, I became a visitor.
I had transitioned out of parish ministry to work with organizations representing Catholic, Orthodox, and more than 60 Protestant denominations and movements. Inspired by my new role, I began visiting different congregations. Over the course of a year, I worshipped in a cathedral and a storefront church, in the great outdoors and a retirement home. I visited one church because I noticed it while sitting at a red light and was welcomed as a guest of honor at another when I went to hear a colleague preach. Along the way, I witnessed ordinary and extraordinary moments in the lives of many different congregations through the eyes of a visitor.
We enter the season of Advent recalling how difficult it was for the Holy Family to find welcome. It is also a moment in the church year when visitors are more likely to cross the thresholds of our sanctuaries. How might we help them find the welcome that the Holy Family was denied?
While I have taken too many theology classes and attended too many fellowship hall potlucks to be an ordinary visitor, I still take a deep breath as I walk into an unfamiliar church. Entering as a visitor, I notice things I missed when I was wearing a stole. I hope these experiences will help clergy and longtime members consider a visitor’s perspective of the place you love and what you can do to welcome the stranger this Christmas and beyond.
1. Help me find the entrance
Churches have a habit of not using their front doors. One church I visited holds its early service in the fellowship hall. When I arrived, I walked up to the door closest to the parking lot and realized it went into the kitchen. That didn’t feel right, so I walked the length of the building to the second door. Entering there would have required me to walk by the band. No, thank you!
One of the hardest parts of visiting a new church was navigating the space between the car and the pew. Clear signs helped me feel welcome, and that calmed at least one anxiety.
Take action: Starting in the parking lot, imagine a visitor trying to find the sanctuary. What doors are most obvious? Are there any turns that don’t have a sign? Bonus points if you walk through with a friend who has never been to your church.
2. Help me follow the service
It was my first time attending an AME service, and my transferable knowledge was at its limit. In this church, members of the congregation go forward for the offering and place their gifts in a small replica of the church. I have no idea how I would have navigated that moment had the woman sitting next to me not leaned over and explained what was about to happen.
Churches that used prayer books brought a different kind of challenge. There is something deeply hospitable about being handed an open hymnal or prayer book with a finger on the right line. Bulletins with explanatory notes also helped me find my way.
Take action: Consider what elements of your service are hardest to follow and encourage the congregation to look for visitors who may need some guidance in those moments.
3. Welcome warmly but gently
I have come and gone from churches without speaking to a soul and have had a member chase me down in the parking lot for a conversation. How do you welcome visitors without scaring them off? I found that the way I was welcomed back mattered.
When I visited small and aging congregations, it was common for folks to tell me, “We hope you come back.” Perhaps it was all those new-visitor conversations I had as a pastor, but I always felt some pressure with that invitation. It was clearly heartfelt. But it also felt a little wistful, as if I were the key to the future flourishing of the congregation.
One Sunday, I was given a different invitation: “You are welcome back any time.” In that simple sentence, I felt all of the welcome and none of the pressure. It said that they would continue to be the church as they always had. If I wanted to be a part of that, the doors were open.
Take action: Discuss as a hospitality committee when you have felt most welcome in a space and why. Then identify welcoming conversation starters to engage visitors.
4. The website is where it’s at …
I Googled most of the churches I visited. As with your doors, think about what questions visitors are asking as they pull up your website. Make that information easy to find. The first thing I looked for was what time services were held. It’s also helpful to say something about parking if it isn’t obvious or abundant.
A change to a church’s normal routine doesn’t always make it to the website. Sometimes the surprise was delightful, such as when I unexpectedly walked in on a combined Episcopal and Mennonite service. The theology nerd in me was in paradise. At other times, it meant showing up to locked doors or an empty parking lot.
Take action: Ask someone who doesn’t attend your church to look at your website and share feedback. Add updating outward-facing communications to the to-do list for special Sundays.
5. … AND it’s not why I came to your church
When I started this visiting adventure, I went to churches where I already knew someone. It wasn’t the Facebook posts or community events that drew me. It was a relationship. The best advertisement for your congregation is the people in the pews. Most of these folks didn’t invite me directly, but I knew where they attended. When I was ready to visit, I reached out.
Take action: Tell your members they matter! Equip them to answer questions like where to enter and whether child care is provided.
This Christmas, may we extend the welcome that the Holy Family longed for to the strangers who are sitting in our pews.