Throughout the Bible, we are told that once we become followers of Jesus, we are part of God’s family. One family.
But I don’t think we are doing a good job of living like family, at least not here in the West. The problem is that we don’t understand the crucial role of Christian hospitality.
A love that would be noticed
Loving one another is our primary responsibility when it comes to our fellow believers, and loving one another is a good practice for learning how to love our neighbors and the lost among us, too.
The lost must see our love for one another because, as the apostle John told us (John 13:35):
By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.
How did the early church demonstrate this love to the world?
Their practices included gathering together daily for fellowship, meals, prayer, and teaching. Acts 2:42-47 illustrates families “doing life together” — to use a current churchy phrase — but for them that meant daily, communal, self-sacrificial living.
My house doesn’t belong to me. Your house doesn’t belong to you. Our homes are a gift meant to be shared.
Daily? Communal? Self-sacrificial? Have you ever considered what it might look like if we tried to more closely pattern the early church in this practice?
Author Rosaria Butterfield certainly has. She is living it, in fact, as she describes in a book she wrote several years ago called “The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World.”
Radically ordinary hospitality
Most nights at the Butterfield house, more than just immediate family sits around the table. The Butterfields open their home for communal dinners with their fellow church members, and meals include a time in the word, prayer, and singing. Feeding a dozen or a couple dozen people is not unusual.
Other church members help bring food as well and sometimes host such gatherings. But the Butterfields have made an ironclad commitment to hospitality and making their church family a real family, with members who are intimately aware of each others’ needs, sorrows, victories, and joys.
Just like a “real” family.
There are some small groups, within churches, that might approximate this kind of commitment to each other, if they meet regularly in each other’s homes — but I think that’s rare.
And in churches where home fellowships are not even encouraged, especially in bigger churches, it’s all too easy to pop in and out on any given Sunday without even speaking to another human, much less building a relationship with them.
This is particularly problematic for our single brothers and sisters, who literally have no family to go home to after Sunday services.
As Butterfield notes in her book:
Kent and I practice daily hospitality as a way of life because we must. We remember what it is like to be lonely. We remember the odd contradiction: to be told on the Lord’s Day that you are part of the family of God but then to limp along throughout the rest of the week like an orphan begging bread. … We believe that the Bible’s high calling for singleness compels us to live communally when we can and to feast nightly on meals and Scripture and prayer with doors wide open.
Did I mention this is ‘radical’?
There’s a lot in the above passage. Not only are the Butterfields offering communal dinner most nights, with all the work and expense that entails — but they are also advocating living “communally” as it relates to singles.
If we are family — and in light of how God teaches us to view people like the widows and the orphans — I think these are fair questions:
Why does anyone go home alone after church, especially singles? For that matter, why do any families go home without a chance to fellowship with another family or two?Why are we so intent on protecting our privacy and/or independence? Imagine if every Christian who is currently single had the option of renting a room within a Christian family. Or even in a house with other singles! Are we as believers meant to live life day after day alone? (Hint: The answer is no. See Psalm 68:5-6.)Is all this something our churches should be encouraging and perhaps even facilitating? (Hint: The answer is yes.)Are these ideas we should all thoughtfully consider how we might implement? (You know the answer.)
What is Christian hospitality?
That’s the real question here. I used to envision opening my home — at carefully selected times entirely of my own choosing and convenience — to people I wished to be closer to, serving a delicious meal on nice dishes and a lovely tablecloth with vases of fresh flowers decorating my perfectly cleaned house, appropriate soft music playing in the background.
This is an “ideal” that gives most of us a severe case of anxiety, and no helpful books of hospitality tips or recipes can really make it less stressful.
But that is not what Christian hospitality is. Not at all. Really.
Butterfield says:
Our homes are not our castles. Indeed, they are not even ours.
This is the key point of the book — and the starting place for true Christian hospitality.
Our homes are a gift to be used to love others. Starting with our family — and that means our blood family and our church family. If our home is always to be used to love our family, why is it not open to all of our family more often?
Why is hospitality a once-every-so-often rare occasion requiring superhuman preparation, with exhaustion and relief once it’s over?
In my view, it’s nearly impossible to practice biblical hospitality regularly if both dad and mom work outside the home. A full-time homemaker can incorporate hospitality as part of her daily life rhythms. Should we not be opening our homes to each other daily as a practice?
Loving our singles
Along those lines: Why are we not encouraging singles from our church family to live in our families? God put them there! Why are we ignoring them or assuming they prefer to live alone in a sterile apartment?
Are we under the mistaken impression that this would adversely affect our children?
Surely the opposite is true, according to Butterfield:
It is good for children to have many Christian adults pouring into their lives, helping them apply faith to the facts of a hard situation.
That’s our bottom line. My house doesn’t belong to me. Your house doesn’t belong to you. Our homes are a gift meant to be shared, first with family, with the caveat that family means more than just our kids. It means our church family, and/or any believer we encounter who might need our hospitality, whether it’s around the table or in the spare bedroom.
This requires sacrifice. You might not be able to walk around the house in your underwear. You might not be able to spend hours binge-watching Netflix. You might not both be able to have full-time jobs. It will involve a sacrifice of time, effort, and money.
Did I mention that our time and effort and money also don’t belong to us?
Where Rosaria and I don’t see eye to eye
Our home is also a tool to love our neighbor (meaning both our brethren and nonbelievers), and this is where I take exception to Butterfield’s perspective on hospitality.
Throughout her book, she reiterates her view that her home is open at virtually all times to everyone — believer and nonbeliever alike, or as she calls them, “family” and “neighbor.” Her goal is that neighbors will be transformed (by Christ) into family, and that’s a mission with which I agree wholeheartedly.
But I think there are problems with her approach, namely that she combines the two categories at inappropriate times. Butterfield writes:
And those who don’t yet know the Lord are summoned for food and fellowship.
This statement is part of her description of a nightly communal meal at her house, where church members and neighbors freely mingle (the neighbors know they are welcome to come any time, just like her church family).
But spiritual endeavors are never to be pursued in concert with unbelievers. That is exactly what 2 Corinthians 6:14 talks about. We can never really fellowship with unbelievers — they are from a different spiritual world.
What’s more, their presence in an environment where believers have gathered to pursue true fellowship — including sharing our most intimate prayer needs — is harmful to the growth of those family relationships. Family fellowship is by definition for family. It is the ultimate “safe place.” It is not where our unbelieving neighbor should be, generally speaking.
So as much as I admire the Butterfields for opening their home to their neighbors, I don’t believe this is a biblical approach to family (meaning our church family) fellowship.
Does our home play a role, then, in loving our neighbor? It sure does. Butterfield is absolutely right about that. And her book gives many examples of how her family is exemplary at loving their neighbors.
She’s also right that our Christian hospitality is not just for our church family — although that is where it should start. Opening our homes to our brethren is an excellent way to begin prying our grasp free of what we may have seen as our sovereign castle.
It’s time to start.
This article was adapted from an essay originally published on Diane Schrader’s Substack, She Speaks Truth.
Christian, Christianity, God, Hospitality, Jesus, Rosaria butterfield, Faith
