My husband’s ministry job moved us 3 hours away from our families at the height of the 2020 pandemic. After much prayer and grief, we packed up our two very young children and left our home without a chance to say goodbye. We had a singular goal for our first year: build a community. We’d been given this call from God (to seek and save the lost) and we were eager to fill our home with meaningful relationships. But even stronger than our ministerial drive was our loneliness. Thus, fire was in our bellies: we’d build a community come hell or high water.  How we’d do it, though, remained a mystery.

How does a rich, deep, mission-based, Kingdom-centered gospel community grow? What are the building blocks for a group of people who love one another, love the gospel, and are united in mission? How did Jesus build community during his ministry? Praise be to God, it isn’t actually a mystery. The Gospel of Luke tells us very clearly: 

The Son of Man came eating and drinking. (Luke 7:34 ESV)

When Christ, the Son of God, brought the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, he came preaching the truth, of course, with justice and reconciliation and grace. The way he distributed those things, though, was was around a dinner table. The method of Jesus’ dispensation of Heaven among earth was by eating and drinking with people.

So we followed suit. We had a small house and a smaller budget. We bought a few boxes of spaghetti and a few jars of marinara and invited the few people we knew over for dinner. Little did we know that this practice of gospel hospitality–God’s way of welcome–would do much more than secure a few friendships.  Over the course of 4 years, we’ve had nearly 100 people join us for this meal. They aren’t coming for the food, they are coming God has knit together a true gospel community through the regular practice of gospel hospitality. Let me reiterate that we were not the ones cobbling this community together–it was God himself, the author of community, who did this. 

And he can do it for you, too. The extension of gospel hospitality has the power to change the course of eternity. Even the most meager meals, when offered with a heart of welcome, can change the course of a life forever. So how does it happen? How do we practice gospel hospitality?

What hospitality is not

If we want to witness the life-transforming power of gospel hospitality, we must detangle our understanding of hospitality from the Western cultural definition, which has more to do with aesthetics than community. The methods of true hospitality will not be found in well-curated listicles in magazines or online. The way we welcome others into our homes (and, by extension, into our lives) has very little to do with what our homes look like, what silverware we use, whether or not there are flowers or dessert. Many, if not most, elements of the secular understanding of hospitality have more to say about the host than anything else. Gospel hospitality, on the other hand, has everything to say about God and his kingdom. Gospel hospitality is not an opportunity to display your domestic prowess. It is not a stage for your exquisite decor or spotless half bath. While your home may be beautiful and clean, that is merely the stage for true hospitality to take place, not the main character. 

We shouldn’t wait to practice gospel hospitality until we’ve gotten all our ducks in a row or we’ve finished the deck or donated those toys to Goodwill. None of these things bring our hospitality closer to that of Jesus. After all, Jesus didn’t have a home of his own into which to invite others! If Jesus didn’t need a house to practice pure, heavenly hospitality, we’ll be fine without a homemade lemon loaf.

In short: hospitality isn’t much about the host at all. It is about welcoming others into relationship: first with you, then, ultimately, with the God whose table never runs out of space.

The Pillars of Gospel Hospitality

When we have a broad, Scriptural view of hospitality, we’re freed up to release the pressures of earthly hospitality that get in the way of the true heart of welcome. But what does it look like? How do we practice this deeply transformative invitation? The answer is simple: however you’re able to offer it. Our own expression of hospitality will be as individual as our story of salvation and the batch of gifts and abilities instilled in us by God himself. We use what God’s given us, knowing that the point of our hospitality isn’t what we put on the table but who’s sitting around it.

While there will be great diversity in the way gospel hospitality plays out in our homes, there are a few pillars we see in the way Jesus practiced hospitality during his earthly ministry.

An invitation

There will be times when people enter our lives spontaneously, and certainly the Scriptures encourage us to be open and ready for those times. But hospitality requires a measure of planning ahead; that a space is being made first in the imagination and then the schedule and space of the host for the guest being welcomed. 

It is imperative that we remember the hospitality of Jesus, both during his earthly ministry and today. Jesus set the table for dozens of meals in the scriptures and is preparing a place for us around the Eternal Table now:

“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.”

So this is what we do: we prepare a place for our guests. We imagine them in our home, consider their circumstances, and how we might bless them. This presents an essential question of gospel hospitality: who are we inviting? Who is gospel hospitality for?

The most likely invitees will be the easiest to host: people we know and like, people with shared values and interests and hobbies. But gospel hospitality reaches far beyond our socially-prescribed circles and into the fringes of society. If discipleship to Christ means to imitate his behavior, this includes who we invite into our homes. And Christ invited in the absolute furthest out, at the expense of his own reputation, which was sullied among the religious elite because of the people with whom Jesus broke Our invitations, by grace, can be as far-reaching. 

It is in this practice that Gospel hospitality becomes a harbinger of God’s reconciliation, a practical outworking of the gospel of peace. Here’s how Paul puts it in his letter to the church in Corinth:

So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!

And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:16-21 NLT)

Once we’ve extended the invitation and prepared space in our schedules and tables for our guests, we tend the soil of our hearts, ensuring we are ready to welcome them into relationship.

A Willing Welcome 

When we invite others into our homes, we are inviting them into fellowship–a word used in the Bible to convey a joining together of disparate individuals. In order for this to happen, our hearts need to be as open as our homes. After all, inviting others into our homes is merely the precursor of the deeper invitation into our hearts. The event of hospitality (a meal) is merely the mouth of the funnel into true hospitality, which happens in the hidden recesses of the human heart. Thus, we must take seriously Peter’s admonishment to  the church to “show hospitality without grumbling”(1 Peter 4:9)

This means that we hold our guests in prayer, seeking to view them through the eyes of Christ as image bearers of God, extending mercy to them as if we were extending it to Christ himself. Jesus gave this example in a parable in Matthew 25:34-40:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’(NIV)

Here we circle back to the way Christ came into the world: eating and drinking. And Jesus didn’t merely consume food and drink (though he did with frequency and joy), he was the chief provider of food and drink. It’s for this reason that food and drink should be a part of most of our gatherings. 

Food and Drink

Eating and drinking are among the most ordinary habits of our lives. Perhaps that’s exactly why Jesus made such a big deal of them–the expansion of God’s Kingdom doesn’t require pomp or circumstance. As one pastor said, “Our life at the table, no matter how mundane, is sacramental–a means through which we encounter the mystery of God.”

Jesus offers food and drink as the operational baseline for gospel hospitality. The proclamation of the Kingdom of God happens as regularly over supper as it does in the synagogue. And since Jesus is our model, we get to do the same. 

While food isn’t a requirement for practicing hospitality, it was almost always present at the gatherings of Jesus. In fact, food was one of the primary metaphors Jesus used in his teaching about God and his Kingdom. Take for example that the body of the newborn Christ was placed into a feeding trough, a foreshadowing of the gospel reality that he’d one day offer his flesh as our true food, and his blood as our true drink.

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”

Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” (Matthew 26:26-29 NIV)

Indeed, Christ called himself “The Bread of Life”, a fulfillment of the Bread of the Presence that was always in the Temple. Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice, which, to original hearers, would have evoked sensory memories of meat and grain being cooked upon the altar. In the same way, the meals we cook for our guests offer much more than a full belly (though that is no small offering!) The food need not be fancy in order to nourish not only the body but the soul of those who enter our homes.

As we welcome others into our homes, our lives, and the family of faith, may Christ go before us, setting the table with a feast of joy, peace, reconciliation, and hope.