Hospitality: A Program or a Presence?

As noted earlier, I spent July 10-17 with ten other people from our church on a volunteers in mission work trip to the Dominican Republic.  We came alongside Dominican and Haitian church people to work on a small place of worship for a new church start in a community called Samangola.  There's a tendency on the part of international work campers, I know, to over-idealize the cultures they encounter.  I don't want to fall prey to that.  However, even from an objective view, we were blessed and graced beyond measure by the people we encountered and the people with whom we had the privilege of working.  And we realized that they had so, so much from which we could learn.

One of those areas of learning was hospitality.  I am blessed to be a part of a church here that works hard on practicing "radical hospitality."  Our congregation has improved in welcomeness by leaps and bounds, and I am so proud of our staff, leaders, and church folks who go out of their way to make the needs of a newcomer more important than their own.  Many established churches struggle to break outside their own closed circles of relationship, and I'm glad to be a part of church people who are eager and willing to raise the bar on hospitality.  However, in our admittedly limited experience of the Jesus-followers of Bani, San Cristobal, San Rafael, and Samangola, hospitality there is not a program, an emphasis, a committee, or a spot on an organizational chart.  It is the air they breathe.  It is the rhythm of their collective heartbeat.  It is a Presence that is undeniable.  The hospitality extended to us and to those in their own culture they seek to reach for Jesus is hard to describe.  It is genuine, warm, unconditional, and energizing all at the same time.  They offer it effortlessly and joyfully.

I found myself wondering why it is this way.  Why do we read books about hospitality, have training programs on hospitality, create hospitality teams, and give instructions on hospitality, while they just live it like it's their own skin?  I'm not sure sure I know the answer, but I intend to find out.  I find myself wanting to go back and just live in their church culture for a time, maybe to absorb how the welcomeness with which Jesus welcomes us all becomes so second nature.

A couple of times in the last week people in are area have asked me, "Are you glad to be back in civilization?"   Trust me, in the area of Christ-like hospitality, many of the Dominican and Haitian Jesus-followers are the "civilized" ones, and I am the "third world" who needs to benefit from them.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.