How Hospitality Provides a Defense of God’s Truth
In Church as It Is in Heaven Video Curriculum: Session 4: Passing the Peace: Welcoming One Another in a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture
InterVarsity Press has partnered with Jamaal Williams and me to provide your church with a free video curriculum to facilitate a six-week study of apologetics and multiethnic kingdom culture, as well as a free discussion guide for group leaders. At the end of this post, I have included the video for Session 4: Passing the Peace: Welcoming One Another in a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture as well as the group discussion guide.
Hospitality as Apologetic
This session of the In Church as It Is in Heaven video curriculum is all about hospitality. For many of us today, hospitality is “a nice extra if we have the time or the resources, but we rarely view it as a spiritual obligation or as a dynamic expression of vibrant Christianity.”
It wasn’t always this way.
In the earliest decades of Christian faith, hospitality was not seen as an optional add-on. The apostle Peter commanded Christians in Asia Minor to “be hospitable to one another without complaining” (1 Peter 4:9; see also Romans 12:13; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). The author of Hebrews raised the stakes even higher. According to this writer, mortal beings aren’t the only possible recipients of Christian hospitality: “Don’t neglect to show hospitality, for by doing this some have welcomed angels as guests without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2).
Practices of hospitality seem to have been one of the reasons why ancient worshipers of the Roman gods were attracted to Christianity. In the fourth century, the emperor Julian shared this complaint about Christians with a high priest of the venerable gods of Rome: “Why don’t we notice that it is their benevolence toward strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the seeming holiness of their lives that have done the most to increase their number?”
Fourth-century pagans were attracted to the Christian faith, in part, because they looked at the church and saw habits of hospitality.
A lifestyle of welcoming people unlike themselves provided compelling evidence for the truths that Christians proclaimed.
A few decades later, in the aftermath of the sacking of Rome, Augustine of Hippo urged his North African congregation to welcome refugees from the Italian province with “hospitality and good works.” “Let Christians but do what Christ enjoins,” Augustine told his church members, “and so will the heathen blaspheme only to their own hurt.”
Once again, hospitality put heathens to shame by providing compelling evidence for the truths that Christians proclaimed.
Perhaps it still can.
Watch this video to learn how and why hospitality provides a defense of God’s truth.