Hospitality, personal but also organised

There is a hospitality aspect to the service of the church – hospitality as a reflection of the mercy of Jesus Christ. The word hospitality in Greek means lover of strangers, and originally the idea of hospitality is that one would serve those that they don't know. But hospitality took on a meaning in the New Testament to include those that were known. We read from 1 Peter 1:1–5:14 and we read from Romans. Paul says to show hospitality one to another. There is a knowledge of each other as this hospitality is given and shown within the people of God.

The New Testament places high regard on the practice of hospitality. It is such a high regard that it became one of the indicators that the Lord Jesus was at work in the midst of a congregation. Hospitality became in a sense a mark of the church in the Old Testament. I know theologically we don't include hospitality as a mark of the church, but as people in the ancient church looked at the church, their love for one another and the reflection of that love in showing hospitality became an indicator of the work of Jesus Christ in their midst.

Now, that is hospitality on a person to person level or a family to family level. But there are also aspects of hospitality that need to be organized within the life of the church. And those would go under the role of the deacon. I can give you a few examples just from our own congregation. We had an email go out requesting that a visiting minister and his wife be taken to the airport and back. And when they called, they said, We would love to use the bunkroom. The bunkroom is a way for us to show hospitality as a church. So that is a church function of hospitality. And as that church function of hospitality is organized, that is something that would go under the authority of the diaconate, because it both relates to mercy and it relates to the physical building of the church. Another example is that we had two mothers give birth in our congregation recently. The way that we as a congregation served them was by providing them meals. And the way that that was organized is in part through our diaconate as the ministry of service or hospitality to those that we love is done. And that is something that needs to be organized, because if everybody in every family on the next Sunday after they had given birth said, We are going to bring a meal, you would have 20 meals on one day and nothing on the following weeks.

So it shows that hospitality is something that is to be organized. It is something that is to be strategic in the life of the church. Because hospitality has a way of causing people to look into the church and see our ministry, and it has a way for us to love one another and to practice hospitality, which is a call of the church.¹

Nathan Eshelman