A couple years ago, I asked those who attend McKernan Baptist Church in Edmonton, Alberta, to send to me how they say welcome in one language they speak other than in English. From the responses, we created our McKernan English Language Learning logo.
Prior to committing to follow Jesus, I was a young man with a social conscience involved in many efforts to enhance the lives of people and the environment. Shortly after trusting Jesus with my life, I was immensely impacted by Rev. Harry Lehotsky and his powerful work in my neighbourhood, Winnipeg’s West End. (Check out a recent spotlight on Harry’s life and impact.)
Somewhere along the way as a pastor, I became more focused on the health of the congregation I served, some might say at the expense of my concern for those outside of the church. Over the past number of years, I have greatly benefitted from a number of organizations that are walking closely with Jesus as he continues to expand his Kingdom reign. I have been on a wonderfully welcomed learning curve as to how to be involved in the life of our culture.
One of the influences came from the NAB’s Blue Ocean. This gathering allowed me the privilege of meeting with other NAB leaders while also working through some profound lessons on how to engage culture with the life-giving message of Jesus’s tremendous love, healing, and work of reconciliation.
Sandra Maria van Opstal suggests hospitality involves a deepening relationship with both the Holy Spirit and people who may not look like us or share our experiences. Shifting our focus from doing to being allows us to become more fully the community Scripture calls us to be. Though we may begin with hospitality, where we are saying “we welcome you,” Scripture calls us to journey from that place through a place of solidarity (“we stand with you”) and ultimately to mutuality (“we need one another”), where we comprehend just how deeply the global community of Jesus followers need each other in order to be the people of God we are called by Scripture to be.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul expresses this in the concept of ‘oneness’ by highlighting Christ’s example: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Philippians 2:1–2 ESV).
If oneness is the goal, the outcome, the result, then what is the activity that leads to the desired result?
Paul makes this clear in the following verses: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (vs. 3–4).
First, we must understand what true hospitality is.
The Step of Hospitality – We Welcome You
We are all at least partially familiar with our biblical call to hospitality from Jesus’s appeal to “love our neighbour” and his discussion with the rich man about who his neighbor is (Mark 10:17–31; Luke 10:25–37).
“Welcoming the stranger” is another phrase we often hear, specifically when discussing immigrants, refugees, or people we don’t know or who might not fit into our familiar context. The phrase is rooted in Exodus 19 and Matthew 25.
Matthew 25, especially, makes it abundantly clear what the King is like and what kind of Kingdom he has. The hospitality narrative is a vital step in our process of living out Christ’s command to be the church and to show compassion and mercy to those who need it the most (Ephesians 4:32; Philippians 2:1). However, it is only a first step. Though there is a level of comfort for the church with hospitality, and a temptation to pat ourselves on the back because we have been so welcoming, we will miss out on the gifts our global family has to offer if we stop there. If we never move past the idea of hospitality as a task to be accomplished, we remain stuck in a limited paradigm.
A power structure is involved here as well: if we’re only focused on providing hospitality, especially to immigrants and refugees, then the church stays in a position of power. We retain the comfort level that any majority culture enjoys, no one is asking much of us, and we take few risks in this process.
Imagine a family new to the country who arrives to your church for food, clothing, kid’s program, or other services. You begin a relationship with them in which they are clearly the ones in need. We have a genuine desire to care for the hungry, hurting, and lost and to show the Lord’s compassion. Yes, we should applaud how counter-cultural that act is in such a narcissistic season of Christian faith. That is a step desired for every Christian. The problem is if our relationships are one-directional, the people we are helping will not engage freely. They may allow us to pray for them, they may attend our studies, but we may never know if their curiosity for Jesus or the church is authentic or out of an act of obligation.
This form of hospitality is not the end goal. The next step is:
The Step of Solidarity – We Stand with You
If deepening our understanding of true hospitality and opening our hearts to it are the first step, what’s next? How do we as the church continue to engage in our biblical calling to both hospitality and solidarity?
In Ephesians 2, Paul reminds the Ephesians they were once aliens and strangers who had no hope. This word choice is not a mistake; he’s reminding them they were once outcast and considered “less than” by God’s chosen people, in much the same way immigrants and refugees are treated in Canada and the USA. They are told they are aliens – dangerous intruders who can’t stand on their own two feet. The logistics are such that it would be easy to forget these are real people who are being processed.
This includes all groups who fall under this title: those who are undocumented, those seeking asylum, and even those who are here legally but require some assistance due to family hardship. Imagine feeling like everything about you is unacceptable, whether you are poor, educated professionals, or just children. But now there’s hope! Those who were “once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” and he “has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:13, 14). In other words, we are to stand with each other, to view each other as equals, as kinfolk in the Family of God.
Solidarity, standing with one another, is a step in our journey toward loving the immigrants and refugees who come to our country, city, and community – toward understanding that every person bears God’s image and has equal access to the Kingdom. The Gospel is available to all, transforms all, and invites all to equal participation in God’s family. This counter-cultural solidarity was the power of the Gospel in Paul’s time; do we believe it has that power today?
What if we did not focus on delivering or sharing assets but on relating as neighbours in proximity to one another. Rejoicing when one rejoices and suffering when one suffers (Romans 12:15). Communities that neighbour well become a fragrant offering, often because they have their windows open and tonight’s cooking emanates into the neighbourhood. This type of person draws others into authentic relationship with the Church and with Jesus. We become the doors people knock on because they smell our sweet solidarity.
My prayer is that when there is someone in your neighbourhood who needs marital help, when there is someone who has a troubled family member, when they are in financial trouble, they knock on your door. I long for us to be the scattered and gathered church.
Jesus Christ is at the centre of all I’m referring to. My motivation is that all would come to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus alone is the way and the truth and the life; there is no other name under heaven that saves. That is truth. Embracing that truth, we are called to go into the world with the Jesus way of communicating the truth. The Jesus way is always to do the most loving thing.
Why is solidarity important? Standing in solidarity in the form of relationship, relief, and advocacy witnesses to the Gospel. It is a witness not only to immigrants but also to those who are not followers of Jesus, whose experience of evangelical Christians is that we are xenophobic. If non-immigrant churches and immigrant churches work together to address the suffering of immigrants, this becomes a witness to all who see the relationship of solidarity.
To truly enter this stage of solidarity in our relationships, we as the church need to be engaging our sisters and brothers with these solidarity questions:
- What issues most impact you?
- What do you need?
- How can we stand with you?
- What can we celebrate with you?
When we focus on solidarity, we are exhibiting an additional level of competence, which is often not present where hospitality is the main focus. However, solidarity still has us retaining power, because we perceive they need us but we do not need them. We are showing a desire to understand others’ perspectives and needs but can miss important elements of God’s call to us all to live in reciprocity as a global Church. There’s a vital next step in the process that moves us more fully into connectedness.
First is hospitality, then solidarity, followed by:
The Step of Mutuality – We Need One Another
Mutuality was at the core of the early Church’s witness into the world. The testimony of the church in Acts 4 centers around how they lived in mutuality.
The passage does not start by saying the powerful and wealthy shared. It says “no one” claimed any of their possessions as their own. This means everyone brought what they had to the community.
Did some have more material possessions than others? Of course.
That is still true today. What can’t be missed here is that they all shared. The Spirit empowered them, they developed relationship and were unified, and they shared everything. From this lifestyle and practice of mutuality, they witnessed and testified to the power of the Gospel. God’s power was at work in them to live in a way where there were not givers and receivers but brothers and sisters.
We are used to operating from the perspective that most churches approach church life as we do. In reality, we have just as much (if not more) to learn and receive from global Christians as we have to teach and give. However, to truly enter a space of mutuality, we must ask more of ourselves than we are accustomed to.
Mutuality involves vulnerability and dependence, acknowledging we don’t have it all together, we need each other, and we have much to learn and many places where we need to grow. Imagine a place where this is lived out across cultures and socioeconomic power! To truly live out mutuality, we would be wise to admit we have a fear of letting go of control and acknowledge the fears and hesitancy of change in how we operate.
In Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church, Dr. Soong Chan-Rah has proposed this basic framework which we are elaborating here. He says:
The true challenge is making a home together. We are not merely hosting each other as a guest, we are working at building a home together. There is a difference between having a guest stay over one night and getting married, moving in together, creating a joint bank account, and making the other person a beneficiary of your life insurance policy as well as the beneficiary of all your possessions. The Scriptures testify that the church is the household or family of God. A family does not simply offer up hospitality towards others; it ceases to use the language of “otherness” altogether. The church is not merely a place where we tolerate strangers; it is a place of grace and acceptance that comes from being a family.
When we are able to get to a place where we embrace newcomers rather than simply welcoming them, where we see them as sisters and brothers, the church as a whole and its community become a witness for Christ’s sake! We do this by practicing love in such a way that we communicate there’s something to be learned from every human being. Embracing the fullness of mutuality reveals that we take Jesus seriously.
How did Christ tell his disciples that others will know they are truly following Jesus? If we love one another. And true love requires mutuality.
Of all the ways God could have chosen to spread the Good News, he determines the best would be Christ’s Body as witness.
In Reimagining Evangelism, Rick Richardson repeats his mantra that people want a community to belong to before they want something to believe in. Immigrants come from many different experiences, but whether they lived in poverty or not, in their relocation they desire to belong. We have the opportunity to be a place to belong, a home away from home. We are provided an opportunity to embody and witness to the love of Jesus Christ: not in what we say but in how we love.
While we tend to think of this journey from hospitality to solidarity to mutuality as a one-way process, our life in Christ is far from linear. Jesus exemplified mutuality in every way: in the stories he told, in the way he related to others, and even in the way he died. When we work to embody mutuality in our daily life, and especially in our approach to immigrants and refugees, we learn to lament, celebrate, and mature together. Ultimately, this leads to the healing and wholeness that God wants for his creation!
I have been overwhelmed with how wonderfully our church has demonstrated love to many immigrants and refugees. God smiles when the church lives out faith in him by rejecting status quo, comfort zones, and mediocrity. Sisters and brothers, God is calling us to live out Christ’s love as we witness to others, not just in words but in our mutual identity as members of his body.
Do we trust him enough to follow him?
What’s your next step? This might be the year that you dive into Blue Ocean and explore these and many other thoughts.
Dan Schroth is a lead team pastor at McKernan Baptist Church in Edmonton, Alberta.