Category Archives: Hospitality
When Love Gets Lost in the Scuffle
I have lived through that peculiar moment in American history, when it came to marriage, many Christians were more concerned about the race of persons who love each other, than the quality and content of their love for each other. …
Making churches safe places for gay youth
In Christian Community’s study on the sexual values and behaviors of 5,819 U.S. teenagers who are involved in congregational life (described in Faith Matters: Teenagers, Religion, and Sexuality), we found a surprisingly high number (12% of males; 9% of females) …
How inclusive hospitality can help your congregation grow
Congregations with inclusive attitudes and practices toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people make themselves much more attractive not only to LGBT people but to many others as well. Becoming a welcoming and accepting congregation can create an atmosphere …
The hospitality gap
In response to surveys and as a part of informal conversations, most people share the perception that their congregation is friendly to those who visit.
The reality, however, is that most of our congregations are not as welcoming as they like to think; and people who join our congregations often do not continue to be as active as when they joined. There is a significant hospitality gap between the image of the church as warm and welcoming and what guests and new members actually experience.
Expecting once more
The Christmas season, and especially the time of preparation with which it begins and which is called “advent,” tend to be times for nostalgia and sentiment. As good church folk, we focus on the baby born in a manger many years ago. We sing of silent, holy nights and Bethlehem and the wanderings of three sages … long ago. Too easily we get stuck in the rut of replicating our fond holiday memories only.
Ethiopian eunuchs and reading the text from the margins
As a man of color, I always read the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 with an emphasis on Africa. My reading through Hispanic eyes unmasks insights about the text that most of my Eurocentric colleagues miss. Nevertheless, I can easily fall into a similar myopia if I solely read the text with heterosexual eyes.
While whites may gain insight from me when I read the text from my particular social location, I myself am in danger of missing all the gems to be mined from a passage if I refuse to learn how to read the text from other marginalized social locations.