One day last month, I sank into our couch with particular enthusiasm. It had been after a long day working at my church: I’d been running around the rooms, setting up signs here, laying out a tablecloth and centerpieces there, rearranging chairs, restocking the church pantry, coordinating with the ladies helping with childcare.
The work of welcome is ordinary and downright mundane at times.
That night as I put up my tired feet on the couch, it didn’t seem like my work day had added up to much. But later that week during the events for which I’d been preparing, I was able to glimpse the fruit of my efforts. Young moms got a chance to connect with each other, to engage in deeper conversations without the interruptions of their little ones. Other women were able to split into a smaller group for their Bible study now that another room had been prepared for them.
People from both groups found me later to share their thanks, and it almost felt wrong to accept it. After all, what did I do? I only readied the space.
The spiritual practice of welcoming
When we talk about offering hospitality, we are primed to think of fancy cooking and well-decorated homes. But hospitality is more about welcoming than entertaining. In fact, a physical location need not be a part of it at all. Theologian Adele Calhoun explains:
“Because we have been welcomed into the love of Christ and received as dearly loved children, we can offer the world a place of safety and healing. We can incarnate the welcoming heart of God for the world.”*
That safe place of welcome can be our very selves. Part of my professional work might be to offer hospitality to the various groups that meet on our church campus. But I also want to be the kind of person who embodies the act of welcome as I love my neighbor.
There are a number of spiritual habits we can practice in order to cultivate a heart of welcome.
Slowing
The first one is simply slowing down. Though simple, slowing is far from easy in a culture that values efficiency and productivity. When everyone around us prizes busy and hustle and rush, it’s easier to go along with the flow. As a result, we become people who are constantly focused on the next thing—getting to the next place, crossing the next thing off of our to-do list, making sure we have enough time for the next errand—settling for drive-by conversations and promise to catch up over coffee “soon.”
In the meantime, we fill our calendars so full, there’s not an inch of white space to be found. If we said no a little more often, if we could disentangle our self-worth from our productivity, if we slashed our to-do list in half to favor what matters most, we could slow down. We could become the kind of people who gave their full attention to the present moment. We would have more time to respond lovingly in our daily interactions.
Theology professor James Bryan Smith writes:
“The most important aspects of our lives cannot be rushed. We cannot love, think, eat, laugh, or pray in a hurry.”**
Slowing allows us to reclaim the parts of our lives that count the most, and by doing so, we take the time to love others more fully, thereby becoming a person of welcome.
Listening
Cultivating a heart of welcome means becoming a safe and soft place for others to land. Listening is the way we show others that they are valued and that we care. Instead of brushing people’s words aside, or focusing our mental energy on what we want to say next, we validate the thoughts and feelings of others. We get curious about the heart behind the words, asking follow-up questions, willing to dive deeper than surface-level conversations.
Being heard in this way is a gift. It is a way to feel truly seen and understood. As pastor Adam S. McHugh notes in his book The Listening Life, our talking “takes space, when instead we want to give space.”
One way to practice giving space to listen well is what I call “the ministry of availability.” We show we are available when we look up and around instead of burying our heads in our phones. We show we are approachable instead of looking busy, like someone who can’t be interrupted. Of course, we are often actually busy doing something, but during the times we are in-between things, or waiting for the next thing, or any time we are prone to boredom is when we tend to reach for our phones for some happy distraction. What if instead we showed were open to connection?
One evening after dinner, my phone was charging in a different room and so I just sat on the couch to rest. My seven-year-old son wanted to know what I was doing. “Nothing much,” I said, patting the seat next to me. He sat down and started sharing about his day, thinking aloud about the social dynamics in his second-grade classroom. This sweet conversation wouldn’t have taken place if I hadn’t looked so available.
Intellectual Humility
The hard truth is that some people are harder to welcome than others. It’s one thing to practice listening well to those we already love, but what about those with whom we disagree? What about people who have let us down? What about others who, for whatever reason, are so hard to get along with?
The welcoming heart of Jesus was big enough to include anyone and everyone, and our holy challenge is to go and do likewise. This would be an impossible task if it wasn’t for the power of the Holy Spirit, who teaches us all things (John 14:26).
We can also practice intellectual humility, which is the humble acknowledgement that questions may have several reasonable answers, and that we may be overconfident in the rightness of our opinions and beliefs. Intellectual humility allows for the possibility that our viewpoint might be incomplete, or even incorrect, as we admit the limitations of our own knowledge and understanding.
In her book The Night is Normal, Alicia Britt Chole refers to this concept as “mental flexibility.” She says:
“[It] would enable us to disagree and then still go enjoy dinner together. Instead, our threshold for disagreement is so low, that at the first sign of not being on the same page, we block, cancel, and bail on one another for issues that, even if real, may not be eternal. Mental flexibility protects us from relational extremism (that is, one strike and you’re out) and overreactions (that is, if you’re disagreeing with my idea, you’re really disagreeing with my existence.)”
Alicia Britt Chole, The Night is NormaL
When something is rigid and unyielding, it’s more likely to break. Intellectual humility helps us to stay flexible, preserving our relationships with people we disagree with, instead of fracturing them. This doesn’t mean that we condone what another person is saying, or that we need to embrace their opinions as our own. It does not mean that we must seek out a person who has hurt us, stepping past our healthy boundaries. But it does mean that we shouldn’t be so quick to write someone off.
Our high, hard, and holy call
The tasks of hospitality, though they may be mundane, are fairly simple and straightforward. And they matter, as I am reminded when kind people share their thanks. But becoming like Jesus in cultivating a heart of welcome is a higher, and sometimes harder, call. Paul tells us “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (Rom. 15:7) When we practice slowing down, listening well, and treating humbly those with whom we disagree, we are glorifying God with our lives.
If you’d like to dive deeper into fresh and uncommon spiritual practices that help us grow closer to God, consider my self-paced digital course which comes with several short videos and helpful printable resources. Check it out here.
Whether you take advantage of this resource or not, I pray that you would click away from here feeling encouraged and empowered to cultivate a heart of welcome!
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*From Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, p. 162
**From The Good and Beautiful God, p. 327 ebook
Feature photo from Pixistock
Sarah K. Butterfield 