Becoming a world Christian: Hospitality as a framework for engaging Otherness

Abstract

Hospitality is the Christian imperative of welcoming the stranger to our table, which serves as a living metaphor for the salvation God extends to all of us, welcoming us as sinners to his table of abundance. As we transition from the era of missions to the era of world Christianity, a hospitality framework is helpful for the concomitant task of developing world Christians. In this article I describe a Hospitality Project I assigned that required my students to read and reflect on the Christian practice of hospitality, and then to extend hospitality to someone from another culture. I suggest that hospitality is an appropriate framework for the development of world Christians because it cultivates empathy through intentional listening and learning, is inherently reciprocal as all bring gifts to the table, and engenders transformation because it forces us to leave familiar structures and view life through the eyes of the Other.