Many people today feel lonely, isolated, and disconnected from God and others. We crave authentic community, but we have no idea where to start. We'd be glad to cultivate friendships; but honestly, who's got the time?
In Invited, writer Leslie Verner says real hospitality is not having a Pinterest-perfect table or well-appointed living room. True hospitality is not clean, comfortable, or controlled. It is an invitation to enter a sacred space together with friends and strangers. Through vivid accounts from her life and travels in Uganda, China, and Tajikistan, and stories of visiting congregations in the United States, Verner shares stories of life around the table and how hospitality is at the heart of Christian community. What if we in the West learned about hospitality from people around the globe? What if our homes became laboratories of belonging?Invited will empower you to open your home, get to know your neighbors, and prioritize people over tasks. Holy hospitality requires more of Jesus and less of us. It leads not only to loving the stranger but to becoming the stranger. Welcome to a new kind of hospitality.
Many people today feel lonely, isolated, and disconnected from God and others. We crave authentic community, but we have no idea where to start. We'd be glad to cultivate friendships; but honestly, who's got the time?
In Invited, writer Leslie Verner says real hospitality is not having a Pinterest-perfect table or well-appointed living room. True hospitality is not clean, comfortable, or controlled. It is an invitation to enter a sacred space together with friends and strangers. Through vivid accounts from her life and travels in Uganda, China, and Tajikistan, and stories of visiting congregations in the United States, Verner shares stories of life around the table and how hospitality is at the heart of Christian community. What if we in the West learned about hospitality from people around the globe? What if our homes became laboratories of belonging?Invited will empower you to open your home, get to know your neighbors, and prioritize people over tasks. Holy hospitality requires more of Jesus and less of us. It leads not only to loving the stranger but to becoming the stranger. Welcome to a new kind of hospitality.
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Overview
Many people today feel lonely, isolated, and disconnected from God and others. We crave authentic community, but we have no idea where to start. We'd be glad to cultivate friendships; but honestly, who's got the time?
In Invited, writer Leslie Verner says real hospitality is not having a Pinterest-perfect table or well-appointed living room. True hospitality is not clean, comfortable, or controlled. It is an invitation to enter a sacred space together with friends and strangers. Through vivid accounts from her life and travels in Uganda, China, and Tajikistan, and stories of visiting congregations in the United States, Verner shares stories of life around the table and how hospitality is at the heart of Christian community. What if we in the West learned about hospitality from people around the globe? What if our homes became laboratories of belonging?Invited will empower you to open your home, get to know your neighbors, and prioritize people over tasks. Holy hospitality requires more of Jesus and less of us. It leads not only to loving the stranger but to becoming the stranger. Welcome to a new kind of hospitality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781513804330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MennoMedia |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2019 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Quest for Community
Atangle of tumbleweed skittered across Interstate 80 as we drove west through the bleak plains of Nebraska. So appropriate, I thought, gripping the steering wheel and weaving to avoid the cartwheeling, rootless branches blowing far from their origin. So much like us. Adam, the kids, and I were on our way back to Colorado after a short visit to Chicago, and I held back tears as we left what still felt like home for a place where we were friendless and unknown.
Although Chicago had nurtured me through early adulthood as I shared an apartment with friends for four years after college, its abusive Januaries had punctured my soul, and it felt as if more of me seeped out with each winter. When I left the city to live in northwest China for five years, I never missed the way the sun hid behind a slate sheet of cloud for weeks on end, rarely emerging between November and May. When I returned to the States to marry Adam, my whispered fear of being trapped with an infant in a frigid Chicago apartment in the vortex of winter quickly materialized.
Chicago yanked the covers of seasonal affective disorder right up to my nose, choking my joy and darkening my demeanor. Parallel parking three blocks away, lugging one, then two children, strollers, and groceries through snow drifts up to our third-floor apartment eventually rusted our shiny resolve to never sell out to the suburbs. We couldn't afford to buy a home in the city anyway, so we began the conversation that culminated in a cross-country move to a place boasting three hundred days of sun a year.
We crossed the Colorado-Nebraska border as the amber sun burned in my rearview mirror. Our kids were little, so Adam and I preferred to make the fifteen-hour drive at night to stopping every hour during the day. The kids still slept, somehow comfortably crooked in their car seats. The Rocky Mountains in the distance were pink in the fresh sunlight, and black cows scattered across the grasslands on either side of the highway. I thought about how, in moving from Chicago to northern Colorado, we had unknowingly stepped into a foreign culture. At first glance, Colorado is a mix of handguns and pickup trucks, marijuana dispensaries and craft beer, hiking trails and shops called One Love and the Hazy Hippo. Suburban homes are zoned for chicken coops, and even large cities have horses penned behind gas stations and strip malls. Mountains peek out from behind Target, and the smell of manure from nearby cattle ranches wafts through parking lots. Rocks carpet the lawns, rattlesnakes nestle in the grass, and clothes dry stiff on the line within an hour. Women follow folklore and wind up the mountains to induce labor by the altitude. Churches like God's Country Cowboy Church have mini rodeo rinks in the church parking lot.
We've been in Colorado for more than three years, yet I still feel like a foreigner here. I'm told that the wide roads in our city of Fort Collins, just fifty minutes south of Cheyenne, left room for pioneer wagons to turn around with horses when the land was settled by white people, who forced Native Americans in the area onto reservations in 1878. Colorado still has the air of frontier independence, the whiff of the first European settlers who abandoned the familiar to prove they could handle life well enough on their own.
But despite cerulean skies, sun that warms your skin even in January, and mountain peaks that flaunt their beauty, Colorado still has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. Loneliness laces its fingers around even the most physically fit, ecologically conscious, and financially secure, sometimes tightening its noose-like grip to the point of fatal despair.
According to the American Psychological Association, loneliness is an epidemic not only in particular states but in the United States in general. About one-third of U.S. adults age forty-five and older report feeling lonely. The top predictors of loneliness are the "size and diversity of an individual's social network and being physically isolated." The problem is not unique to the United States. The United Kingdom even hired a "minister of loneliness" to help combat their loneliness problem. Psychologist Susan Pinker reports that in the United States "more than sixty-two million people ... say they are socially isolated and unhappy about it. More than half of them (thirty-two million) live alone."
Churchgoers are not immune to the grip of loneliness. A quick Google search of "lonely at church" yields hundreds of articles. Sunday mornings can feel like the loneliest time of the week when we expect soul connection and experience only weak coffee and shallow small talk. Or worse, no talk at all.
We visited our tenth church in Colorado a few months before I gave birth to our third child. We never set out to be church hoppers, but somehow our family of four, and eventually five, visited eighteen churches in the first three years we lived in Colorado.
"You can choose how you want to worship," a man had announced from the front of that tenth church. "Take communion at the back right corner, write down prayer requests and hang them on the cross, come forward for prayer, or remain in your seat to pray or sing."
We had attended two different churches for nearly a year, leaving each because of differences in priority and theology. In all the churches we visited, we hadn't been just lackadaisical visitors, attending without effort to introduce ourselves to new people. We had joined small groups, potlucks, parties, and outreaches. We went to retreats, newcomers' luncheons, Sunday school, and women's ministry events. But climbing into our car after church, we had still felt like land detached from its rightful continent, drifting beyond the shore.
At this tenth church, a man on stage plucked strings on his guitar and a woman sang softly into the microphone, "Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down, here I am to say that you're my God," the words projected onto giant screens on either side of the stage.
I started singing, then sensed the silence of the people around us. I glanced over my shoulder at the back corner to see a round table displaying a tray of plastic cups and a plate of wafers. A middle-aged woman approached the table alone, tipped the tiny cup to her lips, flicked the wafer onto her tongue, and returned to her seat. A man stepped up to the stage after the time of worship ended and preached for thirty minutes, a digital clock on the side of the wall ticking backward to show the time remaining in his sermon.
When the service ended, people chatted in pairs. No one approached us, spoke to us, shook our hands, or asked us a question. A woman sitting just a few chairs away darted out without making eye contact. I sat next to Adam, hand propped on my pregnant belly, tears streaming down my face.
* * *
As I consider this church experience, I wonder if some churches are being held captive by our individualistic Western culture. In the sea of a grand Christian theology that beckons us to die to ourselves, live for others, and welcome strangers, individualism is the silent, lethal undertow luring the North American church away from the shore of genuine community. We often don't realize we're caught in the flow, much less know how to swim against the stream.
I didn't even realize I had a culture until I lived with a Ugandan family for six months during my senior year of college. Like air, breathing, economic security, and health, I took my culture for granted until I was no longer surrounded by it. Away from my Western culture, I gasped for breath, astounded that every rule I had considered to be universal had shifted. Body language, vocabulary, attitude, daily rituals, social expectations, and even what was considered "biblical" all carried mysterious underlying assumptions that I scrambled to decode. I felt as if I were walking on the ceiling and laying down on the walls.
Professor Soong-Chan Rah notes in The Next Evangelicalism that "the cultural captivity of the church has meant that the church is more likely to reflect the individualism of Western philosophy than the value of community found in Scripture." When we construct our sermons, services, small groups, songs, and Bible studies to focus on "me" and "I" instead of the communal church or God, we allow our culture to inform our churches instead of the other way around.
Individualism has led us offshore, leaving us wondering how we can get back to where we started — back to the promises of Eden and God strolling with a couple in the garden. Back to being loved even though we are strangers. Back to belonging in a community of people who love us unconditionally.
* * *
One evening after moving to Colorado, I escaped the house at dusk to roam the silent streets of our neighborhood, pretending not to gaze into the glowing window panes of the apartments and homes. I paused under the streetlight at a Little Free Library, a box set up for neighbors to swap free books. I took my hands out of my pockets to shuffle through the random titles and found a slim, unfamiliar volume on American culture, a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness.
During the kids' naptime the next day, I flipped through and discovered it was originally written in 1970 by a sociologist named Philip Slater. Published at a time before our smartphones could be consulted about where to eat a meal, for directions, or about what to do about bullies at school, Slater's words were prophetic. He suggested that our deep needs for community, engagement, and dependency "are suppressed in our society out of a commitment to individualism." From the time we're babies sent to sleep alone in other rooms, we're molded for independence. He wrote,
We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his or her daily business. Even within the family Americans are unique in their feeling that each member should have a separate room and even a separate telephone, television, and car, when economically possible. We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.
I wondered if the author knew that Jesus carried the discussion so much further. Rather than living for self, Jesus and his followers forfeited personal comfort for the sake of selfless love. "Practice hospitality," Paul urged the Roman church. "Share with [God's] people who are in need," he says, and then echoes the words of Jesus himself: "Bless those who persecute you; ... rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:13-15). Privacy can be the enemy of the open home.
As Middle Easterners, Jesus and his followers dwelled within a culture that highly valued community, hospitality, and relationships. Hospitality was their default response to friends, guests, and strangers, not their extraordinary act of service. Community was built in, not sought out. But in the West, our default is privacy, individualism, and independence. The United States is listed as number one on the individualism index, a measure used by researchers to determine how where we live influences how we think about the role of the individual versus the role of the group. Australia ranks number two on the individualism index, with Great Britain and Canada as three and four. In contrast, most countries in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia fall much lower on the list, valuing the group over the individual. In fact, write the authors of one study, "collectivism is the rule in our world, and individualism the exception." With such a high value on individualism and privacy, it's no wonder many of us in the West feel isolated and lonely.
* * *
Around our third anniversary of moving to Colorado, I remember tripping the blinker with my hand and easing the car out into traffic on our way to the grocery store. I had been thinking about something but wondered if I was correct. At a stoplight, I glanced back to catch my five-year-old son's eye. I asked, "Elijah, do you remember going to anyone's house for a meal since moving to Colorado?" I knew we had, but my calculations seemed ridiculously low. Could it be that we had been invited to someone's home just three times in three years? "We went to Faraz and Sara's house," he said, not realizing I was counting churchgoers. Faraz and Sara were the three- and six-year-old children of our Iranian international student friends who had stayed with us five nights before moving to an apartment near campus. In fact, international students had invited us to eat Chinese hotpot, homemade pizzas, or spicy chicken stews in their apartments more times than North Americans from church had invited us over.
Perhaps it's intimidating to host a family with three small children. Or maybe busy schedules, finicky eaters, restrictive diets, dirty houses, stressful jobs, or cooking phobias prevented others from inviting us over. Perhaps the lack of invitations was because life just barrels on, and Western culture rarely demands that we invite one another into our perceived personal chaos. At least these are the things I told myself. Without those explanations, I'd begin to deduce that the subtle snub indicated people didn't like us.
A single meal does not community make, but it has the potential to remind us we're not solo wanderers in the wilderness. An invitation is a slight opening in the window of relationship, granting intimacy permission to drift in like a breeze into a stuffy room.
Hospitality, while still vibrant in some areas of the West, has mostly become a faded dream in a fast paced society. Resurrecting this old-fashioned value has the power not only to satiate our personal loneliness, but also to enliven our faith communities, revitalize our neighborhoods, and transform our cities. The Bible clearly commands followers of God to welcome, open our homes, and love our neighbors. "Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling," Peter urges the church in 1 Peter 4:9. Peter seems to use this as an anecdote to the previous verse: "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." Love errs on the side of invitation.
Hospitality is the marrow of community, the life source that produces the very cells our collective humanity needs to function.
But what does God really expect when the Bible commands us to "show hospitality"? That we invite our neighbors for dinner every night? Convert our minivans into shuttles for people who are homeless, bringing strangers home to eat casseroles with our families? How far does God want us to go when it comes to loving our neighbor? And how much does our culture muddle the clarity of God's commands?
* * *
Living in China for five years as an adult offered me plenty of snapshots of communal living. As a twenty-six-year-old, I had quit my job teaching seventh grade in Chicago, sold my car, and moved to China to teach English to college students. My first three years I lived in a small city unknown even to most Chinese people I met when traveling to other provinces. A man from Hong Kong once compared my city to the China of sixty or maybe even one hundred years ago. The president of our university was the only staff member who owned a private car, and taxi fare was forty cents to travel anywhere in the city. The nearest airport was an eight-hour drive until a highway opened up a few months after my arrival, halving the travel time. We were, by anyone's standards, "remote."
On one of my trips to the countryside to visit one of my student's families, her mother had invited three friends to teach us to dance. As a single woman living alone, I couldn't remember the last time I had ballroom danced, much less with a middle-aged woman as my partner. The Chinese farmer's sandpaper palms chafed my smooth ones as we waltzed on the cold brick of the living room floor, odors of garlic, earth, and burnt charcoal surrounding us. She grinned, just inches from my face, and we mimicked dancers on television who twirled and spun in evening gowns on the screen while ballroom music blasted from dusty speakers into the room.
In winter, these goji berry farmers often congregated in each other's homes, playing cards or switching on the dance channel before harvest called them out to pluck tiny red berries from waist-high bushes. Although I knew life as a farmer was harsh and monotonous, I envied their community, the way they danced away the wicked winter months. I had rarely experienced this type of community, brought on by the simple hospitality of an open invitation to congregate, celebrate, and enjoy each other's presence.
Living and traveling in countries like Uganda, China, Thailand, Laos, Tajikistan, and Kenya, I noted the implications of favoring life together over life alone. There were certainly downsides, but I also wondered what I could learn from their strengths.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Invited"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Herald Press.
Excerpted by permission of Herald Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note,
Introduction,
1 The Quest for Community,
2 Staying Put,
3 Stranger Love,
4 Linger Longer,
5 The Friendship Conundrum,
6 Habits of Hospitality,
7 Beyond Our Limits,
8 Solitude,
9 Utterly Dependent,
10 A Shared Life,
Epilogue,
Discussion and Reflection Questions,
Ideas for Inviting,
Further Reading,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
The Author,