Hospitality isn’t about impressing guests—it’s about loving people, starting with those in our homes. True hospitality fosters connection, growth, and generosity.
Hospitality isn’t something we add on once the house is clean and we have everything together. Hospitality is loving others in and with our own selves and our homes; and love is the whole point. Let love be genuine.
We need to know what hospitality means because Scripture is very clear that hospitality is a requirement for God’s people. If we are NOT hospitable, we are being disobedient —
- Romans 12:13 - “seek to show hospitality.”
- Hebrews 13:2 - “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers”
- 1 Peter 4:9 - “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.”
What hospitality means
The Greek word in the Bible translated hospitality is literally “stranger-love” which is also the sense of the Latin root from which English gets hospitality.
n. “Cordial and generous reception of or disposition toward guests.”
The adjective form, hospitable, is to be disposed to —or characterized by —warmth and generosity. To be hospitable also means being “favorable to growth and development, as in a hospitable environment."
Clearly, then, hospitality is not the same thing as entertaining. Entertaining is about impressing others and making ourselves look good; hospitality is about serving others and sharing life.
Remember that definition: “having a warm, cordial, generous disposition.”
Yes, part of the very definition of the word hospitality has to do not with your home or food, but with your attitude, your heart.
Real hospitality has nothing to do with showing off our homes or cooking skills. It has to do with how we treat people.
Creating - even BEING - hospitable environments is what women are all about - all of us, in a variety of ways and through many avenues.
Family hospitality
One of my very favorite quotes of all time is from G.K. Chesterton. In an essay on domesticity, he wrote: “The business done in the home is nothing less than the shaping of the bodies and souls of humanity.”
The home is to be a hospitable environment, shaping the bodies and souls of humanity, bringing people up to thrive. Clearly, then, our first calling with hospitality in our homes is to the residents of our home.
The greatest contribution we can make in the world is through multiplying the number of thriving, functional households in the next generation. Our home is our primary work because it is of primary effectiveness.
Our homes are for using to build up people. If those people make a mess – a physical mess, an emotional mess, any mess – it’s not frustrating our goal or ruining our home.
The messes give us opportunities to use our home for its very purpose: mending, serving, building, nurturing, growing ——people.
Hospitality is building up people, and that’s our mission, whether we started from the moment of their birth or we only just learned their name.
Hospitality is the goal of our home, not a garnish. Our homes are tools to be used, not trophies to be displayed.
Our first duty as homemakers is to make our homes welcoming for those that live here. That is the work of shaping the bodies and souls of humanity which will reverberate for generations.
Hospitality for church community
If hospitality is a building up of the body of Christ, it must begin within our own families and then overflow to others. Otherwise, it is likely not true Christian hospitality, but something we do so others will think well of us. It might be a cover for our insecurities rather than a genuine offering of ourselves to others.
You don’t need to wait to figure everything out or be guaranteed your dinner will be a smashing success without an ounce of awkwardness. There are no such guarantees. Quite the opposite, really.
Hospitality and awkwardness actually go together all the time. Hospitable is not the opposite of awkward; it’s the opposite of hostile.
Graciousness doesn’t mean there’s never awkwardness, but rather that you look past the awkward and keep going, loving the person in front of you.
We build a loving, connected, generous, gracious, hospitable church community by having people over for dinner, inviting someone to go to a baby shower together, introducing yourself to whoever is sitting behind you at church, asking people to remind you of their names again, and volunteering to take meals to people you don’t know and might never meet.
Yes, I did say go to baby showers and I do mean even if you don’t know the new mom or the hostess. Baby showers are church functions, not personal parties. Baby showers are not so much about honoring a particular person but about celebrating new life and growth.
We church ladies should be treating baby showers as the main social function of our church body. Again, it’s not about the particular mom. The point is knitting together the community in love and celebration of life and growth.
When we go, whether we feel like it or not, we are church ladies. You are a church lady. Our goal should be to notice who is new and have conversations.
Hospitable giving
Whatever awkward, difficult situations you’ve had as a newcomer, a young married, a sleep-deprived mom, a busy basketball mom, a disoriented launching mom ARE the situations God is using providentially in you to grow and mature you.
What did you wish someone did when you were in your previous stage? Look around and find someone for whom you can do that.
One of my favorite Proverbs, besides 14:4 — Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.— is 11:35— “Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.”
Hospitality is watering other people. There are all manner of opportunities God is placing before each one of us to water people and foster their development. First, to our own particular people— husband and children — then to our particular church body, and then also outward to the community as a whole.
Hospitality —whether for the family, in the church, or in the town — is about treating people in such a way that you foster connection, growth, and development in them or for them.
It is a “cordial and generous reception of or disposition toward guests.”
Hospitality wherever we go
Women create culture by adorning and glorifying life. Our demeanor in public is the atmosphere of the culture we are stirring up, waiting for that starter to work its way through the loaf.
Smile at children and babies. Look people in the eye and see them as persons — even the sad grocery checker with green hair and a face mask.
Women have the power to be humanizing. We make humans, we feed and clothe humans, and we also nurture humanity - we export our home culture with us wherever we go, shaping the bodies and souls of humanity as cordial, gracious, generous beings.
We can radiate hospitality wherever we go. We can make conversation in love with strangers, even hostile strangers, because we are called to hospitality.
We can be open to allowing God to use us as He sees fit — opening doors we never saw, closing the ones we try carving for ourselves, and creating doors in brand new places.
Just extend hospitality
One thing that makes hospitality difficult is that we are out of practice. It is easy to slip into selfish patterns: doing what needs to be done on our own agendas, taking a break, keeping to ourselves and our own thoughts. Instead, we need to practice the habit of hospitality, the habit of openness to others.
The habit of hospitality includes but is much broader than having people over for dinner. It means inviting people into our lives – starting, of course, with the people that live in our houses.
And that sort of life will overflow into the lives of others through invitations and conversations, but mostly through our demeanor. The way we treat people is either selfish or welcoming, inviting, and interested.
The habit of hospitality will shape all our interactions. —even with such little things as looking people in the eye and smiling when we’re walking down the street, the grocery store aisle, or school hall.
Hospitality requires and brings growth; it takes time & practice.
Love, service, and even conversational skills come by cultivation. And that’s another way of saying hospitality takes work. But, like all forms of obedience, it is worth it. So, let’s commit to show hospitality without grumbling.
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