What lies beyond the welcome?

The benediction has been given. The final “amen” chorused as if with a single voice in response from the congregation.

The one voice of corporate worship separates after the service into the hum of dozens of casual conversations: greetings between friends, parents rounding up their children, cliques of teens debating where they’re heading for lunch after the service.

This is the sound of starting the clock on the loneliest ten minutes of my week.

On The Other Side of the Welcome Team

My husband and I are empty-nesters. Four moves in a little more than a decade has made perpetual new people of us when it comes to church. Even if a congregation has a standard protocol to welcome first-time visitors (as many do), there is often a giant chasm between being The New People and being integrated into a local body’s life.

Nowhere is this chasm more evident to me than during those moments following a worship service.

I’m an extrovert, and normally have no problem working my way into a conversation at a gathering. But those moments after a church service, spent trying to engage a friendly-looking stranger or standing awkwardly and invisibly in the middle of a crowd, leaves me feeling just as I did back in third grade, waiting to be picked for a team, and knowing I would be the second-to-last one chosen every time. My husband Bill, an introvert, finds this exercise even more soul-depleting than I do. It takes a lot of energy to face passive rejection week after week.

Without a natural bridge—such as kids, friends already attending the congregation, or a mutual social media acquaintance some other social connection—we find ourselves standing alone on one side of the chasm struggling to figure out how to find our way across it.

We’ve visited enough churches over the years to recognize that leaving one new inhospitable congregation to try somewhere else means beginning the New People process all over again.

The Hospitality We Forget

Hospitality is a non-negotiable value of the household of faith, underscored most famously with the words of the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, reminding us that by entertaining strangers, we may in fact be entertaining an angel in disguise (13:2). These words bring to mind the angelic visitors who showed up at Abraham and Sarah’s tent, looking all the world like standard-issue fellow nomads. Only after they communicated to Abraham that his antique wife Sarah would have a baby by the same time next year did they realize these were no ordinary visitors (Genesis 18:1–15).

An ancient Celtic prayer captures the essence of this Biblical call to hospitality:

I saw a stranger yestereen,
I put food in the eating place
Drink in the drinking place
Music in the listening place
And in the sacred name of the Triune
He blessed myself and my house
My cattle and my dear ones
As the lark said in her song “Often, often, often
Goes Christ in the stranger’s guise.”

Our current experience revealed my own hospitality failings. The language of entertaining angels unawares, and the heroic ways in which we in the Church often talk about hospitality has inspired me to do lots of big things during the rooted years when Bill and I were raising our three children: I was a foster mom. I ran the Vacation Bible School program. Bill and I hosted small groups in our home. I prayer-walked my neighborhood, looking for opportunities to know and serve those living around me. I grocery-shopped for a homebound senior. Our family served at a food pantry. I now recognize I passively neglected the small stuff of true Biblical welcome, like reaching out to The New People. Having a second, and then a third conversation, with someone; inviting a stranger not in my own demographic to our home for a meal. 

Interestingly, when I was on staff at a church, I would go out of my way to welcome newcomers, but with the clarity that has come from standing alone at the chasm after services each week, I now recognize that I saw it as part and parcel of my job. At the time, I think I gave myself a micro-“Atta girl!” whenever I intentionally bypassed some after-worship chat time with my pals so I could help connect a new person to congregational programs so they could make their own new friends that may or may not have included me. Now I recognize that this wasn’t angels-unaware, welcome-the-stranger hospitality at all, but was about feeding a false image I had of myself as a self-sacrificing servant and good church team player.

When Worship is Rightly About Us

Christians like to tell one another that corporate worship is not about us. This is foundationally true, but it is not the whole story. Worship also reminds us of the ways in which we are inextricably inter-related to one another as members of the body of Jesus the Messiah. Those bits of our gatherings that seem less vertical, and therefore less sacred – the greetings, the lunch invitations, the announcements – are another expression of our worship of the One who called us together.

Bible teacher William Barclay said, “Christianity was, and still should be, the religion of the open door.” As much as I wish I could turn this into a mandate for the behavior of the people who walk past us every week after services on the way to someone more important, I recognize that I am not exempt from the call to hold open the door, too, even when it feels as though no one wants to walk through it. Perhaps especially then, because though that door seems heavy, as I practice holding it open, I will have eyes to see through its portal a new face in the crowd, standing alone, staring at the chasm and wondering how to enter in.