Last week, a family member shared a sermon with me that they thought I would like. It was all about reclaiming the Christian practice of hospitality as a response to the increased loneliness in society and how the church should be a space that welcomes lost and broken people in. While I agree with this as a starting place, I can't help but feel it didn't go far enough.

I wrote about hospitality in my essay exploring how the church can better relate to the labour rights movement (working together for a mutual flourishing). Key to this is that the church is not meant to be solely the givers of hospitality, but the recipients of it as well.

As we have been discussing thus far, a truly common good requires the mutual flourishing of a diverse relational network of people within a shared context. Yet the complexities of those relationships are often what stand in the way of making this possible. As stated earlier, these relationships are made up of a conflicting web of families, friendships, neighbours, strangers, and enemies. For the church to step into this web in hopes of advocating for an alternative vision for society, it needs a posture that can build partnerships across these differences without diminishing them. For Luke Bretherton, the answer is found in the traditional Christian practice of hospitality; the intentional act of welcoming strangers. He writes that true hospitality “involves listening to and learning from strangers, as this entails forming a relationship with those not like us that we disagree with or find scandalous.” Thus, there is always a risk to hospitality as it requires a willingness to let go of our preconceptions and assumptions of how things ought to go. When we listen to and learn from those who are unlike ourselves we are necessarily changed. Importantly, hospitality is also something that the church can both give and receive. This is a theme that Cavanough picks up in an essay on mobility and how the church might consider how it ‘moves’ through the world. He offers two metaphors, those of pilgrim and monk, as a way for the church to see itself both as those who travel in solidarity with others, receiving hospitality along the way; and as those who remain in place, offering hospitality to others. That second one, the role of monk, invites the church to work with others to “build strong local communities and cooperative social arrangements deeply rooted in their places.” In this sense, hospitality itself becomes a form of common good that works across our differences to build more welcoming communities. It also helps us resist the assumption that we encounter each other as equals, teaching us to pay greater awareness to the relational imbalances that exist.

This isn't meant to be a criticism towards the sermon, more to say that I think for the church to have a healthy relationship to the surrounding society it needs to not see itself only as having something to offer—but also a humility to learn and be equally changed as it builds relationships for the mutual flourishing of our world.