Seasoned for Hospitality
Sycamore Creek Church
November 27, 2011
Tom Arthur
Romans 12:13

Peace, Friends!

It’s the season for hospitality.  Thanksgiving.  Christmas.  New Years.  Anyone throwing a party or invited to a party?  I would guess all of us will at least get together with some family or friends at some point in the next month or so.  Sarah and I went down to Indianapolis for Thanksgiving and a good portion of our family met for a meal at my dad and step-mom’s house.  Or perhaps you’ll be having a couple of office parties.  Whatever the situation, in each case hospitality will be a big part of what makes or breaks the moment.  Hospitality is like seasoning.  It makes or breaks the meal.  As Christians, we are to be people seasoned for hospitality.  This is true whether we’re with family, friends, co-workers, or even here at the worship.

Sarah and I recently went to a worship service while we were on vacation.  We got the whole experience of hospitality.  Too much seasoning.  Too little seasoning.  And just the right amount of seasoning.  The moment we walked in the door we were greeted by a very enthusiastic greeter.  He realized we were new to the church, and he was a little too eager to make sure that we knew we were welcome and wanted.  He told us about all kinds of things and said that after the worship service he’d introduce us to all kinds of people.  Way too much seasoning.  What I really wanted to know was, where is the bathroom?  And you can bet that after the service we did our best to avoid this over seasoned greeter.

After going to the bathroom, Sarah and I regrouped and headed into the worship area.  We found ourselves a row of seats that had plenty of room between us and the person further down the row.  You know.  The comfort zone seats.  You never really want to sit right next to someone, so we left a couple of seats between us and them.  A moment after we sat down, a lady who was standing in the aisle turned around, saw us and said, “I was saving those seats.”  We looked around to make sure she was talking to us.  Then she said, “Well, you can just move down.”  We imagined the safety seats we had left between us and the next person down the row disappearing and said, “We’ll just move to another row.”  So we got up and moved.  OK, I have never had this happen to me in my entire life of visiting churches.  You always hear about stuff like this, but it always seems a little bit like an urban legend.  Are church people really like this?  Way too little seasoning.  (To the credit of this woman, she did come up to us afterwards and apologize.  She said that her grandchildren had been sitting where we were sitting, and when she turned around, she was startled to see us rather than her grandchildren.  Makes sense, and easy enough to understand, but had we really been guests looking for a church, it is highly unlikely that anything that happened that morning could have made up for the awkwardness of that moment.  We found out later that she and the guy who greeted us were married!)

So we got up and moved.  When the worship service began, we joined in.  They came to the moment in the service when we were asked to greet our neighbors.  We found ourselves in a handshaking assembly line.  Almost everyone simply said, “Hi” without really looking us in the eye and gave us a quick hand shake.  The only person who didn’t do this was the guy in front of us. He turned around and introduced himself. He seemed to be a little introverted himself and not particularly fond of this part of the service.  But he was kind and friendly and brief without making us feel like we were part of someone’s to do list.  After the service was over (here’s the key part), he turned around and complimented us saying, “I’d like to sit in front of you two singing any day.”  Compliments go a long way in greasing the wheels of conversation.  Soon we were into a conversation about all kinds of things.  He singlehandedly saved our first impression of this church from being a major disappointment.  Just the right amount of seasoning.

Scripture is chock full of references to being people seasoned for hospitality.  Here are some examples:

Rom 12:13 TNIV – Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.

Rom 16:23 TNIV – Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings.

Heb 13:2 TNIV – Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

1 Peter 4:9 TNIV – Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.

1 Tim 3:2 ASV – The bishop therefore must be without reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, orderly, given to hospitality…

I want to stress that when scripture talks about hospitality, it almost always means providing a roof, bed, and meal (and perhaps even clothes).  Whatever is needed.  Motels and hotels weren’t anything like they are today.  When people traveled they were dependent upon the hospitality of strangers or acquaintances or friends of friends of friends (and all this without Facebook!).  But there’s a basic principle at work here: when someone new shows up, make sure their needs are met.

I’d like to suggest this morning that there are three basic ingredients to hospitality: invitation, welcome and connect, and the meal.

Invitation

It’s hard to offer hospitality if you haven’t extended an invitation.  How are you at extending the invitation to come and join us at Sycamore Creek Church?  How many people have you invited to SCC this season?  We’re encouraging you to invite three people.  Write their names down.  Pray for the opportunity to present itself.  Then invite.

I think watching for the opportunity for an invitation begins simply with listening and asking questions, being sincerely and genuinely interested in someone.  Jeremy and I have been hanging out on MSU’s campus more and more lately.  We tend to bring free coffee with us.  Coffee helps get conversations going.  Then we simply ask questions.  We are curious about the lives of those people we’re talking with.

A couple of weeks ago we met dozens of students but had significant conversations with four different people.  We met Brenda who is a first generation college student in her family and is studying humanities and packaging.  Her family is from Mexico, but she grew up in Michigan.  We met Todd, a liberal arts student who is interested in everything.  He was particularly focused on keeping corporations and the government in check.  We met Baho, who is from Uzbekistan.  He studied English for 10 years in his home country, and when we told him we were with a local church, he wanted to know if our church had an ESL class.  We spent a lot of time discussing religious laws in Uzbekistan and the rationale behind them.  Lastly, we met Yuna, a freshman who is still looking for a church.  At the end of the conversation she gave me her email.  In each instance, we simply listened and asked questions.  It was only as the opportunity came up (they usually asked us why were handing out free coffee) that we even brought up Sycamore Creek Church and handed them an invite card.

Speaking of invite cards…those cards we’re passing out to you each week aren’t for you.  They’re for your friends.  Those three friends (or more!) that you’re going to invite to SCC this season.  We’ve also created posters for you to take to your work place, community hang outs, school, or wherever to hang up.  And to support all the work you’re doing, we’re mailing out thousands of these cards to families in our immediate community.

Another very simple way to at least make people aware of SCC is through Facebook.  We’ve created an updated page about SCC and invited you to “Like” it.  So far we’ve got 38 people who “like” our page, but there are surely more of you out there who can push a simple button.  Do you know that through those 38 people who have already liked our page, we have the potential of reaching almost 9000 people.  The more you interact (comment, like, or share) with the content we post (and we’re trying to post something every day), the more your friends will see and hear about SCC.

The recipe for hospitality begins with a very simple step: the invitation.

Welcome and Connect

So you show up at a party and you don’t know anyone.  How do you feel?  Awkward?  Overwhelmed?  Excluded?  For most of us, we generally don’t have a positive initial experience of being the new person.  Every time a guest walks in the door of SCC, that’s what they’re experiencing.  I’d like to teach you a simple technique that you can use to help people feel welcome and connect with others.  This works whether you’re at church, home, work, school, or anywhere.  It’s called the 5-10-Link rule.

5 = five minutes before the service and after the service focus less on the people you know and more on the people who you don’t know.  It’s not a bad thing to want to talk to your friends, but too often we let that desire to connect with friends overwhelm the need of the guest around us.  So give the guest among us the first five minutes before worship begins and the first five minutes after worship is over.

10 = ten feet around you.   You don’t have to hit the whole room.  That would be overwhelming.  Just pay attention to a ten foot radius around you.  Who don’t you know that is within ten feet of you?  Focus on those people.

Link = connect them with someone else.  This is super simple.  You go up and introduce yourself.  You begin a conversation.  Then you see another friend of yours standing behind them.  Say, “Hey, let me introduce you to my friend.”  When you introduce them, give a brief introduction.  If you noticed something they have in common—they both like the Lions—make sure you point that out.  Prime the conversation pump.

The person who introduced me to the 5-10-Link rule was a master at doing this.  I was at a conference in Dallas and barely knew anyone.  He found out that I was at a relatively new church, so he brought me over and introduced me to some other pastors who were in new churches too.  He told these other pastors a little bit about me and my church (what he knew) and got the conversation going.  Eventually he moved on, but we kept talking.  It was awesome.  I made some new friends with people who were in very similar situations that I was in.

Too often we don’t offer this kind of welcome and connection because we’re afraid of forgetting names.  Let me give you a couple of tips for how to get around stick situations where you’ve forgotten names.  It’s not a sin to forget someone’s name.  It is a sin to avoid them because you think you should know their name, but you don’t.  If you’ve forgotten their name, simply say, “Help me with your name.”  Everyone likes to be helpful and everyone understands that names are easy to forget.  They probably forgot your name too.  Then say you’re introducing someone new to someone else and by the time you get to the “Link” you’ve forgotten their name.  Simply say, “Have you two met?”  Then wait.  There’s a script in our culture and soon they will shake hands and introduce themselves.  Pay attention and you’ll hear their name again.  It’s that simple.

Hospitality continues with the 5-10-Link rule.

The Meal

The last part of hospitality is the meal.  It would be a little awkward to invite people over and not have something to eat or drink.  When you’re at worship, the “meal” is the music and/or message for the day.  I’d like to give you a little behind the scenes look at how we organize the “meals” here at SCC.  While we try to make every Sunday accessible to the guest, there are some Sundays that are particularly geared to the guest.

Throughout the year we have several categories of series.  Here are some of them and examples of those series:

1. Buzz Series (engaging, fun, felt-need based, relational) take place in October, Christmas, February, Easter, and once in the summer.  These are series that are particularly aimed at being guest friendly.  Here are some examples: Clearance, Chipped, Courage, and Questions.
2. Bible Series (an Old or New Testament book) in the fall and spring.  Some examples include: Revelation, Exposure (Song of Solomon), and The Downfall of Kings (1 & 2 Samuel).
3. H.A.B.I.T.S. Series (the habits and practices of the Christian life) in the fall or spring.  Here are some examples: H.A.B.I.T.S., I Like Your Style (Evangelism), The and Elements of Worship.
4. Belief Series (basic beliefs and Christian doctrines) in the fall or spring.  Some examples include: Off the Tracks (Sin), I Believe (The Apostles Creed), and Life (Baptism).
5. Vision Series (where we’re going and our mission, vision, and core values) in the fall and spring.  Here are some examples: Mixin’ It Up (Missions and Small Groups), So Many Reasons (Our Annual Stewardship Campaign), 20 Years Deep (Our Capital Campaign).

Seasoned for Hospitality

When all of these ingredients are blended together in the just the right amount the end result can be incredible.  I’d like to give you one example of how I’ve seen this work in our church at its best.

Daniel Storer was shopping one day at Hidden Treasures when he bumped into Keith Cantrall.  They started a conversation and Keith invited Daniel to try our church.  Daniel biked to church that next Sunday.  He showed up early and was a little sweaty.  Martha Trout greeted him warmly and offered to show him the school showers.  Bob gave him a ride home.  Several people did the same over the next several weeks.

Daniel isn’t one to sit for an hour, and when he got up to walk around, he found that no one treated him as though he shouldn’t be doing that.  He was connected to Mark Aupperlee who invited him to a small group.  He began attending regularly.  He met some other people and found more rides to worship.

He met Jeremy Kratky, our worship leader, and Jeremy found out that Daniel could really sing (he actually taught choir at one point), so he joined the band.  Daniel was looking for a job.  He eventually met Carol Hazel in the band, and Carol introduced him to a friend who needed a handyman and chef.  Daniel was both, and he has recently been hired at Charlar’s Place.

Daniel then invited the people he lived with to church.  One of those people is in a wheel chair.  Mary Ziegler noticed this and offered her wheelchair accessible van to this family.  She had not needed it since Ken died.

Did you notice that I barely showed up in Daniel’s story.  Yeah, I’m the pastor, but it wasn’t me who made Daniel feel welcome.  I wasn’t the primary person who connected him to other people.  A guest won’t experience our church primarily through me, the pastor.  Their experience will be based on the people they meet here.  Daniel’s story is a story of meeting a people who are seasoned for hospitality.  It is my hope and prayer that every guest who walks in the door will experience the same thing that Daniel experienced.  Will you make that hope and prayer a reality?

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We’ve got a stand-alone one sermon series this Sunday to prepare you for the season of hospitality:

How do you welcome someone into your home?  How do you welcome someone into your church?  It’s the season of hospitality and we’ll be exploring how we’re called to be seasoned for hospitality.  This message will give you practical steps for offering hospitality in your home, work, school, or church.  Come join us and be seasoned for hospitality.

November 27 – Seasoned for Hospitality

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How to be a Good Host
Sycamore Creek Church
1 Corinthians 14:1-4 & 23-25
July 18, 2010
Tom Arthur

Peace, friends!

Summer is wonderful, isn’t it?  It’s a very active time.  We all enjoy getting outside.  We enjoy being active.  We also enjoy having people over.  Summer is a time for BBQs, deck parties, pool parties, garage parties, and the like.  It’s a time when we enjoy being a host to friends, family, and neighbors in our homes.  I think this makes summer an appropriate time to also consider how we host people in this home we call the church.  How should we treat those who are guests among us?  Does the Bible offer any direction on this?  Well, not explicitly, but Paul does offer some thoughts to the church at Corinth on how their worship should be received and experienced by those who come but are not believers.  Hear what he has to say:

1 Corinthians 14:1-4 & 23-25 (NLT)

¹ Let love be your highest goal, but also desire the special abilities the Spirit gives, especially the gift of prophecy. ² For if your gift is the ability to speak in tongues, you will be talking to God but not to people, since they won’t be able to understand you. You will be speaking by the power of the Spirit, but it will all be mysterious. ³ But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord, encouraging and comforting them. ⁴ A person who speaks in tongues is strengthened personally in the Lord, but one who speaks a word of prophecy strengthens the entire church…

²³ Even so, if unbelievers or people who don’t understand these things come into your meeting and hear everyone talking in an unknown language, they will think you are crazy. ²⁴ But if all of you are prophesying, and unbelievers or people who don’t understand these things come into your meeting, they will be convicted of sin, and they will be condemned by what you say. ²⁵ As they listen, their secret thoughts will be laid bare, and they will fall down on their knees and worship God, declaring, “God is really here among you.”

This is God’s story for us today.  Thank you, God.

Now there’s a lot going on in this passage, but I’d like to focus on the third verse which says, “But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord, encouraging and comforting them” (1 Corinthians 14:3, NLT).  There are several things we can learn about being a host in this short verse.

Focus on Others

First, being a host in worship means focusing on others.  Paul says, “But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord…”  You do this whenever you invite someone over to your house.  Several weeks ago I helped plan and host a community BBQ for our neighborhood association.  When I invited my neighbors into my house, I was focused not on my own needs but upon their needs.  For example, I told folks where the bathroom was, where they could put the picnic chairs they brought, where they could put the food they had prepared, and how and when we would eat.  I provided the meat for the event and had grilled it.  This might sound like a lot of expense, but I bought a grill box from Great Food for All that made the whole event very affordable.  Within that grill box came several different kinds of meat so that my guests could find the kind of meat they preferred.  I showed the kids where some of our toys were and where they could play freely.  When I saw that they were missing some active toys, I went out and grabbed my Beemo, a large soft Frisbee-like toy, and played toss with them so that their parents could enjoy time with one another.  I was simply enough focused on meeting their needs.  This is what a good host does.

Paul is concerned about the same thing in the Corinthian worship services.  Paul values prophesy in the church over speaking in tongues.  Now what are these things that Paul is talking about?  They sound kinda strange.  For the moment, let’s understand prophesy as speaking God’s word into a situation, not telling the future, and speaking in tongues is a kind of supernatural speaking or prayer language.  To explain what those two things are in more detail would take another entire sermon, and that’s not where our focus is today.  What we’re focused on is that Paul prefers one, prophesy, over the other, speaking in tongues, because prophesy helps the guest while speaking in tongues does not.  Notice the “others” in verse three.  In the next verse, Paul says that those who speak in tongues are “strengthened personally in the Lord” while those who prophesy strengthen “the entire church.”  Clearly Paul values in this context what strengthens the entire church over what strengthens one personally.  Growing in Christ means being willing to worship in a way that may not speak personally to you, but does speak to the broader community, especially those who are guests.

So does this mean that we should never focus on our own personal spiritual growth?  Absolutely not!  Jumping down toward the end of this passage Paul points out that his encouragement is for a particular situation.  He says, “If, therefore, the whole church comes together…” (1 Corinthians 14:23, NRSV).  This suggests that there are other appropriate times when the whole church is not present that may be more appropriate for a personal focus.  I suspect that even in Paul’s day there were small groups within the church that met to focus on personal growth.  That’s certainly one place where it can happen in our church.

Grow and Mature

A second characteristic of a good host for Paul as found in verse three is that a host wants his or her guests to grow and mature.  Paul says, “But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord, encouraging and comforting them” (1 Corinthians 14:3, NLT).

Once again when I hosted our community BBQ I too wanted my guests to grow in the Lord.  Sarah and I sought for our guests to grow by providing sign-up sheets for people to help out with future events like this one and also for our community garden.  These sign-up sheets were about growing community but didn’t specifically have to do with growing in the Lord, so while this was not a church-gathering, because it was in our house, I decided to go ahead and pray before we ate.  I gathered people together in our great room and welcomed them.  I told everyone that Sarah and I pray before we eat, and then I shared a prayer from our “prayer cube.”  It’s a six-sided cube with prayers on each side.  This prayer cube is something we often use at meals to help us keep our prayers fresh so that we’re not just saying the same thing every time we pray for a meal.  It is a very easy way to pray because you don’t have to come up with something to say yourself, but you can use the words of others to be meaningful to you and your guests.  This was modeling an easy way for my guests to pray in their own homes.

What about being a host in our church gatherings?  Paul focuses on this aspect when he says that he values prophesy because guests “will be convicted of sin…” (1 Corinthians 14:24, NTL).  You know that growth sometimes hurts.  It is sometimes like surgery.  The surgeon cuts not with the intention to hurt, but with the intention to heal.  It is a hurt that is motivated by compassion not judgment.

Recently I was listening to a classic Christian book by Thomas à Kempis called Imitation of Christ.  As I was listening in my car there à Kempis said something that struck a little too close to home for me.  He said that we will not be judged by the amount of books we read but by how we lived our lives.  Ouch.  I love reading books.  I read and listen to audio books almost every day.  Sometimes I get a kind of trophy mentality.  I put books up on my shelves like little trophies that I’ve earned.  Thomas à Kempis was reminding me that if I do not love rightly all those books mean nothing.  This kinda hurt, but it was a hurt I needed.  Sometimes growing in the Lord hurts.  Thankfully that’s not where Paul stops.

Encourage

For Paul, the church hosts well when it encourages.  He says, “But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord, encouraging and comforting them” (1 Corinthians 14:3, NLT).

Speaking of reading books, I recently read a book titled, The Art of Mingling by Jeanne Martinet.  I don’t really feel like I’m the greatest at mingling.  I’m kinda introverted sometimes, and I sometimes have a hard time with small talk.  This makes Sunday morning something of a challenge for me, so I thought that Martinet might be able to give me some good tips for how to mingle on Sunday morning.  In the midst of this book I came across a section titled “The Party Coach.”

Martinet describes a good host as a party coach.  He never lets a guest be left out of the party.  If he sees someone standing by himself, he goes over and begins a conversation.  When he finds a subject that he knows someone else who is a guest at the party is interested in, he takes this guest over and introduces him to the other guest.  Martinet says, “A good host doesn’t then merely introduce the two people; he offers them something they have in common.  In other words, he provides them with their first bit of subject matter, just to get things moving” (174).

I wonder if that isn’t part of what it means to be encouraging to guests when they come to our church.  If we see a guest standing by themselves, don’t keep focusing on yourself, go over and introduce yourself.  And when you find out something they like that you know someone else in our church likes, introduce the two people and get the conversation going.  Connect guests with others in the church who will encourage them.  This can even happen with things they are struggling with.  If you find out that a guest at church is having a hard time because they’ve been grieving the death of a friend of family member, perhaps there is someone else in the church who has been through that process already (preferably they are not still in it!) and can offer an encouraging presence and word.  Connect those people together.  In this way we as a church will encourage our guests.

Comfort

Paul is also interested in comforting the guests who show up at church gatherings.  He says, “But one who prophesies is helping others grow in the Lord, encouraging and comforting them” (1 Corinthians 14:3, NLT).

While planning the community BBQ at our house I got an email from a single woman in our neighborhood who wasn’t sure about coming because single people don’t often fit in at events like this.  I encouraged this neighbor and promised that if she came I would personally make sure she had a good time.  When she arrived I quickly introduced her to Sarah and other people in the room.  There happened to be about four or five other single women at this BBQ and from that point forward, she seemed to feel very comfortable at our community BBQ.

What about comforting the guest in our church?  There seem to me to be two possible reasons a guest might need comfort.  The first would be in the midst of those growing pains I spoke about earlier.  In this instance I think providing a kind of coaching can be helpful in appropriate times (if you really know what you’re talking about).  When I was younger my dad paid for me to have batting instructions from a private batting coach who was a scout for the Mets.  It was helpful for me when he moved me from the 60-mile-an-hour cage to the 90-mile-an-hour cage to remind me of what I needed to do differently, and what he saw me doing incorrectly.  This worked only because he knew what he was talking about and I trusted him.

The same can be true as we talk to a guest who has experienced growing pains in worship.  Maybe they are taking that sermon point a little too rigidly.  Loosen up your grip.  Maybe they’re swinging the point of that song a little too widely.  I’ve found it helpful if I hold my hands a little closer together.  And so on.

Another reason a guest might need comforting in church is because of a trial or suffering they are going through.  In times of suffering people often seek out spiritual communities like a church.  A way to provide comfort is by offering to pray.  Even right there!  Or drop a card in the mail to them.  Offer to meet for lunch or coffee sometime throughout the week.  In these ways we offer comfort to the guests among us.

Everyone

I think it is helpful to also notice that later in the passage Paul says, “If all of you are prophesying…” (1 Corinthians 14:24, NLT).  In one sense Paul expects that the work of growing, encouraging, and comforting isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s job.  It’s not just the job of the pastor to be a good host to guests in the church.  It’s the job of everyone to be a good host.

This took place too at our community BBQ.  Everyone brought a dish to pass.  I couldn’t have fed over 30 people by myself.  I needed help.  Parents took turns playing with the kids and keeping them entertained.  I wasn’t doing that all night long.  The single women and some married couples in the neighborhood embraced and enjoyed one another making this community BBQ a safe place for our single neighbors.  The community BBQ wasn’t a success because of me, but because of everyone who attended.

When guests visit our church, they will experience it as warm and welcoming not by whether they were greeted at the door by a hospitality team, but by whether the person they sat next to was warm and welcoming.  All y’all are responsible for being good hosts to our guests.

Response

This leaves but one thing, the response of the guest.  Paul hopes that when a guest comes to a church worship experience that they leave saying, “God is really here among you”

(1 Corinthians 14:25, NLT).  They will do that in large part based on whether we are good hosts or not.  May it be said of Sycamore Creek Church, “God is really here among you!”

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