The Hospitality Trap

My first foray into the world of Biblical hospitality was my first married Superbowl.

Our local friends all loved football; almost all of us, being poor graduate students, had hardly the space to host a party.  But my husband and I had stumbled into a larger-than-usual apartment with manageable rent, and we had enough in the budget for a little splurge.

I was raised on exacting notions of hospitality in general, and of Christian hospitality in particular.  The King’s Daughter by Diane Hagee had started me down a road of thinking of the home and hospitality being a) primarily my duty and b) an extension of myself on which others might judge me.  I thought a lot at the time about tablecloths and good food, and the potential of keeping idolatrous objects in my house, and exuding a sense of perpetual availability.

So: a Superbowl party.

God wants us to be generous hosts, we thought, and spend more than we intended on silly Superbowl decorations and a Superbowl feast of absurd standards: nachos, hot dogs and hamburgers, tacos, potato skins.  God wants us to be welcoming, we thought, and when people asked if they could bring their significant others and children we didn’t bat an eye—just increased the food and drinks we’d planned.  God wants us to be holy, we thought, and tacked on a Bible study beforehand.  God wants me to serve my husband, I thought and decided to do absolutely everything myself.

It wasn’t a bad night in the end, per se.  In fact, I think everyone we invited had a pretty decent time.  But what I remember most is being miserable.  It took an entire day, working alone while my husband was at the office, to clean the apartment from top to bottom, to decorate, to make all the food, to set up little candles in the bathroom.  At the end of it, I had teaching and scholarly work to deal with.  I didn’t get to bed until the wee small hours.

That night, at halftime, I was so tired I barely remembered the commercials (which was my primary reason for watching the Superbowl at all).  A friend brought three children with her, and they spent the night largely unsupervised, running through my house and spilling nacho cheese onto the floor, knocking things down, and moving household items to places they didn’t belong.  When everyone left it was far past midnight, the house was in worse shape than it had been when we started, and I swore never to host a Superbowl party again.

Somehow, though, I felt like a failure, and the failure only got worse as the years went on.

Because of our lives, because of our jobs, and because of our hours, my husband and I often didn’t have the leisure to do the sort of planning hosting required.  Whenever we tried to “show hospitality,” the result seemed to be either: a) spending far more money than we anticipated; b) spending far more energy than we could spare; c) living up to a standard that neither of us believed in, desired, or found particularly Biblical.

So we changed it.  Now we espouse a hospitality that we believe ministers to others, that gives us great joy, and that fits who we are in Christ.  Rather than becoming someone we aren’t or trying to facilitate something beyond our ken out of a vague sense of expectation or holiness, we have settled on principles that make Biblical hospitality possible for us.

It doesn’t look like Diane Hagee’s hospitality, and it doesn’t look like my mother’s.  But it looks like ours.  Here are the guidelines we use; I hope they’ll be helpful to you, too, if you find yourself in the Biblical hospitality trap.

1. Hospitality doesn’t have to be at home.  Our friends and colleagues are scattered widely over a significant metro area that means some of us are, at max, 45 minutes away from each other.  That’s a long way to travel for dinner.  While we do sometimes host at home, sometimes hospitality looks like treating someone to a meal at a central restaurant; hosting a coffee-and-pastries extravaganza at a local shop for colleagues; opening up my office for a “vent and doughnuts session.”

• Hospitality is shared.  The evangelical model in which my husband and I married held that hospitality was largely woman’s work; that it was the job of the “woman in the home” to facilitate hosting, planning, cooking, and general hospitality efforts.  I work full time, so this isn’t possible.  More critically, my husband and I don’t believe that hospitality belongs to a particular gender: caring for the home is a task we share and hospitality and service (and the associated tasks) are too.  So when we do extend hospitality at home, the burden is halved: we both cook, we both clean, we both plan or do whatever else is needed.  (And we buy ourselves pizza the next night).  We both serve God through hospitality to others.

• Hospitality means largesse.  I don’t necessarily mean financial largesse here, although being generous is important to us.  I just mean that for us, good hospitality means “a feast mentality”: we take a lot of joy in creating a sense of celebration and delight and depth.  My mom was excellent at this, and so I try to approach hospitality with a sense of: how do we make this feel like a special holiday, like an experience?   Sometimes that means homemade guacamole.  Sometimes it means a special playlist.  Sometimes it means decorating a banner for a coffee-shop birthday celebration or pulling out the woodland décor for a Tolkien-themed gathering.

• Hospitality means being us.  If you come to my house, you can always expect that my bathrooms and my kitchen will be sparkling for you.  I am, however, not going to clean my house top to bottom before I feel comfortable opening my doors.  There might be a cat toy on the living room floor.  I don’t always dust the tops of the shelves.  The Chex Mix may come out of a bag. 

• Hospitality means sustainability.  We used to buy paper everything when we had guests, because we didn’t want to do any extra work.  Now, though, we stick with the dinnerware we have that we can pop in the dishwasher, real cups, and real cutlery.  This is the worth the sacrifice in terms of labor to us because we want our gatherings and hospitality to be environmentally sustainable.  We save decorations and special items and reuse them for particular occasions, which has made the decorations themselves more meaningful and full of memories.  And we try to be sustainable with our own time and resources: we take (environmentally-sustainable) shortcuts where we can, whether that means buying pre-chopped vegetables for a recipe or shrugging off hosting at home for hitting up a local coffee shop instead.

The result of all this has been that extend a lot more hospitality, in a lot of different ways, to others.  We open the doors of our house/offices/cars/coffee shops and try to serve as a place of accessibility and gathering and warmth.  We do this in a way that allows us to make the best use of the resources God has given us…and lets us really get into the spirit of hospitality by taking care to create welcome and joy and memories.  More, we do it without fostering inner resentments or wearing ourselves out to the point that we can’t engage with others the way we’d like.

Don’t worry about tablecloths or food or cleaning your home just so.  The heart of Christian hospitality is the attitude that says: I’m thrilled to have you here, and you are always welcome, and your well-being is dear me.  Everything else is just details.