The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

And where else but a Christian home should neighbors go in times of unprecedented crisis? Where else is it safe to be vulnerable, scared, lost, hopeless?

as committed pro-life Christians we know this: each life is a gift, each life is a mystery, each life reflects God’s image, each life holds treasures indescribable, some of which take on the form of holes in your walls.

For Christians to maintain an authentic Christian witness to a world that mistrusts us (at the very least), we must be transparently hospitable.

Invest in your neighbors for the long haul, the hundreds of conversations that make up a neighborhood, and stop thinking of conversations with neighbors as sneaky evangelistic raids into their sinful lives. Maybe our own lives are actually more sinful. Is it not more sinful to openly sin while claiming Christ’s lordship than to sin while claiming false rights to self-autonomy? Stop treating your neighbor as a caricature of an alien worldview.

And who, you might ask, is God’s elect? Anyone with a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

Her faith is not a work but a posture, a hunger, an openness. Joel Beeke says, “Faith is the empty hand by which we receive Christ and all His benefits.”

Grace does not make the hard thing go away; grace illumines the hard thing with eternal meaning and purpose. Grace gives you company in your affliction, in Christ himself and in the family of God.