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

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

We don’t think we are more merciful than God, so we don’t encourage people to sin against him or violate what the Word of God says. We lament. We soberly know that God calls us to bear heavy and hard crosses, self-denials that feel like death. We trust God’s power more than we trust our limitations, and we know that he never gives a command without giving the grace to perform it. But we know that the struggle is insurmountable alone. When radically ordinary hospitality is lived out, members of God’s household are told that they are not alone in their struggles or their joys. Radically ordinary hospitality is accompanied by suffering.

Radically ordinary hospitality is this: using your Christian home in a daily way that seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God. It brings glory to God, serves others, and lives out the gospel in word and deed.

The purpose of radically ordinary hospitality is to build, focus, deepen, and strengthen the family of God, pointing others to the Bible-believing local church, and being earthly and spiritual good to everyone we know.

(1) to wake up a member of the church to the serious danger he or she is in; (2) to issue a serious warning to others in the body about the danger of the particular sin; (3) to maintain the purity of Christ’s church and unity and peace within the body; (4) to uphold the truth of the gospel; and (5) to avoid God’s wrath coming upon the church.