Enemies and hospitality

I've been thinking deeply about hospitality and the lack thereof in the Mansfield church.

When I moved here from St. Louis, way back in 1977, I was coming from a tradition where hospitality was one of the treasured characteristics of the local congregation. We had a potluck dinner every Sunday, 52 times a year. Parties were common. People would go to each others' houses for dinners, for dessert, for an evening of board games, or for an evening watching TV together.

None of that happens in Mansfield. I doubt if, throughout the congregation, more than six shared dinners happen in any month. Maybe there's one potluck a year. Maybe we miss a year. (We do use congregational meals as fundraisers: big pots of generic spaghetti for $5 per person.) To be perfectly fair, there's a congregational dinner in March (catered) and many years a Christmas and/or "Halloween" party. But often those don't happen.

Why so little action?

Some would say it's because people are too busy, and I can believe that. Nearly everyone home schools or has kids at the private Christian school, and both are extremely time-consuming, but I don't think that excuse covers those whose kids are out of school.

Dr. Dobson and some local leaders have pushed the idea that family is so primary that absolutely any outside activity is wrong (and of course, having a friend over for dinner is a deduction from the intense one-on-one time of the family).

Some say that entertaining is too expensive—though the price tag for a pot of coffee and a plate of brownies from a mix isn't that high.

And of course, there's the pietistic thread in the local church, saying that no human activity is worthwhile unless it's specifically (and didactically) religious. Thus we have all those past barbecues that turned into hymn-singing evenings and the New Year's party that's just a prelude to a prayer meeting. And to tell the truth, there are just so many of those meetings that a person can stand in a month.

But I think there's a more basic reason we avoid hospitality.

I think it's fear.

We've been soaked in the idea that outsiders are a threat, and we've bought it. Of course, there's the threat that if one were to invite a Jew or a Muslim for tea and cakes, somehow there would be a theological battle or perhaps the Christian faith would be shown up as false or something. So of course the Jew and Muslim are off the guest list. And if we invite the nonreligious neighbor in, he might do something nonreligious—might tell an inappropriate story or something. And if our kids got to know that Jews, Muslims, and the nonreligious can occasionally be interesting people, our kids' faith would be weakened. They wouldn't see the Christian faith as the only lifeboat in a sea of terrible people.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

We're afraid of other Christians. Not just the demon Catholics or the accursed Presbyterians or the heathen Lutherans. Our very own kind.

I've been told that people are afraid to come to my place because it's an apartment (which means "tenement" which means "housing project" which means you'll get knifed in the hallway). One of my few visitors asked to see the expiration dates on the food I was offering. I've never had enough money for a cleaning lady, so my carpet is needing shampoo right now.

And of course, almost every fellow church member I can name has some sort of food allergy, food fad, or some other food fetish going. One can't be anywhere near anything artificially scented. Another must never eat anything containing any form of sugar. Yet another exists entirely on mangosteen juice. And of course, there's an implied judgment (you put SUGAR in your cake???). It doesn't take much of this stuff before a person simply locks the front door.

I know others have suffered similar insults. Chapters such as Romans 14 and I Corinthians 8 really don't carry much weight around here. It's sad, really. "Keeping oneself unstained from the world" by avoiding all human contact outside the nuclear family is kind of boring.