Growing Good: Transformative hospitality
Growing Good: Growth, Social Action and Discipleship by Hannah Rich, in partnership with Church Urban Fund and Theos, was the culmination of three years of extensive qualitative and quantitative research, including 350 interviews in over 60 parish communities across England and new analysis of existing parish data that explored the relationship between social action, church growth and discipleship in the Church of England. The Growing Good Toolkit from Church Urban Fund helps church groups explore and implement the findings of the report.
In a five part series for the Living Theology Forum we explore the 6 features identified in the report that characterise churches exhibiting healthy growth. In this second extract from the report, the focus is on Hospitality. Thinking theologically about hospitality will move churches beyond a paternalistic, transactional, ‘provider’ model towards something far more radical and challenging (and counter cultural). If this radical form of hospitality gets into the bloodstream of a church, the effects are profound – as the report says: When a church has a strong culture of hospitality and welcome as the norm, its approach to social action is necessarily changed and the church is able to flourish.
Social action does not inherently lead to the growth and discipleship of those involved, but with the right culture, it has the potential to do both those things. A study of non-religious individuals in the USA found that one of the top predictive factors of growing churches was their hospitality to the unchurched (Note 1).
The theologian Chris Allen argues that radical hospitality rather than transactional forms of aid is the correct theological posture of the church in response to food poverty (Note 2). There is a profound difference between feeding someone and eating with them. The exchange of a food parcel, for example, does not innately welcome a person into the life of the church, nor does it innately deepen the faith of the volunteer.
To consider a concrete example, food banks are acknowledged as “deeply contradictory spaces in which [people] can feel great shame or express real agency; in which volunteers can be hardened by their exposure to suffering or softened by the stories they hear.” (Note 3). The difference between shame/suffering and agency/softening here is not a practical difference in the running of the food bank – the material purpose of the space remains the same – but a difference of attitude and intention. It can also mean the same space is experienced differently, depending on an individual’s role as guest or host, volunteer or organiser.
Without an intentional culture of hospitality, social action in any form can remain purely transactional rather than transformative for the entire church community. With the right change in culture, existing congregations and their activities can become more hospitable and grow through doing so.
After a succession of changes in leadership, parishioners in one case study, where the church building was on a busy high street, recognised a need to develop a greater sense of community. Through listening to local people, both inside and outside of the church, they found that loneliness and isolation was a significant problem for people in the town. There was a small midweek congregation of about 10-15 people who gathered for coffee and fellowship after the service. The church decided to develop this informal coffee slot into a Place of Welcome, opening the church doors and offering free hot drinks, soup and toast for anyone who would like it, whether or not they attended the service beforehand. This has grown so much that the church has had to buy extra tables and chairs to accommodate everybody who comes; an average of 40 people come each week. It is a buzzing hub of conversation, where friendships have developed and the church has become known as somewhere welcoming where people can come for a hot drink and a chat, whatever their circumstances. This parish attendance, which was previously declining, is now deemed inconclusive, suggesting that the downward trend has begun to be reversed.
If social action is to lead to congregational growth and discipleship, it is vital that the ethos of hospitality is consistent throughout everything the community does. If there is a discrepancy between the welcome someone might receive at a midweek social action project and the welcome that might be extended to the same individual on a Sunday morning, for example, it is harder for them to move from beneficiary to disciple.
To return to the ‘voices of theology’ model, if the espoused theology of a church and its operant theology of its social action differ in their approach to hospitality, this may hinder spiritual or numerical growth (Note 4). Similarly, if the content of a church’s preaching does not reflect the importance of generous service in the community, it is harder to integrate social action fully with the life of the church.
In one case study parish, the clergy spoke about the cultural change of consciously preaching with the expectation that the congregation consisted of food bank guests, not just better off volunteers. This was described as an eye-opener for some of the more comfortable members of the congregation, but the leadership felt it had been crucial for the growth of the church:
For most of our people, it’s not an issue for them. We’ve definitely made that effort to talk about it. Within our own congregation, there is a family who share two rooms with two other families and rely on the food bank. That’s in our church – it’s about trying to get people to see that.
In addition to the material importance of physically feeding people, eating together can help churches create a space of intentional relationship and the sharing of food is often at the core of church social action. However, this activity alone does not automatically grow the church. 86% of Anglican churches are involved in some way with the provision of lunch clubs, coffee mornings or similar initiatives (Note 5). 53% are involved in other forms of community cafés not targeted at a specific demographic and yet not all of these are growing numerically.
The way we offer hospitality has the potential to shift power dynamics within a community, beginning to dissolve existing social categories, but can also strengthen these divides. It can be an opportunity for the church to challenge societal notions of class and privilege, for example, forging a community of equality in contrast to the contemporary culture and economy. There might be different tables of fellowship shared by the church community, with different circles of inclusion and standards of hospitality applied to each.
For example, in the course of a week, the same church community could play host to a communion table, a congregational bring-and-share, a community café and a night shelter meal for rough sleepers, but the groups of people who are welcome at each of these might vary. Implicit social norms within the congregation can make it harder for people to move between these. We might argue, however, that in a church where the three aspects of growth, relationship and action were well integrated, these tables and what they represent would start to become indistinguishable from each other.
This is not always unproblematic. Breaking down these categories requires something of the congregation and a transfer of power relations in a way that may feel difficult or uncomfortable. One vicar expressed the challenge of this:
The dynamic of what it means to embrace people in a sense of hospitality theologically and to think about the dynamic of who is host and who is guest is hard. Co-hosting might be something that takes a lot more work because you’ve got to find a radical space, a brave space where two different sets of people – new and old – can actually start to walk together at the same pace which is a new pace to what’s been set before. They start to speak a language that’s new to both of them.
This can mean speaking a shared language of collective worship as well as social action. In several of the case study parishes, we observed the ways in which growing congregations blur the lines between social action and worship, in particular around food. The shared table and the meal eaten together transcend the sometimes binary categories of social action and discipleship. One parish church, for example, holds a midweek ‘Agape’ service, where the congregation sits at tables laid out around a central table with a loaf of bread, which is prayed over and then handed round the tables to be eaten with hot bowls of soup. After the meal, there is a short reflection on the day’s gospel reading and a collection plate is passed around for those who are able to contribute to buying the soup for the following week. It is not a Eucharist service in name or in formal liturgy, nor is it pure social action devoid of spiritual content, but it is recognisably an act of worship, focused on a meal shared by a gathered congregation – many of whom are not part of the Sunday congregation and whose faith has grown and discipleship taken place primarily through their attendance on Wednesday lunchtimes.
This church is growing by all metrics, but the growth of the worshipping community and average weekly attendance is more marked than that of the usual Sunday attendance, reflecting the importance of activities such as the Agape service.
In another case study, in a more deprived part of a city generally perceived as prosperous, interviewees spoke about how there is “an act of worship attached to every act of hospitality” in their community. Throughout the week, the church hosts various different meals that draw in often vulnerable members of the local community and there is an optional service alongside each of these. This might be as simple as a short service of candle lighting and prayer before the community lunch club. While these are not enforced, it emphasises the connection between different aspects of church life. Of those who come to the lunch club and accompanying service, not all would articulate a Christian faith and only a minority ever attend Sunday worship at the church. However, according to the vicar, the midweek visit to the church is, for some, “the only place they are loved, feel safe and belong,” which is attributed to the worship element as well as the meal itself. The worshipping community of this church is nearly double the size of its usual Sunday attendance. While the Sunday attendance here is inconclusive, the average weekly attendance – which includes several of the optional services that run in parallel with the parish’s social action – is seen to be growing.
In another church with a strong Eucharistic tradition, people spoke about the desire to build a kitchen facility in the body of the church building so that the worship space and the thriving community meals could be better integrated. In explaining why this was important for the community, one interviewee here quoted the German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle, who wrote that, “we should eat more at the Eucharist and we should pray more when eating” and articulated this as being at the heart of the vision of growth for their church.
The theologian and environmentalist Norman Wirzba suggests that the fact Jesus regularly ate with strangers and outcasts is an indication that our fellowship too should be “for the nurture of others and not simply for self-enhancement”, to disciple those within and without the community of the church (Note 6).
The imagery and symbolism that Christians attach to bread in particular also sets the church apart from other charitable organisations or ‘service providers’. The sharing of a meal is rooted in something more than the simple provision of food to satisfy a need. As one congregation member we interviewed said:
When we gather around the table and break bread together, that’s our go-to image for hospitality and generosity and change and transformation. It’s something other organisations wouldn’t have.
The Anglican Eucharistic Prayer includes the line, “though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.” The word ‘because’ in this prayer is critical. It echoes what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10 v 17, the passage the prayer is drawn from; “because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.” The causality implied by the word ‘because’ suggests that the loaf itself is instrumental in creating the unity of the body, rather than simply incidental to the sharing it facilitates. This is important for the way we view the sharing of food and hospitality through social action, as well as its implications for growth and discipleship.
Several participants independently referenced Take This Bread, a theological memoir by American writer Sara Miles as being influential on their thinking about what it means to feed people in the context of church (Note 7). In it, Miles tells the story of her journey from atheism to faith through encountering the community of the church and in particular, the sacrament of bread and wine. The transformation she experienced in coming to faith led her into establishing food pantries for those in material poverty in her city, directly illustrating the link between discipleship and action. The food – and not just the fact that we share it – is an expression of unity and community. The spirit in which it is shared is also important if the church is to grow and flourish; it must be characterised by radical hospitality.
More widely, the growth of Messy Church, a congregational model engaging in mission and discipleship with largely unchurched children and families, is an example of this. Food is one of the central elements of Messy Church and is embedded in the structure of the service in a way that traditional congregations do not do. Neither those attending it nor those running it use the language of “staying for a meal afterwards”; it is seen as a core aspect of the congregational life of Messy Church, rather than the part that happens when the other activities have finished.
Although the Messy Church model is not universally successful, in many places it has developed as a congregation in its own right. At their best, there are examples of Messy Churches growing numerically at a far greater pace than the Sunday congregation as well as going deeper in discipleship. Church Army research found that 81% of Messy Church leaders say they have seen evidence of lives changed in some way by being a part of it and 21% of Messy Church congregations have held baptisms (Note 8).
Hospitality is also about making church accessible to the whole community, both in terms of everyone being able to access worship and also being aware how culture affects this. A culture of hospitality within the church does necessarily mean that every member is comfortable hosting a dinner party, but rather that it is understood as important in their context.
One individual we interviewed suggested that in a welcoming church community, it would be natural to invite newcomers to join you for lunch. They implied it would be a negative indication of church cultures were that not the case:
We’ve started doing a series of dinners in people’s homes, which is just about people getting to know each other. You could do that in any church couldn’t you? It’s not revolutionary.
In other parishes, however, people talked about how inviting people to your own home for a meal was simply not the social norm in their wider community and so congregation members would not be quick to do so.
What is “not revolutionary” and may be helpful to the growth of the church community in a middle-class context used to hosting may be alien to other contexts, as we heard, and this has implications for discipleship models as well as social action (Note 9). There are, however, creative ways of instilling the same spirit in a culturally and practically relevant way.
One church has grown a pioneer congregation centred on eating Sunday lunch together in a community space on their housing estate, allowing the community to share collectively in the hospitality of a meal. Another church has designated a ‘living room’ space in their church building, with sofas and a television, where people can host ‘house groups’ for discipleship in a neutral but comfortable space without the pressure of it being literally in their own house.
Hospitality is historically part of the church. The fact that Jesus ate with people is an oft-repeated model, as is the importance of sharing and eating together in the growth and formation of the early church in the book of Acts. It is also an important part of the heritage of individual church communities and one that is valuable to rediscover.
One member of the clergy in a small rural town spoke about how their church building had first been established eight hundred years ago as a hospitium, or place of hospitality, connected to the neighbouring Benedictine monastery. In the Middle Ages, this was a cross between a hospital, a hospice and a hostel, all of which share the same etymology in the Latin word hospitium. Strangers and pilgrims might have come there to receive an unconditional welcome and to be fed, cared for and in some cases to die in the sacred space. Hospitality was in the foundational vision of the parish church in that town and the rector suggested that there was “something implicit within this place, in the air almost, and when the church lives up to that vision, it thrives”.
The growth and discipleship of the congregation in recent years has been closely connected with seeking to live up to that vision and reignite the spirit of hospitality that was part of their church’s origins. Through hosting a food bank, members of the congregation came to know a man who had been sleeping rough in the town. A local councillor brought him to the church when he had nowhere to sleep, because of the reputation of the church as somewhere to find help. He came to live in the church for over three months, with members of the church community supporting him. Many in the wider community were also drawn in by the story and donated food and money to the church; some visited the church for the first time or the first time in a long time in order to do so. This, we were told, mirrors the vision of the building and faith community as a hospitium, with hospitality at its core in the same way that would have been true for the monastic community of the thirteenth century.
He was actually living here in the church, sleeping in a pew, over the Christmas period so there was this enormous challenge for us of thinking about ‘no room at the inn’ when there was someone living in our church who we were feeding.
Shortly after leaving the church building and being rehoused locally, the man sadly passed away but the church raised enough money to give him a basic funeral. This was attended by over forty church members, who recognised him as a valuable part of their community and someone who had been instrumental in their own faith journey.
The story was recounted by several interviewees as something that had deepened their faith in ways they had not expected.
We’ve all been on a journey to recognising that church is not just a place for respectable people, and learning what it looks like to see the presence of Jesus in the flesh of the poor.
Through modelling to the whole community what Jesus would have done, the congregation encountered Jesus in a deeper way. The church has grown stronger and their faith has been strengthened individually and collectively by this practical example of generosity.
If discipleship is about cultivating the ways and behaviours of Jesus, then learning generosity through housing a homeless man in the church is an intentional act of discipleship.
Case study
Rose is 56, the eighth of ten children. The mother-of-four fled her home in Birmingham to escape domestic violence. She lives in Swindon with her second husband and attends St John’s Church.
“My husband was violent towards me. Because we was married, it was hard to get it sorted. I fled in the middle of the night with my four children. The youngest was 4. The oldest was 11.
I came to Swindon. I couldn’t have contact with my family in case he came after me. I wanted to go to church, but at first, I went in and came straight out again. I met someone called Julie who made me feel calm and welcome here. I brought my children here. I met my second husband.
They asked me if I wanted to get involved doing things in the church. I started doing tea and coffee and cleaning the toilets. Now I’m a churchwarden.
My mind was all over the place. I was scared. But I can shout at God now. I can talk now. I never had a voice before. I’ve learned about myself and about people. I became more happier and kinder to people. Before, I kept myself to myself. Now I like talking to people.
If you haven’t been through hard times, you can’t understand people who are going through them. But I know. I understand. I will always point people to where they can get help. This place has been transformational for me. I grew up without being a Christian. It’s not about the religion, it’s about the faith. It’s brought me a long, long way.”
Reprinted with kind permission from Growing Good: Growth, Social Action and Discipleship in the Church of England, Theos and Church Urban Fund 2021
Note 1: Rick Richardson, You Found Me: New Research on How Unchurched Nones, Millennials, and Irreligious Are Surprisingly Open to Christian Faith (Illinois: IVP Books, 2019); Note 2: Chris Allen, ‘Food Poverty and Christianity in Britain: A Theological ReAssessment’ Political Theology, 17:4, (2016), pp. 361-377; Note 3: Charles Roding Pemberton, Bread of Life… p. 84; Note 4: Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti, Catherine Duce, James Sweeney and Clare Watkins, Talking About God… p. 54; Note 5: Church Urban Fund, Church in Action 2017; Note 6: Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 136; Note 7: Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008); Note 8: Church Army Research Unit, Playfully Serious: How Messy Churches Create New Space For Faith (2019), available online at churcharmy.org/Publisher/File. aspx?ID=225713; Note 9: Martin Charlesworth and Natalie Williams, A Church for the Poor (Colorado Springs: David C Cook, 2017).
Questions to consider:
The Growing Good Toolkit is a FREE six session course helping churches explore the connection between social action, discipleship and growth. Through six flexible, interactive small group sessions, we explore how our churches can be faithful and fruitful in our local communities.
· Where and how does your church offer hospitality to others?
· How do you think the culture of your church might help or hinder this, and what can you do practically to change this?
· How does your theological understanding affect/shape how you think about hospitality?
Hannah Rich is a senior researcher at Theos. She previously worked for a social innovation think tank and a learning disability charity. She has an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science for the London School of Economics.