Wide Open, Part 4

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Matthew 28:18-20
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And, behold, I am with you until the end of the age.”

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Post-Christian
A society rooted in the history, culture, and practices of Christianity but in which the religious beliefs of Christianity have been either rejected or, worse, forgotten.

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James Emery White
“In a post-Christian context many believe they know about Christianity—even though it’s often a caricature of its true nature—and thus they feel it has been tried and found wanting. Further, the current context continually lampoons the Christian faith while dismissing it as intellectually bereft of weight. There’s a ‘been there, done that’ attitude that is often more difficult to overcome than when engaging a pristine mission field.”

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Matthew 9:9-13
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office. “Follow me!” he said to him. And he rose up and followed him. When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard them. “It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,” he said; “it’s the sick. Go and learn what this saying means: ‘It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.’ My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.”

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Tim Chester
“Jesus’s mission strategy was a long meal, stretching into the evening. He did evangelism and discipleship round a table with some grilled fish, a loaf of bread, and a pitcher of wine.”

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Hospitality
Love of the stranger, guest or outsider.

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Rosaria Butterfield
“Hospitality is how you turn strangers into neighbors and neighbors into the family of God.”

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Rosaria Butterfield
“The threshold to their life was like none other. The threshold to their life brought me to the foot of the cross. Nothing about that night unfolded according to my confident script. Nothing happened in the way I expected. Not that night, or the years after, or the hundreds of meals, or the long nights of psalm singing and prayer as other believers from the church and university walked through the door of this house as if no door was there. Nothing prepared me for this openness and truth. Nothing prepared me for the unstoppable gospel and for the love of Jesus, made manifest by the daily practices of hospitality undertaken in this one simple Christian home.”

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Simon Carey Holt
“This business of hospitality that lies at the heart of Christian mission, it’s a very ordinary thing…Yet it is the very ordinariness of the table and of the ministry we exercise there that renders these elements of Christian life so important to the mission of the church….Setting a table, cooking a meal, washing the dishes is the ministry…[it provides] a context in which people feel loved and welcome and where God’s Spirit can be at work in their lives. Hospitality is a very ordinary business, but in its ordinariness is its real worth.”

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If evangelism is your only motive, then you won’t be very good at hospitality.

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Hospitality is easier said than done.

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Ephesians 2:12-19
Well, once upon a time you were separated from the king. You were detached from the community of Israel. You were foreigners to the covenants which contained the promise. There you were, in the world with no hope and no god! But now, in King Jesus, you have been brought near in the king’s blood—yes, you, who used to be a long way away! He is our peace, you see. He has made the two to be one. He has pulled down the barrier, the dividing wall, that turns us into enemies of each other. He has done this in his flesh, by abolishing the law with its commands and instructions. The point of doing all this was to create, in him, one new human being out of the two, so making peace. God was reconciling both of us to himself in a single body, through the cross, by killing the enmity in him. So the Messiah came and gave the good news. Peace had come! Peace, that is, for those of you who were a long way away, and peace, too, for those who were close at hand. Through him, you see, we both have access to the father in the one spirit. This is the result. You are no longer foreigners or strangers. No: you are fellow citizens with God’s holy people. You are members of God’s household.