#6: A Community of Exiles Practicing Hospitality
Exploring the Sixth Sign of a Thriving Congregation
Welcome back! Today, we’re excited to share the next post in our series about the characteristics, convictions, and practices that make for a thriving congregation. These posts have been written by different members of our Cultivating Communities team, and today’s thoughts come from Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, the National Director of Missio Alliance. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for her full bio!)
Today, she’s sharing about what it means for the church to practice hospitality.
Catch up on other posts in this series:
Now, here’s Lisa:
Making Room at the Table
When I was growing up, there was always room at our family table. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that room was always being made at our table. In my Cuban family, our mesa was rarely just for the people we expected. Last minute invitations of friends and extended family were normal. Those who didn’t have a place for important holidays were always welcome, whether or not they’d joined us before. I remember bringing extra chairs from another room to make additional seats. Conversations often overlapped in loud, animated waves. Family and strangers sat side by side, and before long it became difficult to tell them apart.
There was an unspoken understanding: People are welcome here. Looking back, I realize the table was never just about food. It was about belonging and about being received. Hospitality was not simply entertaining guests or hosting well-organized gatherings. It was making room for people in our lives.
Perhaps now more than ever, the Church must recover this practice. Our cultural moment is marked by loneliness and fragmentation. We are surrounded by others, and yet, sadly, we remain unknown. In an age of immense digital connection, we experience a persistent disconnection from one another. Even congregations can become places where people attend faithfully for years without experiencing meaningful belonging. We know how to gather crowds and organize programs, but increasingly, many churches struggle to cultivate communities where people are truly received into one another’s lives.
The scriptures offer us a more hopeful vision. Throughout the biblical story, the people of God are repeatedly reminded that they are strangers, sojourners, and exiles. Their identity is shaped not by dominance or control, but by dependence on the hospitality of God. In Deuteronomy 10, Israel is told, “You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” God appeals to their memory as they’re invited into obedience. Israel is to practice hospitality because Israel remembers what it felt like to be vulnerable, displaced, and dependent on mercy.
Hospitality at the Heart of the Gospel
The same is true for the Church. At the heart of the gospel is the startling reality that God has welcomed us. As those who were once strangers, we have now been brought near. Though we were once enemies of God, we have now been reconciled. Christian hospitality begins not with our generosity, but with God’s. This is why hospitality is not peripheral to Christian community. Rather, it is central to the nature of the Church.
A thriving congregation understands itself not merely as an institution or gathering. Instead, as a people who have been received by God, we flourish as we learn to receive one another. While there’s nothing wrong with friendliness at the door or coffee after worship, Christian hospitality extends far beyond that. The invitation of hospitality is an invitation to a way of life shaped by the self-giving love of Christ.
In Romans 12, Paul writes, “Extend hospitality to strangers.” The Greek word for “strangers” here is philoxenia—literally, the love of the stranger. This kind of hospitality pushes beyond transactional relationships. There is no love in a transaction. It requires only agreement to the terms. Philoxenia calls us to resist the tendency to view church and one another through the lens of consumption, affinity, or utility. A community where people make room for one another, (especially the stranger, because Christ has first made room for them) is an altogether counter-cultural community. Whenever we subvert convenience and homogeneity for the sake of hospitality, we bear a more faithful witness to the life and teachings of Jesus.
However, making room for others isn’t the only expression of biblical hospitality. It is also about learning to be welcomed. To receive hospitality requires vulnerability. It reminds us we are not self-sufficient. It confronts our ideals of independence and the accolades we receive for “making it on our own” or “pioneering a path for ourselves.” Perhaps this is why receiving hospitality can feel harder than offering it: It requires us to admit our need for others.
Too often, churches imagine themselves only as hosts—as those providing welcome or care. But thriving congregations understand themselves as permeable communities where the life of God flows both outward and inward. (For more about being a permeable community, read the previous post in this series.) They recognize how neighbors and strangers are not merely recipients of ministry but people through whom God may also nourish and transform the congregation. In order to practice true Christian hospitality, we are called to open our lives to others, and we are called to receive from others with humility and gratitude.
The life of Jesus evidences the fullness of hospitality around tables. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He receives hospitality from friends and strangers alike. In Matthew 25, Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” To welcome the stranger is, somehow, to welcome Christ himself. Practicing hospitality helps us learn to encounter the presence of God in and through one another.
Hospitality is Not a Growth Strategy.
This vision reshapes how the Church inhabits the world. Hospitality is no longer reduced to a strategy for growth. It becomes a theological practice rooted in the Kingdom of God. The Church becomes a people who embody an alternative social reality in a fragmented and fearful world. We become a people who refuse to let loneliness, suspicion, or transactional belonging have the final word.
A thriving church does not practice hospitality because it is fashionable or pragmatic. It practices hospitality because hospitality reveals something true about God. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not distant or withholding. God moves toward humanity in radical welcome. In Christ, God takes on flesh and dwells among us. God prepares a table. God gathers strangers into a family. God creates belonging where there once was alienation. The Church is called to become an embodied sign of this reality.
In our cultural moment, this matters profoundly. Many people today ache for more than information, entertainment, or even inspiration. They ache for belonging and for recognition. They long for communities where they can be known and received—not as consumers or problems to solve, nor perceived as projects of conversion. Their longing is to be beheld as human beings bearing the image of God.
The church can become a community where strangers are welcomed as neighbors, neighbors become friends, and friends become something more like family—a people who remember that they, too, were once strangers carried into the gracious hospitality of God. Perhaps that is what a thriving congregation ultimately is: a people gathered around the table of Christ, learning together how to make room.
About Lisa:
Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, for nearly two decades, has served as an urban church planter, collegiate minister, seminary professor, international missionary and community development practitioner. Her heart to see people reconciled to God and to one another has led her to invest her life, family and ministry in places and people that have often been looked over by the world.
Lisa served as co-founder of a grassroots organization in Memphis, Tennessee that was committed to mobilizing Christians to love their undocumented neighbors, and consider an appropriate Christian response to our nation’s immigration crisis. In addition to her role as National Director of Missio Alliance, she serves as Associate Pastor of Discipleship and Equipping at Christ City Church.
Educated at Florida International University and Golden Gate Seminary, she now lives in Washington, DC where she is a mom to 3 fantastic children, Nathan, Elias, and Annelies, and a wife to her best friend Matthew, who serves as Pastor of Teaching and Outreach at Christ City Church.
Connect with Missio Alliance:
Applications open: Missio Alliance is currently accepting applications to its Sustaining Women in Ministry Cohort. This cohort is for any woman who is involved and leading in full-time/part-time work or ministry in the church, a non-profit organization, or their community. It is specifically geared towards women who find themselves alone in ministry and could use a supportive community of fellow ministry leaders. Learn more here.
Coming October 26-30: Why Stay? is a retreat for weary ministry leaders. Picture a quiet retreat space, where unhurried mornings and deep conversations help you reconnect with the heart of your calling. Learn more here.
Tell us below:
In what ways does your congregation practice hospitality—both making space and receiving welcome?
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This ebook includes classic and contemporary poems to correspond with each scripture reading in the Revised Common Lectionary. Volume 2 begins with Pentecost Sunday and continues through the season of Ordinary Time (ending this year on November 22).
Thanks for this piece. Indeed, considering how uniquely hospitable our planet is, God really is the First and Ultimate Host. This is the message of my latest book (Hosted by God To Really Live) - a challenging message to write because most of us are trained to focus on our lack and what is going wrong...
This series on the signs of Thriving Congregations is helping me as I grow a small organic community.