Carolyn, welcome to the blog and thanks for writing this little gem of a book. First-off, tell us a bit about who you are…

Thanks for inviting me! I live in Worcester with my husband, Richard, and 2 teenage children (18 & 16). Richard is the lead pastor of Woodgreen Evangelical Church and I serve alongside him, leading the women’s ministry and music ministry teams. A lot of my time is spent in pastoral counselling and teaching the bible to women through 121s, small group bible studies and at various events and conferences. I also do a bit of part time maths tutoring and piano teaching. 

On the first page of Extraordinary Hospitality you mention a friend who told you they were concerned your book would be ‘telling us to have more people round for dinner’. Hospitality can definitely be one of those ‘love it or hate it’ words. What is this book about and who is it for?

I think one of the reasons hospitality is a ‘love it or hate it word’ is because it’s so often associated with a fairly superficial picture of perfectly cooked meals served in a perfectly calm environment by a perfectly competent host. I want to offer a broader model of hospitality that’s more about character than cooking; more about cultivating a welcoming heart than an impressive home. We worship an extravagantly generous God who has shown us incredible welcome in Christ. I want to show how our hospitality is a practical way of reflecting his heart to those around us. So rather than offering 7 steps to being the perfect host, the book explores 7 characteristics of welcome we see in God and then encourages us to think about how we might reflect those characteristics in our everyday interactions. 

The book is for ordinary Christians who want to obey the biblical commands to offer hospitality but are unsure what that should look like in their contexts. It’s for those who feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the superficial images of hospitality they see on their screens—or maybe, at times, within the church. For those who just need some encouragement that God can use their small, seemingly insignificant acts of welcome to draw others to him. 

You use a beautiful phrase: ‘learning to welcome like Jesus’. That strikes me as something we can put into practice at multiple levels and settings, as individuals and as churches. What led to you discovering this truth and how has that helped you personally?

I love biblical theology and had initially thought this book might be more of a biblical overview—tracing the theme of hospitality throughout the bible. As I started to work on that, I became caught up in the way God extends welcome—from creation, through the covenants, in his provision of the sacrificial system—and, in particular, the way he perseveres in offering welcome to those who reject him. This culminates in Jesus coming to dwell among us and make it possible for us to know eternal welcome through his death and resurrection. As I looked at Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, I saw how the characteristics of welcome I’d been tracing throughout the Old Testament are so clearly and beautifully expressed in the way he welcomed people. In particular, his compassion, humility and sacrificial heart. 

It’s been both liberating and challenging to learn to welcome like Jesus. On the one hand, it’s freeing to know that I don’t need to strive to offer hospitality that is outwardly impressive. Rather, I can focus on trying to see my friends and neighbours as Jesus sees them and looking for ways to share his heart of welcome with them. On the other hand, it’s challenging—because my heart is so often unlike his. I am proud and selfish—I struggle to lay down my own comfort for the good of others. But he is transforming me, by his Spirit, so I can persevere with hope and confidence that he will continue to teach me and use me, despite my weaknesses and failures, to welcome others for his glory. 

Often we associate hospitality with the home, but some reading this perhaps share a home with non-Christian family or friends, and may well feel that limits the hospitality they’d like to do. How would you encourage people in that situation?

One of the wonderful things about Jesus’ earthly life and ministry was his willingness and ability to welcome people in a variety of ways, according to their needs. He wasn’t limited by cultural traditions or expectations. He invited himself into homes; he initiated conversations in the streets, at wells, on mountains, in synagogues. He had no home of his own—and yet was the most hospitable person who has ever lived!

If the goal of our hospitality is to welcome like Jesus, we can do that regardless of our living situation. We can look for opportunities to show welcome in the workplace—why not look for a colleague who seems lonely or sad, and suggest you eat lunch together or go out for a walk or a coffee. At church, notice newcomers and invite them to sit with you (when restrictions allow). After the service, rather than chatting to your friends, look for someone who is alone or who you know is struggling or suffering in some way. Offer to pray with them and ask if there are particular ways you could support them—and then follow up in the week with a phone call or text. If there’s a neighbour you’d like to get to know, suggest a walk in the park or a drink at the pub (when open!). Try to be known as the person who is always interested in others, available to chat and willing to be interrupted. 

And don’t forget to look for ways to reflect Jesus’ welcome to those you live with!

Do you sense that hospitality can look different in different cultures? For example, different cultures (even within the UK) have different approaches to who is invited into the home. Some people tend to socialise out at pubs and restaurants rather than in the home. To what extent should we be mindful of our culture and to what extent should Christian hospitality mean we break with that culture and show a different way?

Yes, I think that is something to be mindful of—especially in the early stages of friendship. There are people who will feel more relaxed about being invited to a pub or coffee shop than into a home—and I think that may be especially true after this year of social distancing. So it’s good to be sensitive to that and willing to meet people where they’re most comfortable. But, when possible and appropriate, a willingness to invite people into our homes can communicate a deeper—and perhaps unexpected—commitment to pursuing friendship. 

The first time we invited our neighbours over for dinner they dressed up and seemed quite nervous—even though we chat to one another most days. It was something they never did with other friends and it was uncomfortable for them at first, but I’m glad we invited them. They’re far more relaxed with us now and know we value them as friends. It’s also made it much easier to invite them to evangelistic events and church services because the friendship is deeper. Perhaps a good first step for those who may feel particularly uncomfortable is to invite them in for a take-away meal or to watch some sport on TV. 

In our post-Christian culture, people are less likely to just step into our churches or turn up to our courses. What role do you hope hospitality will have in the UK church’s witness over the coming years?

I think we have an opportunity, through genuine and inclusive welcome, to show the difference the gospel makes. There are so many people who are isolated and lonely, who feel unseen and unloved, rejected or excluded. By looking for ways to welcome and befriend, we can offer hope—especially as we show a willingness to persevere when relationships are awkward or disappointing. And if whole church families commit to offering this kind of welcome in their local communities, I would expect to see gospel fruit. I’d love for my church to be known as the place where anyone is welcome and valued, where people in the community expect to find warm and generous friendship—and, ultimately, life. 

Any practical advice to a pastor or ministry team about how they might grow a culture of hospitality in a church?

As lockdown restrictions ease, this feels like a good time to get the whole church thinking about what welcome could look like. I’d encourage church family members to think specifically about one or two people from their workplace or neighbourhood whom they could invite to spend time with them. And after a year of not being able to offer hospitality in the traditional way, it’s a good opportunity to reset expectations. Encourage them to think small and simple—ice-cream in the garden or a takeaway pizza. Even those who are confident at cooking for large numbers and hosting people in their homes would benefit from encouragement to focus less on food and more on the bigger goal of hospitality and to think about how their hospitality might point to Christ rather than to their cooking skills. 

And to cultivate genuine hospitality within the church family, provide opportunities for people to re-connect and develop relationships. Encourage small groups to meet socially or to eat together before a bible study (again, keep it simple—soup, bread and cheese is fine). Remind people of the importance of pre and post-service conversations—maybe think about providing donuts or pizzas so people want to stay around. Keep reminding the church of the wonderful way God has welcomed us—and the privilege of joining him in welcoming one another.  

People learn by watching, so the way leaders model hospitality themselves will impact the church culture. If you give the impression that hospitality only happens over a Sunday roast, that’s the culture you’ll develop. But if you show warm, compassion, inclusive welcome in your everyday interactions and conversations—in the street, in the church carpark, over coffee—those you welcome will start to welcome others in the same way. 

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Thanks so much to Carolyn for sharing and for writing this book. You can pick up a copy of Extraordinary Hospitality (for Ordinary People) from the publisher here.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher to help me prepare this interview.

I wonder how you feel about how Christianity is perceived in 2021 here in the West? For all the good will we might find ‘on the ground’, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the Christian faith is often treated not just as irrelevant, but worse still, toxic. We wake up and wonder, ‘How did we end up the Bad Guys?!’

So I was very glad to interview Stephen McAlpine, author of a new book aimed at everyday Christians that riffs on exactly that idea, Being the Bad Guys. I’ve followed Stephen’s blog for a while and he is known for his cultural perception and helping Christians and churches understand and engage with the culture(s) we find ourselves amongst. Have a read and then grab yourself a copy!

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Stephen, you’re based in Australia, so first-up for those of us in the UK, tell us a bit about who you are…

I’ve worked as a church planter and pastor over the past couple of decades in Perth Australia, and have a background in journalism and writing. I started writing about cultural trends and the place of the church in a secular society a number of years back, and things kinda snow-balled from there in terms of writing and engagement with Christian groups over how to navigate the increasingly hostile secular space.

I don’t speak into that space in a disinterested way: my wife Jill runs a psychology practice and sees the pressures of late modern life taking their toll on clients.  And we have two children who are going to face a more confronting secular setting than even we have.  Perth is an easy place to live – (all too easy!) – so getting people to even think about life beyond what they can see or buy, or beyond the beaches of Perth  – is often hard.

I have a couple of roles currently; one is as a national communicator for a evangelistic organisation in Australia called City Bible Forum.  I work alongside a Scot called David Robertson and we create content around issues to do with faith and life in a secular setting. I also help pastor a church that has lost its preaching pastor, so I have recently moved on from our original church plant to help this other church.

So you’ve written this book, Being the Bad Guys, which is clearly an eye-catching title – with an eye-catching cover to go with it! What led you to write it?

Thanks!  The title comes from a line in a great movie, Falling Down, in which the key character finds himself on the wrong side of the law one day.  As he is being confronted by the police, he asks “You mean I’m the bad guy?  How did that happen?” 

For me that’s the discombobulation that many Christians feel in a secular setting in which Christianity is increasingly viewed not merely as irrelevant, but as hostile to the vision of human flourishing that the culture is headed towards. Christian ethics in the area of sexuality is especially seen as problematic, and many Christians are finding themselves unsure of how they got to be “the bad guys” and what they should or can do about it, if anything. And there is a whole political, legal and cultural push to enshrine and enforce a vision of human flourishing that is anathema to the gospel. 

I’m guessing that no one really wants to be the bad guys. Who’s this book for – and what are you hoping to communicate?

True!  No one does.  And for a season or so the Christian position on culture was that we needed to seek increasing relevance.  I think that approach was wrong, and failed to see the cultural shift that was coming.  Christianity is not viewed as a viable option in the public marketplace of ideas, but as a problematic belief system that is holding back our cultural march towards authenticity and freedom.

I looked around for an accessible book for workers, for students, for families, that would help them understand how that shift had occurred, but couldn’t find one.  But it’s not just about understanding the shift, it’s about helping churches and Christian communities help their people navigate that space joyfully and bravely, even if the culture views them as the “bad guys”.

Maybe some Christians are more inclined to want to fit in and avoid controversy, whereas others can seem to want to go looking for a fight. What do you think is a good posture for Christians who want to be faithful to Jesus in a post-Christian culture?

Yes, that’s true.  It’s well documented that there are a variety of stances to the shift in the public square.  Many Christians risk being tempted – indeed have been tempted – to water down the gospel truths to fit in, while others have figured that we could win political power again (and that’s played out poorly in the US recently).  Still others have gone into despair and assumed that it’s all over!

A good posture is to be joyful, but bold.  To be, in the words of a friend of mine, Greg Sheridan the Foreign Editor of The Australian newspaper, “happy warriors”.  There’s nothing wrong with standing up for what you think is right and true, but the gospel gives us a hope beyond what we have in this age.  Central to this is a reinvigoration in our churches so that we better grasp the gospel message, and that we live out hope-filled and grace-filled lives as communities, ready to offer a thirsty world the water of life, after they have sucked at the sand of the broken wells on offer in the culture.  For make no mistake, the whole utopian narrative of authentic freedom and sexual identity as the core of who we are as humans will let people down. It already is.

And we also need to disciple the next generation – our children – in a thick and rich manner – ensuring that they have gospel communities to belong to that will support them through the increasingly hostile post-Christian secular environment, which often presents itself as a glittering and dazzling viable option to the supposedly retrograde biblical community.

Obviously your immediate context is Australia, but I know you’ve spent time in the UK. Do you have any sense of how things might be different in the UK and the US – and did that shape the book at all?

Australia has been the most secular the longest.  So in a sense this book is a gift to the UK and the US from the future.  Read it now to see what is coming.

All three are examples of late modern secular nations, who have, to varying degrees been built upon a Christian framework.  Australia has always been lazily secular, but the UK has outstripped my home country in terms of Christian fall-away in the culture.  There’s also a faster ramping up in the UK of what I call “the sexular age”, in which our institutions are increasingly seen as vehicles to push an understanding of humanity and what makes for its flourishing, at a pace that would have surprised us ten years ago.  

The US is different again.  It’s a religious place, whether that’s orthodox religion or the new sexular  religions that the institutions are espousing.  Evangelicalism in the USA has an increasingly chequered record in terms of its push for political power, while at the same time being seen to be hypocritical in terms of its own actions.  There has been a dramatic fall away from a common understanding of human flourishing in the US, to the point where tribalism and conflict seem to be the future. Many Christians in the US assume that theirs is a Christian country and feel that if they could just get the right person in the White House things would turn around.  That completely discounts the fact that politics is downstream of culture, and that the major cultural institutions – old media and new – are weighted heavily against the Christian framework.

You give a really helpful analysis of how our culture has ended up where it is – and its relationship with Christianity. What’s your take on how this might change over the coming decades?

I have a sense that Christianity will regain its impact and its credibility when it moves to the margins of the culture and becomes a creative minority that can speak with some prophetic insight into the centre.  We cannot believe that somehow the church can only influence people when it is in power – in fact that model is shown to be increasingly flawed. 

And we cannot discount the fact that bad ideas don’t work. The whole push to centre human identity in our sexuality is already reaping a bitter harvest. The body count from our cultural tsunami is mounting.  The church must be ready as an alternative to the culture, and to be so distinct – “attractively repellant” I call it – as to be surprising and different to a generation that has never darkened the doors of a church community, but that is looking for a way past our hostile culture’s “endless cycle of fiery denunciation” as Douglas Murray puts it. We have a gospel message of grace and forgiveness in Christ that is superior in terms of its outcomes (by virtue of being the truth!) to anything the culture can offer.

Lastly, what’s your hope and prayer for the Western church at the moment and what would be your advice for pastors who are feeling the discomfort of being sidelined or seen as toxic in their communities?

My prayer would be for churches to hold their nerve and for pastors to see their role as equipping people for life in Babylon on Monday morning, rather than figuring ways to keep their people busier and busier doing programs.  People are tired, the workplace and education settings they attend are alternately hostile to their faith, or enticing to their sinful proclivities.  Pastors need to stick to the basics of preparing exiles and strangers for life as exactly that, rather than simply assuming what the average Christian life Monday to Saturday looks like.  Pastors need to get to know the pressures their people face, in order to pray for them and encourage them to keep going. 

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Thanks so much Stephen for taking the time to answer my questions!

Pick up or pre-order a copy of Being the Bad Guys from the publisher here, which releases on Feb 1st.

‘Wasting Time’ with God…

REDEEMING TIME:
Apple/Android
Free

What do you do with the little moments?

How often do you reach for your smartphone during the ‘little moments’ of the day. Making the tea? Stuck in a queue? In the bathroom?! I recently noticed how I’d even begun to instinctively look at my phone as I went up and down the stairs!

And more often than not, what are we doing during that time? Checking email? Glancing through Facebook? Browsing BBC News on the off chance there’s a new story added since we last checked. Of course, all this time adds up! 2019 figures suggested the average user spent 2 hours 22 minutes on social media each day. Just think what else you could do with that time!

Don’t waste your time

A few years ago Crossway published this Infographic showing how long it would take you to read each book of the Bible, based on average reading speeds. It’s a compelling image, because it inevitably highlights that the small amounts of time we whittle away on other things are an opportunity to get through a lot of the Bible. Twelve minutes a day and we’d read the whole Bible in a year!

And this is the premise behind Redeeming Time. James Doc, a Christian web developer, and Andy Geers, founder of PrayerMate, have created a delightfully simple app that really has one goal: to show you how you can ‘redeem’ small amounts of time to read the Bible, rather than squander it on other things.

How long have you got?

The app has a simple welcome screen that invites you to select how much time you have available. Whether it’s two minutes or an hour, the app will then present you with a list of which Bible books you could read during that time.

For example, enter five minutes and you’ll get invited to read Obadiah, Jude or Philemon. Twenty-five minutes and it’ll suggest you try the likes of Amos, Lamentations, or Galatians. After making your choice, the app opens up the chosen Scripture from Bible Gateway. As you begin to scroll and read, it logs where you’re up to so that you can return later part-way through. Everytime you complete a Bible book, it presents you with some helpful reflection questions. 

If you expect a full-blown Bible-reading app with bells and whistles, you’ll be disappointed. Redeeming Time doesn’t aim to take on responsibility for the extent of your personal Bible reading programme. But it does make a simple point, with a practical call to action: read the word and redeem that time!

More info on Redeeming Time here.

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A version of this article was first published here in the February 2021 Issue of Evangelicals Now and is shared here with permission. EN is a monthly newspaper published in print and online, offering a biblical perspective on current issues and insight on what’s happening with God’s people worldwide. Online subscription is just £10 p/a with print & online combined for just £18. Order a free sample or subscribe here.