“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” – 1 Corinthians 12:27
This is the third entry in a series of blogs I’m writing on the topic of service and hospitality. If you haven’t read the other two, I’d recommend doing so before you read this one.
You can find the first here: Serving Others is Experiencing God, and the second here: Love One Another.
So far in this series, I’ve argued that when we serve others, we are the ones being blessed.
By welcoming strangers, helping the poor, caring for widows and orphans, or by visiting those in prison, we experience God. That is, through our acts of service, God’s aim is to bring about our transformation through those in creation whom He loves.
Furthermore, I have pointed out that the New Testament overwhelmingly insists that our acts of service and love should primarily be aimed at other believers. This doesn’t mean that we do not show hospitality to those outside the faith, or shun those whom we don’t know. We absolutely are to serve and love nonbelievers! Yet, Jesus created the Church so that He might be made known through the Church’s witness. When believers love other believers, we are transformed together into the type of people that God desires for us to become.
Acts of service, in a lot of ways, are for our benefit.
They help us grow closer to the God we serve through the stranger. They help transform us into the people that God wants us to be.
I do realize that this might seem backwards, or very different than the way in which Christian hospitality is normally framed. This might be because it is very possible to insert our own implicit cultural assumptions into an ancient text in which such ideas aren’t really found.
A Bit of History
Allow me to briefly touch on what I think are two major historical reasons that many Christians understand service in the way that they do today: 1) the institutionalization of hospitality and 2) the Doctrine of Discovery.
The early church, in the first few centuries of its existence, met within homes. This meant that hospitality efforts were centered around the household. Early believers would gather together for worship in their homes. They’d also welcome the poor into their homes for a shared meal. They’d open their doors for travelers in need of lodging. A level of mutuality and unity was established because of these efforts: poor and rich believers ate together, sick and well believers worshipped together. Yet, as Christianity grew, the location in which hospitality was offered expanded as well. In the fourth century, many Christian hospitals were established.[1] These institutions did great good and met a real need in the communities they were founded within. The specialized care they were able to offer was invaluable. However, as a side effect, the personal dimension of early Christian hospitality was lost. No longer were the poor and sick finding care within a Christian household. They were instead separated out and kept at a distance.[2]
This was understood as an issue even back then. While these institutions that the church created preformed a genuine good, 4th century pastors did point out the fracture they were causing.
John Chrysostom spoke on this subject. In a sermon he delivered sometime in the late 300’s A.D., Chrysostom states:
“Why, has not the Church means you will say? She has: but what is that to you? That they should be fed from the common funds of the Church, can that benefit you? If another man prays, does it follow that you are not bound to pray? Wherefore do you not say, Do not the priests pray? Then why should I pray…
Abraham received the strangers in the place where he abode himself; his wife stood in the place of a servant, the guests in the place of masters. He knew not that he was receiving Christ; knew not that he was receiving Angels; so that had he known it, he would have lavished his whole substance. But we, who know that we receive Christ, show not even so much zeal as he did who thought that he was receiving men.”[3]
Chrysostom was upset that members of his congregation were shirking their responsibility to personal hospitality and instead relying fully on hospitals and hospices to meet needs. He wasn’t against hospitals. In fact, Chrysostom founded several himself. Yet he was rightly concerned that the creation of such would detract from the responsibility Christians had to the poor and sick, that it would cause discrimination, and that it might take away the self-transformative work that Christian service caused.[4]
Spoiler alert: they did.
Let’s now skip about a thousand years forward.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull which granted the Portuguese the right to invade any non-Christian country in order to steal their goods and turn their people into perpetual slaves in the name of Jesus.[5] Two years later, Pope Nicholas V authored another papal bull titled Romanus Pontifex which enabled any European Catholic nation to exert its God-given “dominance” over discovered (read: conquered) lands through both possession and enslavement.[6]
The Pope justified his actions by stating that he desired to seek “the salvation of all…that he might bring the sheep entrusted to him by God into a single divine fold, and may acquire for them the reward of eternal felicity, and obtain pardon for their souls” and “[we should] bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes who…restrain the savage excesses of Muslims and other pagans, enemies of the Christian name, [and] for the defense and increase of the faith vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations.”
In other words, because the European church saw themselves as harbingers of truth, they felt required to spread this truth to the rest of the world through any means necessary. Enslaving non-Christians and stealing land was seen as a great good. It allowed these pagan people and nations an opportunity to change their ways and convert to (a European Catholic version of) Christianity. These papal bulls, among others, were then lumped together to form a set of legal principles now called the Doctrine of Discovery. They gave theological permission for European Christians, and eventually American Christians, to see themselves as superior over all others.[7]
What does this history have to do with the way we understand Christian service today?
In many ways, we have not grown out of this flawed past. The decisions and thoughts of our faith ancestors have ways of tricking down into our thoughts and actions.
For example, even today, Christian service is often relegated to a particular “team” in the local church. A missions or outreach team might choose a few local organizations for a church to sponsor, and then money is raised and sent out to these parachurch ministries or soup kitchens. Members of a church might regularly volunteer in such institutions, but it’s really the institution itself that does the hard work day in and day out.
There’s nothing wrong with this. Yet, just as it was the case in Chrysostom’s day, such a model doesn’t allow the church as much space for mutuality and unity. Churches are often almost wholly made up of the social class of whatever neighborhood their building is found within. Because of this, it is harder for the poor to eat with the rich or the sick to worship with the well. The people we serve in soup kitchens aren’t usually also worshipping alongside us in the pews.
Furthermore, consider how you might react if you heard that a church from Africa or Asia was sending missionaries to bring aid and evangelism here to the United States.
For most of us, this seems backwards. When we imagine world missions, we almost always understand our roll as the missionary and foreign countries as those who are recipients of our missional efforts. Why is this the case? It’s a holdover from European colonialism sprinkled with a bit of American exceptionalism. We might not say it out loud, nor even be entirely conscious of our bias, but many of us have inherited the assumption that western white Christians are superior over all others.
And, of course, this also has bearing on how we read and interpret certain scripture passages too.
Culture Shapes Comprehension
I’d like to just give one example of a passage of scripture, or a metaphor used within scripture, that is frequently misapplied because of such cultural assumptions.
In both Romans and 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul uses a metaphor that relates parts of the human body to members within the church. In the Roman church, various factions of believers were struggling to get along. Paul reminds them in Romans 12:3-8 that all members of their congregation were of value and useful just like all parts of a human body are valuable and have a use. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Paul is again arguing for unity. Some in Corinth were arguing that certain spiritual gifts were more important that other gifts, and because of that, certain gifted individuals were more important than others. Paul corrects this misunderstanding with his body metaphor: all body parts are right where they should be and placed there by God, all parts are important and necessary, and all parts (believers) should have equal concern for one another.
Nevertheless, with that being said, how often have you heard the phrase: “lets go and be the hands and feet of Jesus?”
This phrase, and others like it, are using Paul’s body metaphor and applying it to acts of Christian service. Yet Paul never makes this move himself.
Nowhere in the Bible is Paul’s body metaphor used to talk about Christian hospitality.
This application, as far as I can tell, has developed from the assumption that Christians have been called to take Jesus and, though acts of service or evangelism, thrust him upon others who might not yet know him. It’s an idea that we have inherited from the cultural assumption of western Christian superiority.
We often presuppose that we are the ones who are spiritually rich and need to disseminate our riches to those less fortunate than us. But, as I’ve pointed out in the previous two entries, this isn’t supposed to be the motive behind our acts of Christian service.
When we serve, we aren’t bringing Jesus to others. Instead, Jesus meets us within the people that we’re serving.
When we serve, we are the ones who are being spiritually fed.
[1] Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 44.
[2] Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 45.
[3] See John Chrysostom’s sermon on Acts (homily 45): https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210145.htm
[4] Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 46.
[5] See: Dum Divertas (https://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2011/02/dum-diversas-english-translation.html)
[6] See: Romanus Pontifex (https://www.papalencyclicals.net/nichol05/romanus-pontifex.htm)
[7] By the way, this Doctrine of Discovery is still used today in the US in order to legally ignore or invalidate any Native American claim on ancestral land. See the United States Supreme Court’s 1823 decision in Johnson vs. M’Intosh.
Scripture Simplified 