Category Archives: First Place Hospitality

Your Hospitality Personality

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How to Confidently Create Connection and Community

You have a hospitality personality, and it impacts how you approach hosting.

Morgan Tyree

Does the thought of hosting a dinner send you into spasms of delight or spirals of dismay? Do you love opening your home to others? Or do you dread even the planning it takes to get a group of friends to arrive at the same restaurant at the same time?

We each have our own unique hospitality personality. And when you tap into yours, you’ll find a lot more blessing with a lot less stressing.

With personal assessments, encouraging stories, and plenty of practical ideas, in Your Hospitality Personality, author Morgan Tyree shows you how to identify and embrace your hospitality personality so you can stop worrying and start enjoying yourself and your guests. She helps you understand your hospitality habits, hurdles, and hang-ups, then offers real-life solutions that fit you.

According to author Morgan Tyree, you have a unique and God-given way of interacting with others; don’t fight against your tendencies. If you do, you’ll only be limiting your potential reach, and wouldn’t that be a disservice?

Tyree also believes that you were specifically and individually created to effectively impact your circles of influence. Press into this truth. Seek out all the possibilities around you, and make sure to let your hospitality personality shine!

Do not waste any moment wishing for a different wiring. The world eagerly awaits your unique and invaluable gifts of hospitality.

Embrace your distinct, God-given manner of engaging with others; don’t resist your inclinations. Suppressing them would only curtail your potential impact, which would be a disservice, wouldn’t it?

You were meticulously crafted to make a significant difference within your spheres of influence. Embrace this reality. Explore the myriad opportunities around you and allow your hospitable nature to radiate!

Understanding your identity and aligning your actions with your hospitality traits will enable you to thrive as a host. Whether in your home or elsewhere, adhere to healthy hospitality practices. Commit to discerning which hospitality habits to retain and which to refine. Approach each aspect of hosting thoughtfully and tactfully, considering the who, what, where, when, and why. Design hosting experiences that alleviate any reservations you may have by purposefully arranging details in a manner that puts you most at ease. Make it your goal to enhance blessings while reducing stress.

Author Tyree outlines four primary hospitality personalities in her book:

  • Leaders: “The Director”
  • Entertainers: “The Socializer”
  • Includers: “The Supporter”
  • Organizers: “The Planner”

Regardless of your type, embrace the people placed in your life by God. Each of your circles craves your presence and attention – they need YOU. Plan your hospitality endeavors, and remember to sprinkle in spontaneous acts of kindness – it’s rewarding!

In her book Daring to Be Yourself, Alexandra Stoddard wisely states, “When you give your presence, you are giving the most. Ultimately, time is all you have. When you pay attention to someone else, you honor that person and the other person can honor you. You act not out of duty, but because you want to.”

Remember – your hospitality personality is a gift – the present of being present. Make sure to give it away!

inspired & adapted from Your Hospitality Personality: How to Confidently Create Connection and Community by Morgan Tyree

Sidewalks in the Kingdom

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New Urbanism and the Christian Faith

The virtue of neighborliness is not only something I want for my neighborhood, but is something I want deeply for every residential area. I can practice neighborliness in my context while advocating for a return to neighborliness in every context.

Eric O. Jacobsen

Christians often talk about claiming our cities for Christ and the need to address urban concerns. But according to Eric Jacobsen, this discussion has remained far too abstract. Sidewalks in the Kingdom challenges Christians to gain an informed vision for the physical layout and structure of the city.

Jacobsen emphasizes the need to preserve the nourishing characteristics of traditional city life, including shared public spaces, thriving neighborhoods, and a well-supported local economy. He explains how urban settings create unexpected and natural opportunities to initiate friendship and share faith in Christ.

Helpful features include a glossary, a bibliography, and a description of New Urbanism. Pastors, city-dwellers, and those interested in urban ministry and development will be encouraged by Sidewalks in the Kingdom.

According to author Eric O. Jacobsen, the most meaningful way to define a city he has found is to say that you tend to know when you are in one. While it may sound like a cop-out, this is one area where our intuition might really be our most reliable guide.

To be more specific, there are six general features that would indicate to a visitor that he or she is in a city. These features can be understood as six distinct markers of the city.

  • Public spaces
  • Mixed-use zoning
  • Local economy
  • Beauty and quality in the built environment
  • Critical Mass
  • Presence of strangers

Jacobsen believes that a familiarity with these makers gives us handles upon which to hang our impressions of the communities in which we live, whether or not they qualify as cities. They also help focus and clarify our discussion about the merits of city life.

inspired by & adapted from Sidewalks in the Kingdom, by Eric O. Jacobsen

Palaces for the People

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How Social Infrastructure Can Help People Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

The social and physical environment shapes our behavior in ways we’ve failed to recognize; it helps make us who we are and determines how we live.

Eric Klinenberg

We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together and find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides.

According to author Eric Klinenberg, social infrastructure is not “social capital” – a concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks – but the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops.

When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves.

Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions – at the school, the playground, and the corner diner – are the building blocks of all public life.

People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures – not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.

inspired by Palaces for the People, by Eric Klinenberg

How to Help You Live SENT in the Place You Call Home

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Not so long ago, neighbors generally kept their doors open to one another. Smaller houses seemed less confining, because the more porous divisions between homes – separated not by doors of wood or steel but by “screen doors” – encouraged socializing with neighbors.
An essential ingredient in community formation is dying out: the strong relational ties that are built when we let our guard down with each other, when we claim common space as an appropriate forum for conversation, play, and eating.
I used to think hospitality was a lost art. Now I’m convinced it is a lost heart.

Len Sweet, From Tablet to Table

Here are some more helps in learning to build bridges with hospitality – from your home to your neighbors.

These bridges are the next step in the ongoing shift in thought from a facility-focused ministry (church as a place) to one based in people’s homes (church as the body of Christ BEING the church).

Think of it as shifting:

  • From a buildings to your block
  • From a campus to your cul-de-sac
  • From in-person to in-the-neighborhood

Why not BE the church in your neighborhood TODAY, instead of BRINGING your neighbors to church?

Here is a link to the webinar recording I did entitled How to Help You Live SENT in the Place You Call Home. 

You will learn about the spaces, places, and graces that will help you become bridge builders to your neighbors. I unpacked those three words with ideas, examples, and tools to help you BE the church where you live.

Even though recorded at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, the webinar concepts are valid and needed just as much today.

Here are some next steps from the content covered in the webinar:

> Download a blank Spaces/Places/Graces Listening Guide PDF

> Download a brief synopsis of the key slides used

> Recommended Books Referenced:

   Primary

   Other Good Resources

As discussed on the webinar, the ideas and resources we talked about are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Building Bridges to Your Neighbors. You can find many more by searching on this site using the key words “First Place Hospitality.”

For an essential First Place Hospitality library, check out this page.

Good Works

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Hospitality and Faithful Discipleship

The essence of our vision is quite simple: that we may receive the love of Jesus so deeply into our lives that it propels us to love God and our neighbors with all of ourselves, thus sharing the good news of Jesus with each person who is among us.

Keith Wasserman

According to the authors, our acts of love and generosity help us become more like the one who has welcomed us, and they are powerful expressions of our faith, humanity, and identity.

Ephesians 2:8-10 says that we are “created for good works.” That helps us understand why we often feel good when we do good things. It is because we are most complete, most fulfilled, when we are being who we were meant to be.

For over forty years, the community of Good Works, Inc., has shared life with its neighbors in rural southeastern Ohio, a region with high poverty rates and remarkably resilient people. Offering friendship to those without a support network and shelter, care, and community to people without homes, those involved with Good Works have made it their mission to embody the gospel in innovative ways. What insights can be gleaned from Good Works, and how might these lessons be applied to our own communities and churches? 

Keith Wasserman, the founder and executive director of Good Works, and Christine Pohl, a scholar of hospitality who has written extensively on church and mission, explore challenging insights from the story of Good Works and how it has grown over the years into a unique expression of discipleship in the body of Christ. At the heart of this community’s story are connection and mutuality. Good Works functions not as a charity or social service agency but as a place where everyone has the opportunity to both serve and be served. And although worship is a central paradigm for life at Good Works, Keith and the leaders of the community regularly partner with non-Christians from all walks of life who desire to help. 

Christians who hunger for life-giving involvement in their local communities – wherever they might be, and in whichever circumstances – will find inspiration and guidance in this quiet but powerful Appalachian ministry. Short prayers and questions for reflection at the end of each chapter make Good Works a book to be studied and shared among those who know that love of God and neighbor is the starting point, but who aren’t sure where to go from there.

The authors have documented the following five themes that have emerged from the Good Works community over the years:

Worship – Worship is at the heart of discipleship, service and community.

Integrity – A strong commitment to integrity means that how they do what They do is crucial.

Perspective – Understandings and commitments are fundamentally shaped by what we allow ourselves to see and experience, where we locate ourselves, and which sets of lenses we use to gain clarity of vision.

Friendship – Forming relationships with people who are different from ourselves allows us to understand God’s kingdom in fresh ways.

Leadership – Reflections on leadership from within community can offer important guidance and correction.

TeamUP+ – Additional Helps for Bringing Hospitality Home

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Earlier this year, I introduced you to the concept of Building Bridges to Your Neighbors. The intent was to learn how to build bridges of hospitality from your members’ homes to their neighbors.

Featured in that article was a TeamUP (Auxano’s eBook series) called Bringing Hospitality Home: Helping the People BE the Church Everyday. (you can download a copy here).

During the original research and writing, I came across so much good material that we couldn’t use because we wanted to keep the TeamUP short. So I developed a series of seven short TeamUP+ documents – one for each of the seven main points in the original TeamUP.

Click on each below to download them.

I hope you will find the TeamUP and the additional TeamUP+ as useful tools to expand your hospitality to your neighbors!

Households of Faith

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Faith formation is connected to and increases with hospitality. Households that regularly host non-family guests are more likely to talk about faith, pray, or read the Bible together.

Barna

Barna studies have revealed much about the state of religion in the United States an how faith is perceived and discussed in public. But what about how faith is being nurtured in private – with the spouses, children, parents, roommates, and even frequent visitors who spend time under our roofs?

How Christians order their days and connect with relatives and housemates is a critical aspect of spiritual growth. Households of Faith, the second in a series of studies produced in partnership with Lutheran Hour Ministries, presents a vivid portrait of the domestic lives of U.S. practicing Christians, including:

  • An overview of modern living arrangements and the relationships that define them
  • Details of housemates’ regular interactions – practical, recreational, and spiritual
  • Insights about relationships that have a positive and enduring influence on housemates
  • Analysis of how faith heritage is linked to beliefs and rituals in adulthood
  • Interviews with experts in elder, family, and youth ministry about reaching a variety of households
  • Custom profiles of vibrant households that embrace hospitality and spiritual practices

According to the research Barna conducted for this book, here’s what happens when close friends get together:

  • 51% have deep conversations
  • 46% play together
  • 41% have dinner on a regular basis
  • 34% ask for help
  • 33% go on vacation together
  • 30% appear in family photos
  • 25% borrow household items

These percentages are among those who have regular visitors.

On the flip side, 4 in 10 practicing Christian households do not regularly host visitors. Couples are the least likely (49%) to admit they don’t have people over very often.

In summarizing the recommendations that stemmed from their research, Barna concluded they could do no better than Romans 12, which begins with its famous exhortation to be “a living and holy sacrifice.” As the chapter goes on, the focus shifts from the individual to the collective – from “your bodies” to “Christ’s body.” We are reminded:

  • “We all belong to each other.”
  • “Love each other with genuine affection.”
  • “Work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.”
  • “Keep on praying.”
  • “Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.”
  • “Always eager to practice hospitality.”

Taken together, these principles build not only a vibrant household but a flourishing community of faith.

inspired and adapted from Households of Faith

God Next Door

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Spirituality & Mission in the Neighborhood

Look again at your neighborhood, not just as the place you happen to live but as an important context for spirituality and mission.

Simon Carey Holt

What if God lived next door? Would you recognize him? Would you talk to him at the fence or avoid catching his eye? Would you love him as you love yourself?

Simon Carey Holt listened to the experiences of numerous men and women of faith – people who live in neighborhoods of all shapes and sizes – and concluded that though they are a largely forgotten resource when it comes to matters of faith, neighborhoods are places rich with the most inspiring stories and exciting possibilities for mission.

According to author Simon Carey Holt, we all live in neighborhoods. Yours may be as different to mine as the proverbial chalk is to cheese. Your closest neighbor may be far away, hidden behind a high wooden fence, or close enough to hear as she walks overhead. Every neighborhood is unique. Yours will have a look and feel of its own; they all do. No matter where it’s located or how old it is, each neighborhood has its own history, atmosphere and personality; each one its distinctive blend of housing types, commercial and community facilities, and public places. Yet every neighborhood – from the trendy city highrise to the ever expanding housing developments on the urban fringe and anything else in between – is a variation on the same basic principle: people living in close proximity to other people.

And yet increasingly, some of us struggle to simply name those who live next door, let alone know the details of their lives.

At the heart of the Christian story lie the two commands Jesus identified as the essence of living, the heart of spirituality: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength;’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ As I struggle with these two directives and how to make them alive in my everyday experience, there are some questions that beg for answers, questions like these:

  • What does it mean to love God where I live?
  • What does the command, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ mean for the people who live next door?
  • How do the realities of contemporary urban and suburban life impact upon my experience of faith and community?
  • What has my spirituality got to do with the neighbors?

The desire to close the door on the world and create a haven of self-sufficiency, identity and security is strong.

But Holt believes the neighborhood remains a fundamentally important context of life and deserves to be taken more seriously by those who live in one. He believes that in ignoring the health and wellbeing of our local neighborhood, we’re ignoring the glue that binds the wider city together and makes it a genuinely human environment. And perhaps most importantly, he believes a spirituality that does not nurture our connections with the daily places of life fails to reflect the life-transforming nature of the Christian faith.

Inspired and adapted from God Next Door: Spirituality & Mission in the Neighborhood by Simon Carey Holt

Practical Hospitality: A Guide to Building Bridges in Your Church and Neighborhood

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Your church – its members – can be viewed as islands without bridges. The “islands” are the homes, apartments, or condos of your members. Wherever they live, it will be all too easy and natural to want to retreat into themselves and spend their influence mostly on themselves and their families, isolated and disconnected from their neighbors across the street or down the hall.

They are often strangers to their own neighbors.

The secret weapon for gospel advancement that builds bridges is hospitality, and your church members can practice it whether you live in a house, a dorm, or a high-rise apartment.

Thinking like this requires viewing the home as primarily a weapon for the gospel before it is anything else. Biblical hospitality chooses to engage rather than unplug, open rather than close, initiate rather than sit idly.

During the early months of the pandemic in 2020, I worked with the Auxano team to develop this TeamUP eBook to introduce you to the possibility of leading you and your church to build bridges – from member’s homes to their neighbors – and it starts with you.

These bridges are the next step in the ongoing shift from a facility-focused ministry to one based in people’s homes.

In this TeamUP, you will find excerpts, practical ideas, and actions from some of the best practicers of this concept.

These seven ideas and accompanying actions have been highlighted to first raise your awareness in your own life, and then, as a leader, encourage your team or church to do the same in their own lives.

Bridges are born of practical necessity, an astonishing marriage of technology and art. Crossing an often imposing obstacle, they succeed in linking two parts, providing the opportunity for connection and conversation. Bridges are links; they connect people and communities.

It’s time for your church to use hospitality as a bridge to your neighbors.

Happy Hour

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Etiquette and Advice on Holy Merriment

Party develops and sustains the communal life of the community and it is the foundation of spiritual movement. If people find friends, great conversations, a safe place to be themselves and to bring others to, then you have the makings of a kingdom movement. If someone finds you through the party, then finding God will be much easier for them because they will already have a community of people to walk with.

Hugh Halter

All good missionaries know the power of social engagement.

Whether you are called to Spain, Italy, Iceland, or Portland, Oregon, we now live in a pure mission field, and people won’t move spiritually until they are connected socially. In other words, the Gospel will not be heard until our front doors open, our tables are set, and we practice the art of hospitality, celebration, and party.

Why has this ancient art of party been lost?

Because the church has defined holiness as “exclusion” from the world, abstinence from food and drink and separation from real people. In Jesus, we get to be holy as He was holy. Our inward commitments to Him remain intact while at th same time we are deeply entrenched in the life and customs of those around us.

Party is sacrament and we must relearn and reorient our lives around friends, food, and celebration if we are going to have any influence upon the culture right next door.

In Happy Hour, Hugh will unpack the theology of party as well as give you practical etiquette and ideas for making merriment a way of life and a way of mission.

According to author Hugh Halter, the one skill every believer must develop is the discipleship skill of throwing a great party.

No, it’s not just about outreach to lost friends. It’s really about our discipleship after Jesus. If He did it, and we claim to follow Him, then we must stretch past church attendance and Bible studies to learn how to be great human beings like He was.

Happy Hour is a book for missionaries in a missionary context.

Which is all believers.

inspired and adapted from Happy Hour: Etiquette and Advice on Holy Merriment, by Hugh Halter