Brave Table (part 1): Resurrecting Hospitality

TO START

When you were a kid, did your parents have people over to the house much? Any interesting guests come to mind? Tell a good guest story. 

TO DISCUSS

For the next several weeks we’re talking hospitality. How challenging do you expect this series to be for you on a scale of 1-10? Explain your answer. 

Are these two things true of you and hospitality? If so, why do you think you’ve ended up in that place? If not--why not? What has encouraged you to choose another path?

1. We don’t do much of it. 

2. We don’t understand it very well. 

Many times on Sunday Justin used the phrase “courageous hospitality.” What images does that phrase prompt in your head? Does it make sense to you? How might hospitality require courage?

We’re defining hospitality as, “using what you have to bring someone close so they feel God’s love.” Share a time when someone offered hospitality to you.

Justin said on Sunday that hospitality intersects with every single one of our core behaviors. Work your way through them and explain what each one has to do with hospitality. (Ten points if you can name them all by heart! If you can’t, you can find the list here: https://www.rrcoc.org/corebehaviors

TO READ

Let’s spend the length of this sermon series reading positive and negative examples of hospitality. This week, I Kings 17:2-16.

  • What do we learn about hospitality from the widow?

  • What do we learn about God from this story? How does he respond to the widow when she offers hospitality? 

  • How important (in the grand scheme of things) is the widow’s willingness to welcome Elijah and feed him?

TO PRAY

Consider praying this prayer adapted from Rosaria Butterfield’s prayer in the book The Gospel Comes With A House key:

“Shape us in such a way that we let you use our home, apartment, dorm room, front yard, or garden for the purpose of making strangers into neighbors and neighbors into family. Help us stop being afraid of strangers, even when some strangers are dangerous. Grow us to be more like Christ in practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality, and that bless us richly for it, adding to his kingdom, creating a new culture and a new reputation for what it means to be a Christian in a watching world. Help us to see that there’s more to the Christian life than we may have realized--more to enjoy, more to experience, more to celebrate--and that practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality is the key to discovering those hidden treasures. Resurrect this practice in the American church, and begin with us.”

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