Classical Worship for Today: Hospitality: Where Evangelism Begins -- By: Wilbur Ellsworth

Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 13:1 (Winter 2004)
Article: Classical Worship for Today: Hospitality: Where Evangelism Begins
Author: Wilbur Ellsworth


Classical Worship for Today:
Hospitality: Where Evangelism Begins

Wilbur Ellsworth

For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost, and for want of the rider the war was lost.” Hospitality is the nail that often makes the difference in the battle to win people to Christ. Just as a war may hang on something as small as a nail, so in the great cause of reaching people with the gospel and bringing them into the Church, much can be lost over the absence of this one Christian virtue.

American Evangelicals can be grateful for the decades of blessing in reaching millions of people with the gospel of Christ. One of evangelicalism’s greatest strengths has been the fusion of its passion to win people to Christ and its sensitivity to the culture of the people it is seeking to reach. Despite that, American evangelism has profoundly changed the Church in America. Our success in relating to the culture has been something of a mixed blessing for as the Church has engaged the culture, the culture for the most part has won. Today the Church’s culture more closely resembles its surroundings than it resembles the heritage of the Church’s past worship and spirituality. Modern evangelism has changed the Church, and in the view of many, that change has not been an improvement.

While the reasons for our openness to changing the worship

ship and spiritual disciplines of the Church have deep theological roots, there is another more pragmatic question we need to face if we are to be faithful to the mandate of the Lord to make disciples of all the nations, including our own neighbors: if we are not going to change the life of the Church to conform to contemporary culture, how will we create bridges to people around us who do not know Christ?

The answer from the pages of Scripture and the history of the Church centers in a Christian virtue we need to understand and rediscover: hospitality. Hospitality is a forgotten virtue in part because we have lost the essence of its meaning. If we are going to restore hospitality to our communal consciousness we will need to recast the word in its biblical meaning. The word itself means “love of the stranger.” Creating social situations with food and pleasant surroundings may be a part of hospitality, but love of the stranger does not necessarily require outstanding culinary and decorating strengths. We often speak of “the gift of hospitality” as though social and culinary skills enable some people to exercise this gift while those who don’t possess this “gift” are exempt from needing to have hospitality mark their lives. We also tend to think of people who a...

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