‘Faithful, Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World’

THESIS TEN: In a time of widespread migration, Christians must embrace their identity as wanderers as well

The Bible is packed full of advice about how to respond to migrants, and that advice is straightforward: welcome them! The story of Abraham welcoming the strangers at Mamre is a parabolic version of teachings that appear elsewhere in Scripture. The law code in Leviticus commands the Israelites that “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:34 [NRSVA]). The language is parallel to the commandment to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, a commandment that Jesus will make central to his teachings and which first appears just fifteen verses earlier in Leviticus. God’s people knew what it was like to be strangers and wanderers. Abraham and his sons had moved around the Holy Land and the Israelites had wandered through the wilderness for a generation on their way out of slavery in Egypt. When it came time to summarize who they were, they began with words that identified this migratory heritage: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien” (Deut. 26:5). Because they had been migrants, they were called to love strangers in the same way they were called to love those who were already near them. In an earlier thesis, I pointed to a verse from the First Letter of John: “we love because he first loved us” (4:19). I now offer another substitution: use “welcome” for “love” and say “we welcome because God first welcomed us.” In the same way that God’s grace welcomes us into God’s forgiving embrace, we too are called to welcome others. Another way of saying this is that we become hosts because God first hosted us.

However, there are at least two problems with thinking of migration solely in terms of welcome. First, in relation to white mainline Christians in North America, no manner of gracious hosting can obscure the fact that Christians inherit a legacy of being bad guests to the original inhabitants of these lands. Second, thinking solely in terms of welcome does not disrupt the inequitable relationship inherent in the guest-host relationship. When Christians like me whose ancestors have lived in a land for several generations and achieved a measure of economic comfort see themselves as hosts to migrants, it can lead to powerful and important ministries of hospitality. But it does not guard against an all-too-human tendency that most dinner party hosts have felt at some point in their life. It is the tendency to say, “Why won’t they just go home? I’m done being a host.” This is one description of the response that many people are having as they look at the growing numbers of people on the move in the world.

Jesus complicates and challenges received wisdom on hospitality. The gospels have many stories of him attending meals as a guest. But occasionally, as in the case of Zacchaeus the tax collector, he was a rather odd sort of guest. When Jesus shouted at Zacchaeus up in a tree, he was essentially inviting himself over for dinner (Luke 19:1–10). Outside of the Last Supper, there are rarely stories of Jesus serving as a host in anything like a classic understanding of that word. But that did not stop him from violating any understanding of good manners and teaching others how to be better hosts. Once, while eating a meal at the house of a Pharisee, Jesus decided the time had come to offer some advice on how to be both a good guest and a good host. He told the guests not to sit in the place of honor but to sit in the lowest place. He offered some unsolicited advice on how to create a guest list: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke 14:12–13). To be a host in the way of Jesus is to invite not those people who can give to you in return but those who are most marginal and from whom you have no hope of ever being invited in return.

More fundamentally, Jesus’ Incarnation is a moment of becoming a guest. God’s transcendent Word comes to dwell with humans, but does so as a helpless baby in a manger, who needs the support from a mother and father who welcome him as their own and become his hosts. One way of phrasing the truth of the Incarnation is that God in Christ allows himself to be welcomed by humans, that is, to become the guest of humans. To return to the passage from First John, not only can we substitute welcome for love, we can go further and say, “We allow ourselves to be welcomed because God in Christ first allowed himself to be welcomed.” In other words, we become guests because, in the Incarnation and then in his ministry, the Son of God first became a guest.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bible never lets its readers forget two things. First, God’s people are to be welcoming to strangers. This, as we have seen, was fundamental to the logic of the ancient world. But second, and more unusually, God’s people are also to remember that they too are migrants. It was true in the Old Testament when God’s people remembered themselves as descendants of a “wandering Aramean.” It is true in the New Testament as well. In the First Letter of Peter, for instance, the readers are addressed as “exiles” — a particularly challenging kind of movement — and enjoined to “live in reverent fear during the time of your exile” (1:1, 1:17). As followers of Christ, the messiah who was on the move virtually from the moment of his birth, Christians are reminded that we too are always migrants — guests — in this world. We are, to use a phrase sometimes evoked, a “pilgrim people” on our way to another destination that is not of this world. Scripture seems quite clear that extending sympathy and welcome to migrants and interacting with people on the move are necessary steps to following in the way of Jesus. But they are only first steps. The Christian tradition also leaves us with a more challenging question: in this situation of hospitality, how can I be not simply the host but also the guest?

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Christians are among the many people who have moved around the world in recent generations. When these migratory Christians arrive in new locations, they often seek to form a Christian community, known in the scholarly parlance as diaspora churches. When I first arrived in Montreal, I spent a Sunday morning visiting a local congregation of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. The RCCG is a Pentecostal mega-church founded in Nigeria that has a stated vision of having a church “within five minutes walking distance in every city and town of developing countries and within five minutes driving distance in every city and town of developed countries.” At the time of my visit, that congregation was one of five they had in Montreal. The one I visited met in a rented room above a mechanic’s shop. Some diaspora churches worship in more traditional church locations, although they do not often own them. In Montreal, it is not uncommon to see a church sign that advertises a mainline Protestant church — Epiphany Anglican Church, for instance — and then, right next to it, another sign advertising something like the Montreal Korean Community Church meeting in the same building a bit later in the day.

By necessity, these diaspora churches have learned how to be guests. They often need to rent space, whether from a car mechanic or another church. More significantly, these churches grow in large measure through continued migration. The RCCG’s growth strategy is at least implicitly premised on the continued movement of Nigerians around the world. In diaspora congregations, it is not uncommon to find people who specialize in immigration law and can help orient newcomers to the country and assist them as they navigate the process of securing a new legal status. There is a constant interplay between being a guest in a new land while also being a host to those who come after. By contrast, the mainline churches who host these congregations fall naturally into the role of host. When conflict between the existing congregation and the diaspora congregation happens, and it does, there is little doubt about who is in charge.

The presence of these diaspora churches reminds Christians in the North Atlantic world of several important facts. First, as if we needed another reminder, people are on the move. Second, part of our Christian identity is to not just welcome others but to allow ourselves to be welcomed, that is to be guests. In a crisis-shaped world in which human migration is an increasing and inescapable fact of life, it might be worth trying on the role of guest from time to time. If another church worships in your building, have you ever been to that service? If another church opens in your neighborhood, have you ever reached out and gotten to know them? It may not be possible to form a relationship with a church from a diaspora of which you are not a part. But given the sheer scale of human movement in this world, it is almost certainly possible for someone who has been long settled in a place to form a relationship with someone who has recently arrived. That relationship cannot simply be one of host and guest. The person who has been long settled must seek ways to actively become the guest of, to receive from, the one who has recently arrived.

The fragility of the church at this point in its history has led some congregations to shed property as they age and shrink. Seen within the context of the guest-host relationship, this shedding of property may actually be beneficial. Losing one’s building does not need to mean losing one’s identity as a congregation. But giving up the building will almost certainly make it difficult to think of oneself as the host all the time. Indeed, it may even force people who are used to being hosts to become guests for a while. I think of an Anglican congregation in Montreal that sold its building to another Christian community and then agreed to rent back the space for ninety minutes on Sunday morning. The Anglican congregation moved its service forward to 9 a.m. and agreed to be out of the sanctuary by 10:30 so the new community could start their service at 11. They negotiated the use of the hall for special occasions and ensured their priest still had an office in the building. But the Anglican congregation, which had owned the building for decades, now found itself a guest in its former home. While this may have been unusual at first, it has transformed the ministry of the congregation. Rather than having to focus their energy and effort on maintaining the building, they are now freed to connect in a deeper fashion with their community, including with the new congregation that owns their building.

There is a tension between this thesis and the previous one when I argued that Christian witness needs to be rooted in place and land. In this thesis I have been arguing that Christians need to understand themselves as migrants and exiles who receive welcome. If we are to be on the move, how can we be rooted in place? If we are rooted in place, how can we understand ourselves as migrants? This tension is not new and, indeed, it is encapsulated in language to which I have already pointed. When the author of First Peter addresses his readers as exiles, the Greek word is paroikos, which literally means the one who is beside or outside the house. The one who is outside the house is the wanderer, the one who is in need of hospitality. It is a surprise, therefore, that the English language has taken this Greek root and turned it into the word “parish.” (The connection is seen most clearly in the English word “parochial,” the adjectival form of “parish.”) But parish ministry, as I suggested in the previous thesis, is often used to describe rootedness in place, not foreignness.

In a world that is unceasingly shaped by global flows of ideas, goods, and above all people, it is vital that Christians remain aware of this global world and be rooted in particular places. But that rootedness in place is not contradictory with the idea that they are also meant to be guests in that place. “Parish ministry,” therefore, is not the staid preoccupation of out-of-date vicars. Rather, it expresses the central tension of the Christian identity: rooted in place but also an alien wandering in a strange land. These were not contradictory ideas for Jesus the guest-host. Nor should they be contradictory ideas for us. In a global world, Christians are rooted in place, open to new wanderers, ready to be guests to those they encounter, and open to where the Spirit leads us on our wandering journey of faith.

Excerpt reprinted with permission. “Faithful, Creative, Hopeful” ©2024 Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY 10016.