Gay Hospitality: Start with the Churches

It's all over the news and United Methodist circles: the reversal of the removal of a Virginia Pastor who denied membership to a homosexual man in his congregation.

To me, the pastor's exclusion of the gay man was a direction violation of the Christian tenet of hospitality. Hospitality, as defined by Christine Pohl in her book Making Room, involves:

Hospitality provides a context for recognizing the worth of persons who seem to have little when assessed by worldly standards. (page 62)

Hospitality thus has a counter-cultural edge to it as it embodies values and models that are not shared by the greater society. Additionally, Pohl relates the following quote about the relationship between the civil and religious spheres:

Expulsion from the civic sphere, in which the basic rights of citizens are protected, is the most dangerous form of expulsion, but the danger is intensified when particular religious, ethnic, and cultural identities are singled out for exclusion. (page 81)

Hospitality, by Pohl, is defined as a framework for transforming loyalties and relationships that envisions

1. the church as universal community of believers,
2. the lessening of social boundaries and distinctions,
3. the recognition of everyone's value, and
4. providing practical care (often the only understanding we have of hospitality!)

Thus, this concept of hospitality has been lost in our era of the 'hospitality industry' of motels, and the private entertainment of people in our homes.

What this privatization and blurring of hospitality does is remove or distort our initial response to people: to welcome, to invite, to exhibit Christian love. In the above case, the pastor excluded the gay man from hospitality for religious reasons...presumedly for hope of repentance and re-integration into his community. That certainly has biblical precedent.

However, in biblical times, to be excluded from a religious community did not threaten the well-being of the individual. In these modern times, the second quote above becomes relevant: when gays are excluded by the civil sphere, the church intensifies that expulsion by their policies. By not exhibiting Christian hospitality, and welcoming them into our churches and communities, we are making the damage more pervasive. And that damage culminates in deviant behavior, crime, depression, and suicide. While Churches are not directly responsible for the free-will choices of persons, it is irresponsible of us to not accept some correlation between expulsion from society and expulsion from our churches and these situations.

Perhaps that's the idea, though. Perhaps telling people that they are excluded from the church will cause them to change. Pohl, again, confronts this relationship between exclusion and endangerment.

When, by acknowledging difference, we only endanger [people], then we must only acknowledge our common human identity. (page 83)

By focusing on the differences, and by dehumanizing people by their differences, we are perpetuating the problem, not helping it. There cannot be repentance and re-integration if these people are without support and help, and see the church's position, as John Wesley warned us, as God's indeliable viewpoint.

By ignoring the Christian tenet of hospitality, we are endangering the LGBT community. All Progressive Christian churches need to call those churches excluding the LGBT community to accountability...accountability to the demands of the Gospel to see the stranger as fundamentally just like ourselves, human and beloved by God.

Works Cited

Pohl, Christine D. Making Room: Recovering Hospitality As a Christian Tradition Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999.