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Over the last year or so, my husband Dave and I have been thinking about the connection between evangelism and hospitality. We've become more convinced that while evangelistic events and other strategies have their place, they can't be a substitute for real relationships with non-Christian friends. And hospitality seems to us to be a key part of creating and maintaining those relationships.

So we decided that we needed to learn how to cultivate a lifestyle where we give and receive hospitality as part of our relationships with our non-Christian neighbours and friends (especially in this phase of our lives when so many of our networks are local ones within the suburb where we live). With three young children, most of the hospitality has happened between me and the non-Christian mums of our children's friends from school, play group and preschool. It's nothing groundbreaking; just afternoon tea after school, or morning tea with the little ones, or a catch up during school holidays.

And while we have been invited back in some cases, and we've gladly accepted the invitation, I think my bias has been towards having people in my home. With all my thinking about how to do hospitality better, I think I've ignored the benefits of being a guest.

A recent post by Tim Chester made me think about this:

... [E]ven our homes can be safe places for us and alien for others. After all, we follow a Saviour who had no home. I still believe in homes. Homes can become places where people feel they belong. Moreover, it does not have to be my home. We should look to plant churches in the homes of new converts. That way contextualis[ation] will happen more naturally. But we also need to move mission outside of church buildings and outside of Christian homes.

He makes a good point. As Chester writes, “Jesus had no home, but he came eating and drinking!” He welcomed sinners to his table, and he accepted their invitations to eat with them: tax collectors, Pharisees and everyone in between (Luke 5:29, 11:37-8).

In the New Testament letters, the assumption is that Christians will be eating and drinking with their non-Christian neighbours. While Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that they need to separate themselves from people who claim to be fellow believers, but who are living in blatant, unrepentant sin, he quickly adds the clarification that he does not mean that they should separate themselves from ‘the people of this world’ (1 Cor 5:9-11). There are tables that they should not eat at (e.g. the table of the god at the local pagan temple—1 Cor 10:14-22), but their next door neighbour's table is definitely not a place to stay away from (1 Cor 10:25-27).

So how do we become good at being guests? Do we need to build a few more ‘third places’ into the pattern of our lifestyle, or can you skip that step and just keep inviting people 'round, and wait till they begin to reciprocate? What have you found to be the best contexts for cultivating the kind of serious friendships in which the gospel is shared and people come to know Christ?

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The Higher School Certificate (HSC) is a strange beast: apparently it is the biggest test you will ever face in your life. Whoever got that rumour going among the high schools has obviously never tried to understand a mobile phone contract. But the rumour lives on, and it can be used to generate pressure on the students—sometimes a pressure that is too great for them to bear. It is sad to see such high hopes placed upon an exam. It is even sadder to see those high hopes end in tragedy.

Education: who would want to be without it? The rich wealth available for human knowledge in science, the arts, literature and the rest add to life as surely as any compilation of little known items of sporting trivia—perhaps, arguably, even more so. Education brings us information, knowledge and, occasionally, even wisdom. Education promises improvement, advancement, enhancement. For many, it promises upward mobility and a better life than that of the previous generation.

Education: its value was once a point in common between Mr ‘Enlightenment Man’ and his Christian neighbour. To be ‘enlightened’ was to have the soul flooded with the pure light of reason, and once that happened, life could never be the same again. Primitive thoughts led to primitive lives; rational thought led to rational and morally improved lives. Christians got involved in education, in curriculum and in the founding of schools because education was the way to moral improvement in society. The Christians, however, fought tooth and nail for the Scriptures to form a part of a child's education, for how can moral improvement come if the light of Christ is not there alongside the light of reason?

A lot happens in a school. There are values and attitudes that are taught. There are values and attitudes that are just caught. There are things being taught powerfully by the teacher's classroom curriculum, and there are things on the hidden curriculum that are learned even more powerfully. A lot happens as the light of reason is turned on. Many things begin to seem reasonable. Other things are deemed unreasonable.

Peter, the likeable but ham-fisted chief disciple, once found something unreasonable about Jesus. Even if he had a reasonably good education by the standards of his day, it was probably nothing compared to most of those who can now read about his encounter with his master. But by his ‘light of reason’, Peter didn't like Jesus talking about his coming death, and he tried to hush him up. “Get behind me, Satan”, rebuked Jesus. ‘For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:33).

Interesting. Just to think like a human being is to think not like God. Just to be ‘reasonable’, according to human ways of thinking about this world, is to be on the side of Satan.

Education: without God's word, there is no illumination. In fact, education solely by the ‘pure light of reason’—without revelation—is an education that keeps us all in the darkness. It is perfectly possible to be always learning but never arriving at the truth (2 Tim. 3:7).

Education: a force greater than ourselves—a force capable of much good. But when severed from the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ, education is a force also capable of much harm. Sometimes when it is blown up out of all proportion to the rest of life, it can even kill.

The stoicheia, the ‘elemental spirits of the universe’ —the ‘ABC’ of the universe—were another form of the principalities and powers once thought to exert a baneful influence over the world. And they sneak up almost imperceptibly. Why would we notice? They come to be with us at our mother's knee—through our teacher's lessons—at exactly the same time that we are learning to spell.

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One of my favourite movies of all time is Finding Nemo. Okay, so I've got kids, and it goes without saying. But there is one moment in the film that causes many knowing chuckles in my household: it is when Dory turns to Marlin and says, “What is it with men and asking for directions?” Apparently, so I've been told told, it is possible for me to be like this on occasions. Who would have thought?

The reason I raise this is that it presents a paradox I'm currently contemplating. I am preaching at a weekend away for dads and kids in a couple of weeks' time. The dads and the kids are going to do lots of fun, relational stuff together, but on three occasions over the weekend, the kids will be looked after while us dads examine what it means to be men from the Bible. Now, of course, we will be talking about sex (it's a men's camp!), and, being a dads' and kids' camp, we will be talking about being fathers as well. But as I sat down to think about what it means to be a man in the Bible, the thing that struck me most of all is the way men are called on to take responsibility in God's world. Adam and Eve sinned, but biblically it was Adam's sin: he was responsible. The New Testament sometimes addresses parents, but nearly always the instruction about raising children is to fathers. These are just two obvious and more universal examples of the phenomenon.

It is assumed throughout the Bible that part of the challenge to live rightly under God is for men, in particular, to take responsibility for their God-given roles as leaders in their homes and leaders in the community of God's people. But it is here that we come to the paradox: while I am perfectly happy to claim that it is my God-given and inalienable right to find my way from point A to point B without the use of any navigational aids, I find that I am rarely so forceful in asserting my rights to take responsibility for our family Bible reading time (for example). I don't think that my experience is mine alone. And I think that, for most men, we want to claim responsibility when it suits our egos.

On this topic, I had a very encouraging conversation with a young man the other day. I had spoken to him one week before, and he had been asked to take up a position of responsibility in a Christian ministry that he had been involved with. When I asked him if he was going to do it, he was very unsure. There were doubts about pressure and time commitments, and all the usual things. One week later I was at the meeting where he accepted the nomination for the position, and was subsequently elected by the group. When I talked to him afterwards, he said to me, “As I thought about it, I realized that all my reasons for not doing it were pretty selfish. I didn't want the responsibility or the pressure. But being selfish isn't a good reason is it?” I gave thanks to God. Here was a young man who, by the power of God's Spirit, had been persuaded that the giving up of oneself to take on responsibility is part and parcel of what it means to be a man of God.

His example and the prospect of preaching to this group of men has challenged me about what it means to be a man of God. Should Dory have said, “What is it with men and responsibility?” I am wondering, blokes: what tricks and ways do we use to abdicate from responsibility, rather than shouldering it? How do we subtly avoid responsibility, rather than trusting in God's goodness and taking responsibility?

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Last millennium, I got ordained as an Anglican minister, and Jean Penman, wife of Archbishop David Penman of Melbourne, presented each of my group of candidates for ordination with a copy of John Stott's excellent book I Believe in Preaching. David had died suddenly, but the note from Jean said that David had originally intended to present this book himself. It was a great idea to have a book entitled I Believe in Preaching, especially as, quite frankly, most of us didn't—including the leaders of the silent retreat that all the ordination candidates were invited to attend.

On this retreat, there were some exceptions to the silence: I ducked across to the local shopping mall to have a haircut and buy some Batman comics, and I used words to convey my meaning. More broadly, we were treated to some waffly, mystical readings from a Roman Catholic writer of some description. Oh, and we had private conversations with the chaplain on the retreat, during which we were compelled to use words. I took the opportunity then to suggest that instead of reading mystic waffle (I may not have used that exact term), could we maybe have a reading from the book that the Archbishop had given us?

Before this descends into a generalized rant, let's just pick one passage that the chaplain could have chosen. I open Stott's book virtually at random to discover these stirring words:

There is an urgent need for courageous preachers in the pulpits of the world today, like the apostles in the early Church who ‘were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness’. (Acts 4:31, cf. v 13) Neither men-pleasers nor time-servers ever make good preachers. We are called to the sacred task of biblical exposition, and commissioned to proclaim what God has said, not what human beings want to hear. Many modern churchmen suffer from a malady called ‘itching ears’ which induces them to ‘accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings’. (2 Tim 4:3) But we have no liberty to scratch their itch or pander to their likings. Rather we are to resemble Paul in Ephesus who resisted this very temptation and twice insisted that he ‘did not shrink from declaring’ to them what had to be declared, namely ‘anything that was profitable’ for them and indeed ‘the whole counsel of God’. (Acts 20:20, 27)

(John Stott, I Believe in Preaching, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1982, p. 299.)

Stott's book is full of passages like this. For that reason, it is dangerous. Even if you do as I just did and stumble into it at random, you can find yourself cut to pieces on the sharp glass of his biblically based exhortation. But the Melbourne Archbishop's chaplain, who was extraordinarily vague about his own views, managed to find one of the very few bits of the book that was comfy reading for someone who didn't rejoice in the gospel that John Stott continues to stand for.

The words the chaplain chose talked of the necessity and importance of being gracious to those with whom we disagree. As true and fair as Stott's words were, in the context of our silent retreat, this exhortation was all wrong. It was comfortable enough to leave even those who had no particular belief in the gospel or in preaching to remain happily undisturbed. And, as an extract chosen to represent Stott's thinking on the subject of preaching and the gospel, it was a little bit like tuning in to the weekend sports report, only to discover that the coverage was confined to footage of and commentary on the half-time entertainment.

Apart from being a bit irritated by the failure of my attempt to get something meaningful about the gospel and preaching into our ordination retreat, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration of the chaplain's tactics. It is very, very difficult indeed to read John Stott and find material where he is not vigorously urging the clear, gracious and frequently controversial preaching of the Bible and the cross of Christ. But this man had managed it, and managed it well.

Some of us, at least, viewed the chaplain's endorsement of Roman Catholic mysticism as seriously damaging to Christian faith. But we were snookered; he'd done us like a dinner. Were someone to break from the weekend's rule of silence (itself a useful political tool for stopping debate) in order to question the value of a wordless religion, they would end up looking even more like intolerant, evangelical buffoons, disavowed for their gracelessness by no less a Bible teacher than John Stott himself.

That was one of my early lessons on how to blunt the Bible's teaching: work as hard as possible to find teaching from great Bible teachers that qualifies, circumscribes, delineates and apologizes. This may seem difficult at first, but effort will be rewarded. For any Bible teacher worth his salt will always take time to qualify his statements, since that is part of teaching the Bible carefully and well.

So quote those qualifications, while working overtime to avoid the plainer expositions of the Bible's meaning. If possible, quote those Bible teachers in company with Roman Catholics, mystics, wafflers and false teachers. If you can find a Bultmann, a Moltmann, a Benedict or a Williams who has stumbled almost accidentally on some part of biblical truth (but not too closely), quote that—always making clear how you can't endorse their falsehood at every point. In so doing, you will earn for yourself a reputation for wisdom, sagacity, open-mindedness and graciousness that can only really be undermined by consistent, clear setting forth of the Lordship of Christ in the preaching of Scripture.

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It is good sometimes to know that there is nothing new under the sun. The issues of risk and reward, sense and abandon, have always been with us. And God has always been asking us the hard questions. Here is a word from 1999 (Briefing #235) that could well have been written for this week. (Actually, it's a word from about 30 AD that could have been written for this week!)

We are calculating people. We learn to be. The accountants talk about a ‘cost benefit analysis’, and as we weigh the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ we do the same thing in almost every part of life. One of the principles we learn from the financial world is spreading the risk. You never get too deeply committed to any one thing. A range of investments makes sure that if one fails, others will sustain you.

That is why I love Jesus' parables in Matthew 13:44-46. Jesus says in the kingdom there is no room for spreading the risk—it's all or nothing.

We meet a man who finds treasure buried in a field; rejoicing he sells everything to buy the field. Then we meet the merchant who finds the pearl of great price, to buy it he sells the lot. Each time Jesus says this is what the kingdom of God is like.

I love these parables because they are radical, even irrational. I can just imagine these men's family and friends (and their accountants) protesting that surely they did not have to decide so quickly, and sell everything. “You have to keep a steady head”, they say. Jesus would answer “Not about the kingdom”.

I love the word ‘joy’. The man has not done a careful calculation and discovered that things would be slightly better if he bought the field. He knows he has got a winner—and he rejoices. There is something so good that it is worth giving up everything else, and it does not hurt a bit.

I love these parables because they make me pray. I pray that I will be so clear-minded and never lose sight of the value of the kingdom. I pray that constantly I will be so decisive and always choose for the kingdom. I pray that I will rejoice as I do it.

John McClean, ‘Banking everything on God’, Briefing #235, April 1999.

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