Strangers part 2

“…missional communities are called to cross society’s boundaries, to eat as Jesus ate, to be a people of openness and acceptance, of gratitude and generosity.  Missional communities of hospitality do not seek the homogeneous oneness hoped for by modernity, nor do they celebrate the fragmented diversity of postmodernity. They welcome and nurture the incredible richness and particularity of perspectives, backgrounds and gifts but always within the embrace of God’s reconciling unity.

            Modern communities maintain a façade of unity and harmony by eliminating the strange and cultivating the familiar, by suppressing dissimilarity and emphasizing agreement. The traumatic and tragic events of human life are glossed over, ignored, or explained away. Those who are strange—other than we are—are either excluded or quickly made like us. ‘People with whom we cannot achieve intimacy, or with whom we do not want to be intimate, are squeezed out.’ These images portray homogeneous communities of retreat where persons must be protected from one another as well as from outsiders, and where reality is suppressed and denied due to fear and anxiety.

            Missional communities, shaped by faith in Jesus Christ…represent a different image. Rather than seeing themselves as one more civic institution offering religious goods and services to individuals (or society), such communities take the time to create gracious and caring space where they can reach out and invite their fellow human beings into a new relationship with God…Hostility is converted into hospitality, strangers into friends, and enemies into guests. In a world increasingly ‘full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God,’ missional communities such as these evidence the good news of Jesus Christ. The welcoming news of the reign of God shapes them into welcoming communities, open to all creation.”^[1] …particularly the stranger.

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^[1] Guder, Darrell L., Missional Church, pp.179-180