This book is astonishing. I thought it would be a heartwarming book about how the church should be more hospitable. What I got was something far more.
It’s about living out the Gospel in authentic, sacrificial love towards others. It’s a challenging, encouraging, and convicting book suffused with grace and the Gospel. The “radically ordinary hospitality” Butterfield champions is basic Christianity. It’s how believers should care for those within and without the church. Everyone should read it.
At the core of her theology of hospitality is the conviction that everybody’s fundamental nature is as an image-bearer of their creator God. Therefore, everybody (regardless of ethnicity, gender, politics, sexual orientation, etc.) is infinitely valuable and warrants sacrificial love. That is what determines hospitality, not if somebody agrees with us or likes the same things we do. (This countercultural ontological perspective is shared by other current theologians like Sam Allberry.)
Her own life was radically changed because of such hospitality. When she was a lesbian, a leader in the LGBTQ community, and a professor writing a book against the church, she was still welcome at weekly dinners hosted by a Christian couple. Through that relationship, she came to see the truth and beauty of the Gospel.
Such hospitality goes far beyond just having people over. It’s caring for them in the beauty and messiness of everyday life. And messy it often is. She’s no Super-Christian. She is often painfully honest about her own shortcomings. She’s not writing from a position of strength, but rather from a position of weakness that is made strong only by the power of Christ through her.
Her own outworking of hospitality isn’t a template to copy but rather an example to modify to your unique situation. And she demonstrates this through the stories of how her hospitality has impacted her neighborhood, her family, her relatives, and more. (The stories about how this sacrificial hospitality impacted the lives of her neighbors Hank and Aimee and her mother and step-father were incredible and left me weeping.)
In the book, she addresses real and practical things like how such hospitality plays out in the lives of families, couples and singles; how to wisely care for those who are suspicious, stand-offish, difficult, or hostile; how to be hospitable while not neglecting the health and wellness of our immediate family; and more.
This book is eminently practical while being deeply rooted in Scripture. There is no separation between faith and hospitality. One informs the other. She makes it clear that true Christian hospitality is only possible through the Lord working through us.
The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield (Book Review)
