Community...How Big is Your Table?

Another useful background article gleaned from the Internet. The page no longer seems to exist so I am unable to credit it. However the material seemed worth including.


Community...How Big is Your Table?

"Hospitality is a way of life fundamental to Christian identity. Its mysteries, riches, and difficulties are revealed most fully as it is practiced." — Christine Pohl

"Hospitality means inviting the stranger into our private space, whether that be the space of our own home or the space of our personal awareness and concern. And when we do so, some important transformations occur. Our private space is suddenly enlarged; no longer tight and cramped and restricted, but open and expansive and free." — Parker Palmer

Creating community is not something that just happens. Placing a group of people of different gender, cultures, language, theological beliefs and interests into a building, hoping there will be some interaction like molecules in a test tube in which the final product is community...is a pipe dream. It's nothing more than a gathering, like-particles, people with the same interests may attract one another forming a bond and stick, while at the end, the rest disperse into space.

For real community to happen, hospitality...must be a living reality. Hospitality must be a value that is spliced into the DNA of the community. I would even go as far as saying...you can't have one with out the other.