The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, by Rosaria Butterfield {A Book}

 The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in our Post-Christian World, by Rosaria Butterfield. (Crossway, 2018)

I just finished reading this book and it is an excellent read, giving me much to mull over (which is why I’m writing this -- to help me process it all!)

This book has drastically redefined my view of hospitality.

This book is not what you might expect of a book on hospitality: there are no snippets of practical tips for making your time with your guests stress-free. Neither is there an appendix of tried and true recipes.

This book is not a scholarly essay on Scripture’s usage of “hospitality“ and “the Gospel.”

Instead, Butterfield compellingly weaves poignant personal examples throughout her book to delineate an earnest plea for the Body of Christ to practice radically ordinary hospitality.

Butterfield defines radically ordinary hospitality as the manner of “using your Christian home in a daily way that seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God. It brings glory to God, serves others, and lives out the gospel in word and deed.” (Butterfield, 31)

Yes, Butterfield does primarily refer to hospitality in the context of opening our homes to strangers, neighbors, and believers alike in order to gather ‘round the dinner table for food and intentional spiritual edification.

But it’s not just about the food.

In Butterfield’s call for believers to practice radically ordinary hospitality, she implores us to open our homes in such a way that the watching world would see what the Gospel is all about—that the cross changes lives, that the cross gives answers to the hard questions in life, and that through the cross, Christ’s love is extended to all alike.

This kind of hospitality peels back the fronts of social status, education, race, sexuality, financial position, political parties, and even theological camps that so often divide us. In turn, this kind of hospitality powerfully communicates the often-ignored truth that we are all made in the image of God.

This reality--that we are all image bearers of the Most High God—was perhaps the single-most-impacting point for me in the entire book. That all human beings are image bearers has significant implications for how we practice hospitality, and has made me pause to consider its weightiness.
It is the reality that we are all image-bearers that becomes a driving motive to practice radical ordinary hospitality, and as we do so, it exposes the world’s lie that “being a human being means both more and less than being an image bearer of a holy God.” (Butterfield, 60).

Grasping the significance that all are made in His image gives radical hospitality motivation because it enables us to see the divinely-imposed worth of the drug addict living on the streets, to have blood-bought compassion on those in prison, to extend a comforting hand to the dying, even when they have rejected Christ their whole life, and to give a home to those children whose homes are shattered.

Now that is radical, and Butterfield argues that it is a very real and practical aspect of hospitality.

Butterfield takes hospitality one step further and boldly suggests that “radically ordinary and daily hospitality is the basic building block for vital Christian living. Start anywhere. But do start.” (Butterfield, 220)

I take that statement to mean that practicing radically ordinary hospitality is one of the most straightforward, basic, and uncomplicated ways to live out and articulate the message of the gospel before a watching world.

This whole book was convicting--on many different levels.

It spoke to my apathy in witnessing to the unsaved.

It spoke to my stinginess in sharing what I have with those around me.

It spoke to my failure to see all human beings as being made, by God, in the image of God and to see their divinely-imposed worth as such.

It spoke to my laziness in intentional hospitality to those outside the circle of those I call my friends...or just plain hospitality.

Hospitality is hard, because, as we all know, it is about more than just food.

In fact, food is the relatively easy part of hospitality.

Practicing hospitality is about seeing the worth of being an image-bearer and inviting such image-bearers into my home--my “sacred ground” where I live my private life, my safe-haven to retreat to when bombarded by life‘s problems.

My home is also the place where I am most vulnerable.

Yes, this idea of inviting strangers into my home to make them neighbors, and by God’s grace, then members of the family of God, is a scary thought.

Allowing them to see that I struggle with sin and that I am in constant need of God’s grace is scary.

Yet it one worth seriously considering.

If doing such a thing were simply for the sake of say, making new friends or business contacts, I’d say forget it. I can do that at the coffee shop or in the park, without them seeing my personal life and exposing myself the most vulnerable way possible.

But practicing radical ordinary hospitality isn’t just about making friends or broadening business circles.

Butterfield argues that this is about the Gospel.

And so I sit here, praying that the Lord would prod my heart to move beyond conviction to taking baby steps towards making strangers my neighbors and neighbors part of the family of God.

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If you'd like a taste of what the book is like, listen to this podcast from The Gospel Coalition Women's 2018 Conference.