Butterfield titles one her chapters “God Never Gets the Address Wrong.” Your neighbors are not a coincidence. They do not live by you merely due to an accident of the housing market. God placed you next to them and he did it for a reason. I’ll admit, this is a scary proposition. We don’t get to pick our neighbors.

I recently read The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield.

My wife has been telling me to read this book for months (years?) I’m not sure why I put it off for so long. Maybe, after 13 years of having college students constantly in and out of our home, I thought I already had this hospitality-as-ministry thing down.

Well, I wish I hadn’t waited so long. This short book was a tremendous challenge and encouragement to me. I would absolutely recommend it to every single Christian who desires to be a witness in their community.

The book is essentially a call to what Butterfield calls “Radically Ordinary Hospitality” which she defines as “using your Christian home in a daily way that seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God.”

Here are three of my biggest takeaways:

1) Put the Grill in the Front Yard (or Remove Any Barriers from Hospitality)

My wife and I recently delivered invitations around our neighborhood for a cookout we were hosting. We walked along the street and slid the invitations into the mail slots by the front doors (our neighborhood doesn’t have street mailboxes). I noticed very quickly that some houses felt far less inviting than others. There were barriers that had to be overcome to approach them.

Some of the barriers were obvious and intentional: a tall fence with a gate, a no trespassing sign, a large barking dog.

Other barriers were more subtle: a house with all the shades drawn, a particularly prominent surveillance camera, a tall row of bushes blocking the front door from view. Signs that seemed to subtly communicate “we’d rather you stay away.”

In her book, Butterfield reminds us that our houses, and our lives, have barriers that can sometimes make it difficult for people to approach, even when invited.

She tells the story of a neighbor who would turn down invitation after invitation to come over for a meal. There was some invisible barrier that just made it too difficult for him to walk through their front door. He wasn’t even willing to come hang out in the back yard.

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