Today, when we think of the term “hospitality,” our minds often drift to various images. The over-one-billion-dollar hospitality industry. The hospitality majors in college. The hospitality ministry in our churches. The after-service coffee and donuts in the fellowship hall or the coffee cart and barista in the church lobby.

How often, if we’re honest, have we re-gifted something given to us? The truth is that many of us have done it at some point. But what motivation lies beneath this act? Is it merely a desire to rid ourselves of an unwanted item, or is there a deeper motivation—a desire to bless someone else with something we ourselves found valuable?

In the blog post, “Converge 2025: Faithfully Present, Courageously Good,” Lynn Swaner, Converge 2025 chairperson and president of Cardus, U.S., encourages leaders of Christian schools to consider the concrete ways their institutions can be courageously good and be a faithful presence in their communities. While the practices that form and deepen faith inside a community are necessary to be a faithful presence, they can’t stay there. The virtue of courage is the drive to take up these Christian practices within the school’s wider community. She draws our attention to hospitality in Paul’s letter to the Romans as a courageously good practice of Christian communities desiring to be a faithful presence since the beginning of the Church.

Christian Tradition

In Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine D. Pohl (2024) examines how the modernization of society made an impact on a once commonly shared ideal of helping others in need. She begins by explaining that “in a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all morality rested; it encompassed ‘the good.’ For the people of ancient Israel, understanding themselves as strangers and sojourners, with responsibility to care for vulnerable strangers in their midst, was a part of what it meant to be the people of God” (5). Hospitality is a practice integral to God’s desire for community through the Bible. In Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah entertained three strangers who were revealed to be angels in their midst. In Acts 2–4, during the founding of the Church, Christians sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need.

The transfer of caring for others in need from individual obligation to set-apart institutions began as early as the fourth century. With Emperor Constantine’s support behind Christianity, hospitality came to be viewed as a public service (43). Many hospitals were established to care for particularly poor local strangers who had no other resources. As Pohl explains, “Gradually, these hospitals were differentiated into separate institutions according to the type of person in need” (44). David I. Smith, in On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (2018), illustrates how hospitality shaped the community life and learning for the early University of Paris, bringing the monastic spirituality of care of the sojourning guest into the heart of the educational community (11).

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