The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World by Rosaria Butterfield
Rosaria Butterfield’s book on hospitality is challenging and inspiring. If you haven’t read her testimony, you may want to read it before this book (The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: A English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith). In her book on hospitality, Butterfield challenges the church to live out the Christian faith in a post-Christian world, which requires opening our homes to our neighbors, what she calls “radical ordinary hospitality.” Although as you read the book, you’ll probably resonate more with “radical” rather than “ordinary,” since the hospitality she describes seems far from ordinary. I read this book with other women in my church for our summer book club. I live in New England, which is different than the south, so it is fair to say that most of us felt it would be a challenge to practice this kind of “radical ordinary hospitality” in our neighborhoods. However, the book generated great conversations about what hospitality might look like in our neighborhood and church community. Butterfield calls believers to live out the gospel lovingly and sacrificially through “ordinary hospitality,” and she rightly highlights the travesty of brothers and sisters who dine alone on the Lord’s Day. We can do better. Her book is an invitation to live out the gospel in authentic Christian community. I highly recommend it.
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2019 Christianity Today Book Award in the Christian Living & Discipleship Category
What did God use to draw a radical, committed unbeliever to himself? Did God take her to an evangelistic rally? Or, since she had her doctorate in literature, did he use something in print? No, God used an invitation to dinner in a modest home, from a humble couple who lived out the gospel daily, simply, and authentically.
With this story of her conversion as a backdrop, Rosaria Butterfield invites us into her home to show us how God can use this same “radical, ordinary hospitality” to bring the gospel to our lost friends and neighbors. Such hospitality sees our homes as not our own, but as God’s tools for the furtherance of his kingdom as we welcome those who look, think, believe, and act differently from us into our everyday, sometimes messy lives―helping them see what true Christian faith really looks like.