A reflection by Robert Hendrickson, Chief of Discipleship Initiatives.
Churches spend a great deal of time thinking about welcome. We train greeters, improve signage, print visitor cards, perfect websites, and make sure someone knows where to find the nursery and the coffee.
All of that matters.
Hospitality is a Christian virtue, and no one should have to navigate a Byzantine ecclesiastical obstacle course simply to find the bathroom!
But eventually we have to ask a deeper question: Welcome to what?
When the Church welcomes someone, we are not simply welcoming them to an organization, a Sunday activity, or a community of people with similar interests. We are welcoming them into the Body of Christ. And that makes Christian welcome unlike almost any other welcome in our lives.
Most welcomes leave us fundamentally unchanged. A restaurant welcomes us and asks what we would like. A hotel welcomes us and tries to make us comfortable. A store welcomes us hoping to discover what we want and provide it. Much of our culture has trained us to understand welcome in precisely these terms: You are important. Your preferences matter. How can we serve you?
The Church certainly should care about people. We should listen carefully, practice generous hospitality, and pay particular attention to those who have too often been ignored or excluded. But the welcome of the Church ultimately leads somewhere very different.
At the font, we discover that our lives have been joined to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the altar, we stretch out our hands and receive a life we could never provide for ourselves. In confession, prayer, Scripture, service, and the sacramental life of the Church, we slowly discover that Christianity is not primarily about fitting Jesus into the lives we have already constructed. It is about allowing Christ to give us a new life altogether.
The great promise of Christian welcome is not simply, “There is a place here for you.” It is also, “God is making something new of us together.”
That is why belonging to the Church can never be a consumer relationship. Consumers remain at the center of their own stories. They evaluate communities according to whether their needs are being met, their preferences honored, and their expectations fulfilled. But discipleship steadily displaces us from the center. Christ becomes the center. His life becomes our life. His mission becomes our mission. His Body becomes our body.
This is the strange sacramental reality into which we welcome people.
We do not invite newcomers merely to attend what we are already doing. We invite them into a people being formed by grace: washed in Baptism, fed at the Eucharist, forgiven when we fail, shaped by prayer, and sent into the world to love and serve in Christ’s name. And, importantly, newcomers change us too. Every person God joins to the Body brings gifts that the rest of the Body needs.
Perhaps, then, the deepest Christian welcome is not, “We hope you find what you are looking for.”
It is something far more daring: Welcome to the Body of Christ.
Welcome to a life that is no longer entirely your own. Welcome to the astonishing grace of discovering that, in losing what we imagined was the center (us), we find ourselves part of a story infinitely larger than our own.
Welcome to the Church.