Theme 2 of 4

Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table

The table is the primary place where barriers fall and broken people discover that they belong to Jesus before they have to become anyone else.

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Understand

Overview

Who We Have Around Our Table

There is a Sunday morning I will never forget. I looked around our big square purple Communion table at South Melbourne Restoration Community and wept. Sitting there, breaking bread, was a woman in her eighties dressed in her white lawn-bowling outfit. Right next to her sat a gay Jewish man in leather chaps, HIV positive and curious about Jesus. Among others was a woman going through a very messy divorce and a former exotic dancer who had found Jesus in a strip club. What a symbol of the broken, diverse body of Christ. That image has stayed with me because it tells the truth about what Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table actually is: not a program, not a posture we adopt for strategic reasons, but the natural consequence of placing Jesus at the center of everything.

For sixteen years at South, we operated with an open-table policy. All the weird and wonderful were welcome. We discovered quickly that this was not a naive or permissive thing. It was the most theologically serious thing we could do, because it took the gospel at its word. Welcome needs to be seen and felt on a number of levels, not just in how we decorate. To really understand the nature of hospitality and welcome, we need to rearrange both our family life and our community worship to be centered around the person of Jesus. The table is not a metaphor we can afford to keep abstract. It is a literal place where someone has to cook, someone has to pull up an extra chair, and someone has to resist the urge to make the conversation safe.

For sixteen years at South, we operated with an open-table policy.

The deeper claim of this theme is that the table is the primary instrument of Jesus' mission. He practiced active proximity with the bungled, the broken, and the bent. He went out of his way to connect with those the holy ones of the day would never have thought of entertaining. The holiness of Jesus is a redemptive, missional, world-embracing holiness that does not separate itself from the world but rather liberates it. That is the model. That is the invitation. Who we have around our table says a lot about the Jesus we follow.

The usual question

How do we welcome people without compromising our values or appearing to endorse their choices?

What would it look like to arrange our homes and our gatherings so that people encounter Jesus before they encounter our expectations of them?

Debra Hirsch — Deb Hirsch, Redeeming Sex

The Model

The Four Habits of the Table

These four habits are not a formula. They are a description of what happens when a community genuinely places Jesus at the center and lets that center do its work. Each one requires something from us that our instinct for self-protection would rather withhold. Taken together they describe the kind of community where people who have been told the church is not for people like them discover that it might be after all.

Radical Welcome (lowering the threshold)

Most church environments communicate, through their tidiness and order, that people need to manage themselves before they arrive. Our folk at South needed to feel that no matter what else was going on in their lives, this was one place at least where they could be real. And no matter what issue they were struggling with they could be honest without risking rejection. Radical Welcome means lowering the threshold to the point where the only thing required to enter is a pulse and a willingness to sit down. It begins at the front door of our homes before it ever reaches the front door of a building.

Attentive Listening (valuing the person's story)

Christians are generally known to be tellers and not listeners. But we cannot lead, relate, or love effectively without truly listening first. The challenge before us is not to yell back but rather to listen more deeply. This means sitting with someone's story long enough to feel the weight of it, to hear what is really being said beneath the anger or the guardedness. Jean Vanier puts it plainly: true listening includes knowing how to respect the wounds and sufferings of others. The story a person tells you about their life is a gift. Receive it that way.

Shared Vulnerability (confessing our own mess)

Hospitality that conceals the host's own struggle is a performance, not a welcome. The communities that change people are the ones where the leaders are willing to go first in honesty. We are all, at the end of the day and to the end of time, beggars showing the other beggars where to get the bread. When we pretend otherwise, we create environments where people negotiate life inauthentically, with their masks firmly in place, and experience profound loneliness in the crowd. Shared vulnerability breaks that spell. It signals that this table is for people who are still being sorted out, which is to say, for everyone.

Kingdom Communion (experiencing Jesus together)

The chief role of the church is to create the right environment for all people to be able to encounter Jesus; everything else that we do is relative to this great cause. The Communion table at South was set low to the ground with cushions scattered around so people could kneel or sit for as long as they needed, and they did. Alone or with someone else, people came to meet with God, and many remained seated there until way after our gathering finished. Kingdom Communion is not a reward for those who have arrived. It is the encounter that makes arriving possible.

Bounded Set or Permeable Table

The Bounded SetThe Permeable Table

Entry conditionThe Bounded SetConform first, then belongThe Permeable TableBelong first, then journey toward transformation

What the environment communicatesThe Bounded SetA neat, well-ordered display home where people must perform to fit inThe Permeable TableA lived-in household where people can be real without risking rejection

How holiness worksThe Bounded SetHoliness as separation from the unclean, maintained by keeping a safe distanceThe Permeable TableHoliness of engagement, not exclusion, that moves toward the broken and liberates

Who leads the changeThe Bounded SetThe church corrects and controls, trying to play Holy SpiritThe Permeable TableThe church introduces people to Jesus and then gets out of the way

What sinners experienceThe Bounded SetRepulsion, the feeling of contamination, the need to wash one's hands after contact with religious peopleThe Permeable TableThe magnetic pull that drew prostitutes, tax collectors, and social outcasts to Jesus, wanting closeness

The pastoral methodThe Bounded SetLead with theological position, which makes it hard to embrace the personThe Permeable TableLead with embrace, because as one friend puts it, embrace is theology

The bounded set is hard at the edges and soft at the center: it guards the door and softens its theology once you are safely inside. The permeable table reverses this, keeping a vibrant and uncompromising Jesus at the center while leaving the edges genuinely open to whoever is still on their way.

Examine

Biblical Foundations

The Kindness That Leads Home

Romans 2:4

Historical Context

Where the Table Came From

This idea did not arrive as a theory. It grew out of a community. The seed of Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table was planted long before it had a name, in a community house in Melbourne where a grace-filled pastor named Pat sat at a kitchen table every Wednesday night to lead a Bible study. While he opened his Scofield Bible and taught, drugs might be changing hands in the living room and men could be in bed with each other upstairs. Pat never once took a moralistic, tongue-clucking approach. He knew God was at work, and he did not want to mess with that. He modeled Jesus in his openhearted posture toward those who were seen as sexually scandalous, and that posture shaped everything that followed.

1900s

Early 1980sA community house in Melbourne becomes an unlikely school of hospitality when pastor Pat leads a weekly Bible study at the kitchen table, refusing to moralize at a household of drug users, gay men, and spiritual seekers.
Late 1980sSouth Melbourne Restoration Community is founded as an inner-city church that quickly becomes known as a freak church, a last stop for those on their way out of faith and a first stop for those on their way in.
Early 1990sSouth's open-table policy is tested and confirmed as LGBT folk come to make up at least a quarter of the congregation, demonstrating that belonging before believing is not a slogan but a livable practice.

2000s

2010Untamed, co-authored with Alan Hirsch, names the theological underpinning of the open table, framing centered-set community around Jesus as the alternative to the bounded set's demand for conformity before welcome.
2015Redeeming Sex is published, carrying the open-table conviction into the specific terrain of sexuality, arguing that the church's primary role is to create the right environment for all people to encounter Jesus.

Field Studies

What the Open Table Actually Looks Like

These are not illustrations invented to make a point. They are the kind of moments that accumulate over sixteen years of keeping the table genuinely open.

Case study

The Purple Table at South

A big, square, purple Communion table set low to the ground with cushions became the literal center of South's gathering space, and one Sunday morning it held a scene that still brings tears: an eighty-year-old woman in her lawn-bowling whites sitting next to a gay Jewish man in leather chaps who was HIV positive and curious about Jesus.

Case study

Stuart, Ben, and Kingdom Values

Stuart and Ben both worked as prostitutes on a street corner near where Deb lived. When they invited her over to help them through a relational impasse, she found herself in counseling mode, teaching them to listen, to be kind, to forgive, all kingdom values, without once leading with their lifestyle.

Case study

Not on Our Shift

When a young woman in the congregation faced prison and her two children faced foster care, pastor Shirley looked slowly around the room and declared that no child belonging to their community would ever enter the foster care system, naming the congregation as brothers, sisters, parents, and guardians.

Apply

Formation

Who We Have Around Our Table

Step 1

Look honestly at your table and name who is conspicuously absent, without guilt but with genuine curiosity.

Step 2

Suspend your preformed judgments long enough to encounter the person as they actually present themselves to you.

Step 3

See the imago Dei first: every person carries something of God before you see their brokenness or their behavior.

Step 4

Invite someone you wouldn't ordinarily break bread with, a single parent, a neighbor you've kept at a safe distance, someone whose life looks very different from yours.

Step 5

Listen before you speak; let their story reach you before you decide what you have to offer them.

Step 6

Share something of your own mess, because authentic community only grows where people feel safe to be real.

Reflection

Who Is Missing from Your Table?

Who is currently missing from your dinner table, and what fear is quietly keeping them off your guest list?

When you think about the people you find it hardest to welcome, what does that reveal about where your own heart still needs to be enlarged?

Where have you engaged people primarily on the basis of their sinfulness rather than first seeing them as image bearers of God, and what did that cost the relationship?

In what ways has your community been 'welcoming' in appearance while remaining 'steeped in cultures of performance, expectation and exclusion' beneath the surface?

What would it look like for your church or household to practice belonging before believing, not as a slogan but as a lived reality this month?

Go deeper

Watch for the Distortion

How the Open Table Gets Closed

Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table is one of the most misread ideas in missional practice. The distortions tend to come from two directions: those who turn welcome into a requirement for conformity, and those who confuse radical acceptance with the abandonment of any center at all.

Welcome as a threshold test

Some communities say they have an open table but quietly operate a bounded set, people are welcome once they look, believe, or behave the right way. This is welcome as a threshold test, not genuine hospitality. The open table at South was genuinely open: all the weird and wonderful were welcome, because most people needed to feel a sense of belonging before they believed, and acceptance before they could even begin to understand what repentance or transformation might look like.

Hospitality without a center

The opposite error is to mistake openness for the absence of any center. Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table is not a centerless welcome. At South, the Communion table was placed in the middle of the gathering to symbolize Jesus, not the band or the pulpit, as the center. When Jesus is placed at the center, all people are welcome, but that welcome does not mean God affirms all that we human beings are up to. The table is open; the center is solid.

Proximity as endorsement

A common fear is that sitting with, eating with, or befriending someone whose life differs from our own communicates approval. But Jesus ate at Matthew's house with tax collectors and sinners and was accused of it by the Pharisees. He responded: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' Radical engagement and loving of the other earns us the right to speak. Keeping a safe distance earns us nothing except the right to remain strangers.

Welcoming the person but not their story

It is possible to let someone sit in the room while never actually listening to them. Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table requires attentive listening, valuing the person's story, not simply tolerating their presence. Unless people really suspend their judgments they will never truly engage the other. Welcome without listening is a performance, not hospitality.

Q&A

Table Questions Worth Asking

The Table

Does an open table mean we affirm everything everyone believes or does?

No. Being welcoming and mutually transforming moves the issue from just being about any one group to being about all people. God welcomes all, but that does not necessarily mean God affirms all that we human beings are up to. The table is open because Jesus is the center, and Jesus will change us; that is what he does.

What does an open-table policy actually look like in a real community?

At South Melbourne Restoration Community it looked like a big, square, purple Communion table set low to the ground with cushions, where an eighty-year-old in her lawn-bowling outfit could break bread next to a gay Jewish man in leather chaps who was HIV positive and curious about Jesus. It was sometimes messy. It was always grace.

Belonging Before Believing

Isn't it dangerous to let people belong before they believe or change their behavior?

The danger runs the other way. Romans 2:4 reminds us that it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance, not harshness or the wagging of the finger. We have spent centuries demanding that people clean themselves up before we offer belonging. Jesus with the woman caught in adultery offered acceptance first, 'I do not condemn you', and only then the call to go and sin no more. Acceptance preceded repentance.

How do I love someone well without feeling like I'm condoning their choices?

Start by suspending judgment long enough to see the image of God in them before you see their behavior. Our role is to look for God in them, to call forth the image, to fan it into flame. We still see the sin, but it no longer dominates our perspective; it merely qualifies it. Radical engagement and loving of the other earns us the right to speak. Proximity is not endorsement; it is the posture of Jesus.

Practical Neighboring

Where do I even start if I want to practice this in my own life?

It can be as simple as regularly inviting people for dinner, that single mum at church, or the young gay guy who has just started coming. Learning to break bread with people that you wouldn't ordinarily is one first and very practical step. Who we have around our table says a lot about the Jesus we follow. Start there.

What if my church culture makes it hard to practice radical welcome?

Welcome needs to be seen and felt on a number of levels, not just in how we decorate. The chief role of the church is to create the right environment for all people to be able to encounter Jesus. If people feel they need to perform or look a certain way, they simply will not come, or they will come wearing masks. Begin with the culture of your own home before you try to change the culture of your congregation.

About the authorDebra Hirsch

About

Next Steps

Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table

Radical Missional Hospitality and The Open Table is not a program you implement; it is a posture you inhabit. It begins with one honest question: who is missing from your table, and what would it cost you to invite them? Start with that question. Let it unsettle you. Then set an extra place.

Next: Untamed Discipleship

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