Spiritually, this closedness also can extend to God. Congregations closed to other persons may also be closed to God - the God who is an actor in human history and human society. It appears that life is all up to us, so we meet and talk and plan and work at what we want to do. A God who chooses and calls and gifts and sends the Church on the divine mission. A God who claims us in baptism, and commissions us as disciples and ambassadors to make God's appeal to repent, believe and follow.
Hospitality is the act of welcoming the stranger into one's own space.
In her book Soul Feast, Marjorie Thompson commends hospitality as an important means of grace, one of the ways that God's love gets into our lives. It takes practice, born of a commitment to open our lives to God and to others. It is sad to find churches that would rather be closed, securely in control of their destiny, and die. This is especially so when these same churches are in communities inhabited by those who have never heard the gospel of Christ nor encountered the love of God made flesh in the followers of Jesus. As occupant of the Chair of Town and Country Ministries, he teaches church administration, with a concentration on rural and small church contexts.