HOSPITALITY
HOSTING
What would have to be done before you’d feel ready to have people over?
For most of us, the list forms pretty quickly.
Clean the house. Figure out the food. Spend the money.
Start with the house. Three out of four Americans say they would feel embarrassed if someone saw the current state of their home (PR Newswire). Before people come over, we start seeing things we stopped noticing. The dishes in the sink. The chipped paint on the baseboard. The discoloration of the toilet. The stacks of mail and laundry we don’t see until we think about someone coming over.
Then there’s the food. Some of you are amazing at preparing food for guests in your home. You know what to make, how to time it, and how to present it. But for a lot of us, it’s something we never learned, and we feel completely inadequate to do it. When it comes to food prep, many of us feel more like Barney Fife than Aunt Bee.
And then there is the cost. Food is ridiculously expensive now. Many of us struggle to keep the fridge stocked for ourselves.
The thought of spending extra money on food for guests right now?
Exactly.
For many of us, the thought of inviting someone over starts the stress before the invitation ever leaves our mouths.
All of that helps explain why so many of us simply don't do it. In fact, only 17% of Americans plan to invite someone into their home in the next year (Peerspace).
This is not a critique, and I’m not saying any of that is wrong.
HOSPITALITY
I am saying that, for many of us, the word hospitality has come to mean hosting.
That does create a problem when we come to what Paul says in Romans 12:13b: “Always be eager to practice hospitality.” We may assume we already know what he means. We hear hospitality and think, “Have people over at my place.”
But Paul is not simply talking about hosting. He is talking about something much deeper.
WORD STUDY
The phrase Paul uses in Romans 12:13b is τὴν φιλοξενίαν διώκοντες.
The first word is philoxenia. It comes from two words: philos, meaning love, and xenos, meaning stranger. So at the most basic level, hospitality means love of the stranger.
That already pushes us beyond hosting, the way we usually view hospitality. Paul is not simply talking about having your friends over, the people you already like, the people who already know where the plates are.
Philoxenia is welcome extended toward the outsider. The person who is not already inside your circle. The person who does not know you yet, and whom you do not yet know.
And then Paul adds the verb, diōkō. It means to pursue, chase, hunt after. The NLT says, “Always be eager to practice hospitality,” which is a good translation, but the Greek has more force than that.
Paul is not saying, “Be open to opportunities for hospitality to the stranger if it appears.”
He is saying, “Hunt for the stranger to welcome.”
COOL SIDE NOTE:Leon Morris, one of my favorite New Testament scholars, points out something powerful in the Greek. Paul uses the same verb root in Romans 12:13 and 12:14.
Romans 12:13 has diōkontes: “pursuing hospitality.”
Romans 12:14 has diōkontas: “those persecuting you.”
Same verb. Same root. Same basic idea of pursuit.
That is not accidental. Paul is showing us what gospel-shaped people do with their energy. We pursue hospitality toward strangers, and we don’t pursue enemies to harm.
XENOPHOBIA
Remember where this command to pursue welcoming the stranger sits in Romans. The “stranger” in those Roman house churches was not always someone from far away. Sometimes it was the person across the room on the lower couch or standing by the door. The ethnic other with different cultural customs. The religious other with different food convictions and holy days.
Because secular media and pop culture often caricature Christianity as xenophobic, I want to make the following point clearly.
Paul’s use of philoxenia in Romans 12:13 is the exact opposite of xenophobia. Same root word. But the opposite posture of the heart. Philoxenia and xenophobia cannot share the same heart. The Christian’s love of the stranger kicks out fear of the stranger.
A person may become a Christian as a xenophobe. But the one who continues to follow Jesus will learn to love the stranger, the foreigner, and the “other.”
HOW GOOD WERE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS AT HOSPITALITY?
Julian the Apostate was emperor of Rome from 361 to 363 AD, and he had a double obsession: kill Christianity before it spread across the empire and revive pagan worship of Rome’s traditional gods.
Julian already knew that previous emperors had tried violence. They had thrown Christians to lions, burned them, imprisoned them, and executed them. And somehow, the church just kept winning more converts and growing. So Julian went a different route. He asked, “Why do more and more people across the empire keep converting to Jesus?”
In 362 AD, Julian wrote a letter to Arsacius, the pagan high priest of Galatia. In it, he identifies Christian hospitality to strangers as one of the chief reasons Christianity was spreading and outpacing paganism. Then he encouraged Arsacius to teach pagans to imitate Christian hospitality so paganism could regain ground.
Emperor Julian was hit with a spear in battle and died. His Roman pagan revival died in the dirt with him. The church kept growing.
THEOLOGY AND MISSION
Romans 12:13 is not a random command. It is an outworking of everything Paul has been teaching in the first eleven chapters. The gospel creates one new family from people who would not naturally belong together: those with different histories, customs, religious backgrounds, and ethnicities. Strangers. Foreigners.
So when Paul says, “Always be eager to practice hospitality,” he is telling the Roman church to live out the theology he has already taught them. God welcomed them as outsiders. Now they are to be people who welcome outsiders.
And that mattered for the mission too. Near the end of Romans, Paul tells them he wants their help to take the gospel west, all the way to Spain. For that to happen, hospitality would be essential.
The mission moved through people.
Through homes.
Across dinner tables.
Through the pursuit of welcoming strangers.
Hospitality was the infrastructure for the gospel moving outward.
WHAT ABOUT US?
From our context, hospitality is about us. What will they think of my housekeeping? Will they judge the size of my apartment? Will my food spread impress them? How much will it cost me? We can see how we have arrived at this in America. Our individualism causes us to be primarily concerned with what others think about us individually.
No wonder 83% of us have no intention of inviting someone over.
For the gospel, hospitality is about others, not us. Welcoming and befriending the stranger means I stop making my image the center of the invitation. The question is no longer, “How will I be seen?” The question becomes,
Who needs to be seen?
Who needs to be noticed?
Who needs to be welcomed?
Who needs a seat, a conversation,
a meal, a friend, a family, a place to belong?
That is the shift Paul is calling us to make. Hospitality moves us from protecting our image and convenience to pursuing and welcoming the stranger.
MORE THAN OUR HOMES
And of course, hospitality is more than having someone over to our house. That was certainly part of the first-century context, in which lodging and inns were scarce, expensive, and morally sketchy. So the gospel moved through ordinary Christians who opened their homes to traveling believers. Hospitality in the home was the infrastructure for the mission. (F. F. Bruce)
We live in a society full of people who are strangers within feet of each other.
Alone together.
My favorite example: fitness centers filled with people wearing earbuds, giving occasional head nods to strangers and knowing more about their favorite podcaster or influencer than their neighbor.
So in our context, hospitality expands beyond our living rooms. It reaches into our workplaces, the restaurants we eat in, our kids’ activities, and the ordinary places we move through every week.
I am not using this passage to pressure you to invite someone to your house for dinner.
Although God may be.
Paul is discipling us to live in a spiritual posture that pursues strangers and welcomes them into our lives.
Love of the stranger embodies the gospel Paul preached. It protects the unity of the church. And it serves the mission by keeping the gospel relationally focused outward.
Hospitality can start as simply as paying attention.
Walking toward.
Learning a name.
Asking a second question.
Sitting with someone who came alone.
Remembering what they told you last time.
These are Christian moves that make the strangers around us feel less invisible.
And this is where hospitality becomes more than friendliness.
Small conversations can become meaningful conversations.
Meaningful conversations become spiritual conversations.
And spiritual conversations become the place where the Good News of Jesus is heard.
Hospitality moves our faith out of our private lives and into the lives of strangers with questions and a God-shaped hole in their heart. People who have been living alone, together.
And I am motivated by this because the Good News is so good, because the bad news is so bad.
People are not just lonely.
People are not just disconnected.
They are spiritually lost.
They are separated from God.
People do not just need better habits and better community.
They need the spiritual new start that only Jesus can give.
And we know that because we needed it too.
We were not saved because we were insiders who naturally belonged.
We were saved because God moved toward us in Christ.
God welcomed us when we were strangers.
God brought us into his family by grace.
So now we move toward the stranger.
Because the stranger can find what we found.
The outsider can become family.
The spiritually dead can be made spiritually alive.
And the same grace that welcomed us can welcome them too.
Hunt for a stranger to welcome!
©2026 Greg McNichols, All rights reserved.
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