Radically Ordinary Hospitality

We are facing in our day a different kind of pandemic, a pandemic of isolation and loneliness.

Chris and Elizabeth McKinney have written a book about that and they say that message is resonating with a lot of people. My sister's been reading the book and she said that they were at the park and she started interacting with this other couple. And the wife turned to her after talking for about 20 minutes and said, you know, this is the most interaction I've had with someone in two years as far as like social interaction with someone. And a lot of people are pretty isolated.

And if we're honest, sometimes we're lonely. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. In a culture where loneliness and isolation are a reality, Chris and Elizabeth McKinney say we have a lot of ministry opportunities that have opened up to us.

We'll talk more about those today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Is it proper to say you are convicted by something if after you were convicted, you didn't do anything to change? Do you know? Bob, why do you have to bring up these hard questions? You know, Bob, I don't know. I always do when I'm convicted.

No, you don't. A couple of years back, we had one of our friends Rosaria Butterfield as a guest on Family Life Today. She had just written a book called The Gospel Comes with a House Key. Such a good book. It is a great book. It's all about hospitality.

It's about she calls it radical, ordinary hospitality. I was convicted by that. I was convicted. And I'm thinking that was two years ago. So what'd you do? That's the point. That's why I'm asking. I was convicted and I don't know that anything has dramatically changed. Oh, wait.

So you're in sin. OK, keep going. So one of the things we asked her about was how do you begin the process or what has worked for her? And let me just play back for you guys what she described that I thought that's a great idea. And it's one of those things that we still don't do and haven't done.

But here's what she said. If you want your neighbors to come to Christ, some of your neighbors, their lives are deeply burdened by both abuse and also by addiction. And so if you want people who are struggling in those areas to come to your home for dinner, for example, issuing an invitation three Tuesdays from yesterday doesn't help very much because, you know, quite frankly, they don't know if they're going to be sober or safe that day. But simply saying, hey, every Thursday night, we're going to have an open house and buy open house. I mean, you know, here's what we do because we do this every Thursday night.

I cook soup and bread. Not very glamorous. You don't like it. Now, bring something. Hold it. Is it minestrone?

Sometimes it is. That's one of my favorites, because you know what? It's cheap and it's easy. So I cook soup and bread. Neighbors come in.

And then at a certain point, the children gather the plates. They go up to the sink and then the Bibles and the coffee cups come down. So it's not an open house in that we're going to talk about politics.

It's not an open house in that we're going to talk about plummeting housing values. At some point, the conversation is going to switch and we're going to bring our conversation to Jesus so that Jesus can enter into the conversation, not to stop it, but to deepen it. So I hear that again and I think I'm convicted, Bob. That's genius. You're convicted that we, Marianne, and I should have people over our house.

No, I'm convicted that we should. I mean, like you said, it's like, wow, you hear that and you're inspired. Yeah. And it's what we're talking about this week. And we've got some friends who are joining us to do this. Chris and Elizabeth McKinney are with us on Family Life Today. Guys, welcome back. Thank you. Thanks. The McKinney's live in Columbia, Missouri.

Yep. Been on staff with CREW, Campus Crusade for Christ, for 20 years. You are focused now on how to promote ministry evangelism in the community, not on the campus.

I mean, there's great stuff going on on the Missouri campus, but you guys are focused on Columbia and Jefferson City and that whole area. And you're focused on your neighbors, not just as a part of your ministry, but as a part of your life. Have you ever thought about like every Tuesday night, dinner at your house, soup and bread? You know, I haven't.

And I love that Rosaria does that. But I think neighboring, it's not a one size fits all. It's not a cut and paste kind of cookie cutter type thing. It's going to look very different depending on your wiring, your personality, if you're an introvert or an extrovert, your season of life. I think even in our marriage, Chris is an introvert. I'm an extrovert. And we we come to neighboring and we we bring our own kind of style to it.

Well, what's that look like? Did you guys ever disagree? Like, do we have to have people over again? Oh, I forgot.

You guys are perfect. But was there a point like, were you both gamers in this whole concept of neighboring? Yeah, I mean, I think because it started off with just wanting to get to know our neighbors and have fun. I think we both had a desire to want to help build community in our neighborhood. We knew we needed that community. We knew our neighbors needed that community.

And by God's grace, I think we kind of both found our niche in it. So Elizabeth did a lot of the inviting, the connecting, the organizing as the extrovert would do. And I got to you know, it's not like I don't talk to anybody, but I got to help a lot with the serving. You know, I got to sling cotton candy for kids for a couple hours and build into some of those relationships that I had kind of established already.

And on the StrengthsFinder, you have context, which is so neighboring for you, instead of kind of every four years having to reestablish, like with college industry, kind of meeting all these new people all the time, all the small talk. You love the ongoing building into relationships with people that are sustained over time. So there isn't a Tuesday night at the McKinney's house, but there is some kind of rhythm. Talk about what's that look like? You guys are the models of what we're all trying to do.

I mean, you wrote a book on it, so you must be an expert. But no, seriously, is there some kind of rhythm that you sort of have laid out? There is for us. But we in our book, our book is more of a it's really a Bible study.

So we don't really lay out like this is the prototype for neighboring in our book. We give a lot of different ideas for things you can try. But our personal rhythm, just because it works for us, is we do love the parties. I love a party.

I'm a sucker for a party. So we do kind of follow the school calendar year where we in the spring, where people have been hibernating all winter and we're all lonely and we haven't seen anybody in the dead of winter. We kind of start off with an Easter egg hunt and we have a team of people who we used to think we lived in white suburbia until we started neighboring. And we learned, oh, we have neighbors who want to help with these with these events that are Chinese. Or we have we have a lot of people with an Indian heritage or we had I think at our Easter egg hunt committee, we had a mom from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, China, India. I mean, it was all these the world helping with these Easter egg hunts. And then we do a bite of the world food fest in the spring where people bring different dishes from their heritage and kids can come.

You get a little bite from around the world. And that's a lot of fun. We do our block party. Of course, we do a Fourth of July bike parade. We do Halloween. We're doing a turkey trot this year where we're going to space out and we provide hot chocolate and doughnuts.

And it's an outdoor type of thing. Last year, we did a neighbors giving where instead of friends giving after Thanksgiving, we said to some of our neighbors from India, we'll do leftovers at our house. You guys bring your leftovers. We'll have ours, which we were obviously the we came out the winners in that because they brought chicken masala and all these different different dishes that were amazing. We had leftover turkey and mashed potatoes. So but we had pie, too.

But that was a lot of fun. And then we do normally we're not doing it this year, but we do like a holiday open house where we take pictures with Santa. And there's a hayride with tour the neighborhood lights and that type of thing.

So here's here's the great thing about what you're saying. We hear Rosaria and her every Tuesday night. We hear you guys and your four or five neighborhood festivals that you do. This can really be what is what's your rhythm? What's your personality?

What's your temperament? How can you be intentional about having some kind of a connection with your neighbor? And when we use the term neighbor, you guys are this is one of the things you talk about. We're not talking about neighbor in a in a conceptual sense, right? Right. You're talking about your neighbor, neighbor, the real thing, right?

Your literal next door neighbor. Imagine that. Yeah. Well, I like that because as you were saying, Elizabeth, you like a good party. That's part of who you are.

And so to gather periodically to have a good party would be your personality. And then because I was thinking, I don't know how we would have done that. As I'm listening to all of this, I'm thinking I think sometimes it may require giving up something because our kids were in sports almost every night of the week. You know, and I think it's important to ask God, God, what could this look like for me? Because we're called to love the people around us. We're called to love our neighbors.

But to also pray and ask God, God, what does this look like? Even as a family with young kids in the house, kids, what could this look like for us to get to know our neighbors? Yeah, we, you know, we, you know, our kids have grown up doing this and so they kind of have an idea. But even just a small step that you could take with your family is every night. Not, you know, most nights when we do prayers, I know for me especially, we always pray that, you know, our neighbors would experience God's love and come to know Jesus. So it's just it's a prayer that we have that our kids are used to hearing.

So even, you know, when you think about taking just small steps in your neighboring, just praying as a family, starting off, you know, is a great way to start neighboring, right? Yeah. And you said in the book it could be just these small because when you were talking about the parties, there's part of me going, wow, those are big.

Those are epic. I'm not sure I could pull some of that off. Honey, you would be really good at that.

I would like it. Bob, so would you. If somebody else organized it, I'd be the clown or whatever.

You'd be the circus master. No, I'm thinking because there's a whole section of your book I thought is very important for us to understand. And it's you can't love your neighbor if you don't see them. And I've often thought, you know, I see my neighbor across the street, but I don't because I'm busy. I've worked all day.

I can, you know, I've said on our stage and I haven't done it, but I've said to our church, you should do this. You know, you're pulling in from work and Bob across the streets in his driveway, don't go in your house. Take five minutes, not 30, three to five minutes, at least walk to the end of your driveway and say, hey man, what's up, man?

How you doing? Or pretend you're getting the mail and just strike up a conversation. That five minutes could just, you know what I'm saying?

And I've even said this, tell me if you agree. And I don't know, this is probably a misuse of a Bible story, but when Jesus asked the woman at the well for a drink, you think, wow, what's he doing asking her for something? And I thought, if you really want to love your neighbor, ask him for something. You would think, no, I want to wait for them to ask me, no, borrow a tool. And I've spent many minutes in my neighbor's garage getting a tool that they have. And the next thing you know, you're not just returning a tool or you end up in a conversation.

You never know where it's going to go. Is that how you see your neighbor? Oh, yeah. I mean, asking for help is one of the best neighboring tools, ways to neighbor out there. You can, you know, there's a story. There was a guy that I was coaching. We call it neighbor coaching, where we try to help people, you know, kind of begin to figure this out. And he, we were talking about his neighbor and I was like, you know, ask for help, ask for something. And so when we got back together, he came back and told a story where he needed his yard aerated. But he didn't have a pickup truck and he didn't want to hire somebody to do it. And his neighbor had a pickup truck.

He kind of knew him, but not super well. So he just said, I'm just going to ask for help. So he goes over and says, Hey, would you mind helping me go pick up an aerator and help me aerate my lawn? And you have the pickup.

Can we use your pickup? And the guy was, his neighbor was so excited to help. Like we love to help.

It's fun to, it's fun to help and it's, but it's vulnerable to ask for help. So he took that step. They went and got the aerator. They got it. They, they did his lawn.

They took it back. They spent the whole day together. And then this guy that I was helping neighbor, you know, his neighbor coaching, he said, he said, well, thank you so much. And as a way to say thank you, we want to have you and your family over for dinner as a way to say thank you, which, so that led to another opportunity to interact with his neighbor. And so, yes, asking for help is a great way to get to know your neighbor and to start those relationships.

Recently, my sister's been reading the book and she said that they were at the park with their kids and they, it was like a neighborhood park and she started interacting with this other couple. And the wife turned to her after talking for about 20 minutes and said, you know, this is the most interaction I've had with someone in two years as far as like social interaction with someone. And, you know, she probably works where she comes home from work. And, and if you don't work with a lot of people or if you work from your home, a lot of people are pretty isolated and lonely. And if we're, and if we're honest, sometimes we're lonely. And that's where I think neighboring, sometimes we kind of get this idea of like, oh, you know, we, the neighbors need us. We need, we need to reach out to them, but we can meet that need in each other's lives, too. Well, answer this. How do you love your neighbor?

When you don't like them. Now, we've never had this. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, but not. You know, it's like we're called, we were talking about this vision of, you know, our address is not an accident. So God has placed us in place. Their address is not an accident.

So here we are. We know God wants us to love them. And yet they bug us. You know, they play music too loud. Their dog poops in our front, their kid poops in our front yard. It's like, it's like they sort of irritate me, you know, and again, I'm being hypothetical here because I've never in my life experienced it.

No, seriously. And so you see them walking towards your driveway or you see them in their driveway and, you know, you hear me in your head. You go, go spend five minutes with them. And you're thinking, I don't want to.

I'd much rather go in and spend five minutes with my kids. How do you love the unlovable? Well, we call that the non-neighbor, really. And sometimes we don't want to admit it, but maybe we're the non-neighbor. I think of all the bikes and scooters and socks my kids leave in our driveway and the neighbor's driveway. And I'm like, you know, we are the non-neighbor sometimes.

But really in the parable of the Good Samaritan where Jesus, he highlights a man who stops and is the Good Samaritan. He is a neighbor to someone who's very unlike him. And I think in our culture where we're so polarized and there's so much hostility, we kind of have an idea when our pastor says, love your neighbor. If we're honest, it's kind of our family and friends and the people we like. Those are the people who we think of when we think love my neighbor.

I don't necessarily want to think of someone that I don't like or someone that might be different from me in a certain regard. And I think it's important as we neighbor, we can get outside of that bubble. Yeah, we also in thinking about this came up with this idea of this neighboring grid and how to see people. And we've noticed Francis Schaeffer, you know, said that we are all glorious ruins. So we have this element of glory because we're created in the image of God. But then we also have this ruin that's brought by the fall in both our neighbors and in ourselves. And so the way to see people in our neighbors through a gospel lens is to see them and ourselves as glorious ruins. And so when we only see the things that might be ruined or might annoy us, you know, it may not be because it's ruined, but just might be a different preference on something. We judge them. They become a non-neighbor. We find it hard to find common ground and we don't see them or interact them.

But on the flip side, you could also see just kind of this glory part and not remember that they also are struggling. And when that happens, you just see this like perfect image of your neighbor and you're like, man, they have it all together. They don't need me.

They don't want me to interact with them in a wave smile. They're like the Joneses. They're the Joneses. And you forget that they have needs in their lives as well.

There's ruin and there's stuff that's happening there. But to see people well, the way Jesus saw people. Don't forget about the invisible neighbor. Right. Right. That's when we don't see them at all. They're just faceless. They're nameless. Right.

That's the pulling into the garage and we don't even see our neighbors. Yeah. But when you see people as glorious ruins, the glory can motivate your respect for that person. And you can say, because they're created in the image of God, surely there is a point of common ground that I can find. And there's grace for them, like I want grace for myself. And you see the ruin, which can motivate your compassion. You know, you want compassion for yourself for the ways that you're broken. Well, your neighbor wants that as well.

And so kind of trying to pull those two together. It can be hard, especially with people who don't think the way you do, vote the way you do, look the way you do. But we're called out into that. Have you sensed any impact on your family or on your marriage as you try to live out this, we are placed for a purpose vision? Does it help your marriage? Does it hurt your marriage? Does it impact your family at all? Does it impact your parenting or how you're given a vision to your kids? Is it a good thing?

Is it an intrusive thing? I think, you know, as a family, like, you know, you hear of mission, you could take a missions trip with your family. I mean, that can be challenging to do right if you want to bring all your kids. And a lot of times I think we think of missions as something that's going on out there. But if you begin to see yourself as placed for a purpose, your family, you can be missionaries right where you are. If you begin to talk about it with your kids, pray about it with your kids and just say, hey, God has put us here and he's put our neighbors around us, too. And yeah, maybe it's kind of, you know, we don't understand all the ins and outs, but we could maybe love on them and do this together as a family.

So that's I think neighboring provides a way for families to experience being on mission. And that's messy sometimes. But that's good, too. Like our daughter, Ginger, one of my neighbors came up to me in the last year and said, oh, Ginger, she's been asking me if I've been reading the Bible to the boys. And I was, oh, okay, what'd you say?

And this is at the mailbox. And she said, well, I told her no, I'm not doing that. But I appreciate whenever she talks to them about what she's learning from the Bible. And I was so uncomfortable in that moment.

And that was I think it was a good uncomfortable. Because your kids are getting a vision. Exactly.

If you talk about it and never do it, it's one thing. But when they see mom and dad doing it, we had when we moved in our house where now is 30 years ago, right? We had the orneriest neighbor. Yeah. A widowed lady who was so mean.

Yeah. Just she was just mean. I mean, one day she made one little comment to me about my sprinkler touching her driveway. Which meant the water would just lap over when it got the edge of my grass.

I'm like, so I just look at it like you don't want the water to touch your driveway. I wanted to go, it rains, you know, but I said, okay. I don't remember her name.

It's been so long. But I remember we just it's almost like you made fun of her because she sat in her front window and she was that neighbor looking out. And if anything happened, she'd come out the front door and yell at your kids. And so I remember we said to our boys who were young at the time, we're going to go over and rake her leaves. What?

Yeah. What is that going over there? She's going to yell at us. I don't know what she's going to do. We're going to go over there and love her. And we went over and she yelled at us. She did. She came out and said she didn't say to stop, but she said we were doing it all wrong. Right.

So the boys are like, see, we shouldn't have come over. We raked them for free. And this wasn't one time.

It was multiple times. And then we thought, oh, nothing happened. She never felt love. She never got nicer. And then one day, like a year, 18 months later, I was on my front porch and I heard this loud thud next door.

And I look over. She had a side garage and she's laying on the cement in her garage. It was the middle of winter, wasn't it?

It was slippery. I think she slipped on ice and I ran over and she's almost passed out and I pick her up. I'd never been in her house. She'd never let anybody in her house and opened her garage door and walked in her house. And she sort of came to and realized her neighbor was standing over and what had happened. And she was so thankful. And she just said, thank you. It was the first conversation we'd ever really had. And then she goes, let me take you downstairs.

I go, no, that's fine. I want to show you something. We walk downstairs and she shows me her husband's workbench that she has never moved a thing since he died.

Oh, wow. She had never showed anybody this. And I now get that intimate moment with her because I was her neighbor. And we heard the story of her son in his 30s recently having passed. And so there's always a story behind a story. And she ended up giving you all kinds of stuff. Yeah. I mean, she's long gone now, but yeah, gave me a snowblower and I became one of her friends. Yeah.

And I did not like the woman. Yeah. You never know.

And then you realize it's just something underneath is really tender. Yeah. You know, but again, it's just a reminder of everything you're saying is everybody longs for a good neighbor. Yes. And we who are followers of Christ should be that neighbor.

And here's a takeaway I think for all of us. In the same way that we have come to use the noun Google as a verb, we Googled it. We need to use the noun neighbor as a verb as well.

And you've done that. Neighboring is how we've talked about it here and say, okay, part of what we're called to do by God, part of the commission we've been given by God is to love our neighbor. Neighbor. And that's neighbor ring is loving your neighbor.

So you want to hear something? I'll close with this because I think, Bob, you just set this up and I'm sure you're familiar with this, but John 1 14. I'll read it says the word became flesh, talking about Jesus, and made his dwelling among us. And I remember when I studied that in the original, it means he pitched his tent among us. I did a sermon years ago called Move into the Neighborhood. That's what Jesus did. He moved into our neighborhood.

He didn't stand up in the sky and say, I love you. He moved in and became what one of us. He's called us to be. We are to move in and incarnate Jesus to our neighbors.

You guys have modeled this and now you're giving us instruction on it in your book. Thank you for being here and thanks for sharing with the audience. Thank you so much. And for those who are inspired, motivated, convicted, convicted, go to our website, go to familylifetoday.com and get a copy of Chris and Elizabeth's book, Placed for a Purpose, a simple and sustainable vision for loving your next door neighbors. We've got it in our Family Life Today resource center. You can order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order. Again, the website familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. That's 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today.

Ask for your copy of the book Placed for a Purpose by Chris and Elizabeth McKinney. David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here with us. And what we've been talking about today, I know this is something that is – you're very passionate about this. You know, it's really cool for me to have you here from Chris and Elizabeth. When I joined staff with CREW, Elizabeth and I joined staff together, and we were in a group together in the seminary class that we were taking, and it has been so fun through the years to keep up with her and Chris as they have grown this heartbeat for knowing that they were placed in the community they've been placed with to share life, to be Jesus in that place, as John 1 says, to take up resident in that place and to reflect Jesus in that place. And it reminds me of Acts 17, because I think that's exactly what they have lived out and what their book is about, and it's exactly what every follower of Jesus gets to participate in. In Acts 17, verse 26, and God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined at allotted period of times and the boundaries of their dwelling places that they should seek God and perhaps find their way toward him. The reality is that God has placed you exactly where you've been put.

The exact boundaries of your dwelling place, the neighborhood you live in, the spheres of influence that you have, God is the one that determined those, and we get to show up as ambassadors of Christ representing him to those people that God has put around us. You're called to those people. I would encourage you to pray and put into application some of the things that Chris and Elizabeth have shared with us, whatever God's prompted you with.

Take a step of faith, trusting that it is from the Holy Spirit, and see how God's going to show up. Yeah, that's a great challenge, David. Thank you for that. And we hope you and your family have a great weekend.

Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church on this resurrection weekend as we focus on the resurrection of Christ at Easter. And I hope you can join us back on Monday when we're going to talk about all the ways Dave and Ann Wilson messed up as parents. I mean, really, what we're going to talk about, they've written a new book called No Perfect Parent, and we're going to talk about how God's grace is a part of effective parenting. But we'll talk about where our focus needs to be as we raise the next generation. So I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. We got some extra help today from Bruce Goff. Of course, our entire broadcast production team is involved. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Hope for today, hope for tomorrow.