From High Conflict to Open Doors - How Hospitality Can Change Our World
The Apostle Peter tells God’s people, “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” (1 Peter 4:8-9)
It is unarguable that we are a people with a multitude of sins. We hurt one another. We offend one another. We live in a world where it is common to close doors instead of opening them. We huddle with like-minded allies, and we define ourselves by enemies as much as our friends. Whom we fight against tells the story of what we believe. Person X believes that, so I believe this. We see this attitude most clearly in politics, where issues are defined in black and white, Republican and Democrat, but it appears nearly everywhere today. We increasingly live in an environment of what Amanda Ripley, in her book by the name, calls “high conflict.”
High conflict is different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s what I like to call good conflict, in homage to what the civil rights leader John Lewis called “good trouble.” Good conflict is a force that pushes us to be better people. Good conflict is not the same thing as forgiveness. It has nothing to do with surrender. It can be stressful and heated, but our dignity remains intact. Good conflict can lead to radical change, tectonic shifts in how societies operate. But it does not collapse into caricature. We remain open to the reality that none of us has all the answers. To everything all the time, and that we are all connected. We need healthy conflict in order to defend ourselves, to understand each other and to improve. These days, we need much more of it, not less.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them.
In high conflict, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. In this state, each encounter with the other side, whether literal or virtual, becomes more charged. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. When we encounter them, in person or on a cable news channel, we might feel a tightening in our chest, a dread mixed with rage, as we listen to whatever insane, misguided, dangerous thing the other side says. The conflict feels like an existential threat, even if it isn’t. [1]
Throughout her book, Ripley explains through the lives of real people and real events how we get into high conflict and how we can get out of it. There are some surprises along the way. One of the most baffling of examples is Gary Friedman.
Friedman was a lawyer. One day, two friends approached him to be their lawyer in their divorce. Both of them wanted his representation. No way could happen, he told them. But then he started wondering, why couldn’t he help both of them? So, he started the now common practice of mediation. For years, he honed his craft and introduced the concept to the world. What is now a common practice started that day with Friedman and two friends.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario rife with more high conflict than a divorce. If there was anyone who seemed able to avoid the perils of conflict, it was Friedman. But then, he ran for local government in his small California coastal town.
Perhaps there is just something about politics that incites our high-conflict personalities. But Ripley proves that government isn’t the only hotbed. It can happen at home, too. Think Hatfields and McCoys or, to put a single name and face on it, Curtis Toler, a former gang member in Chicago.
Toler’s story includes the typical gang member story. A young boy caught up in neighborhood us-versus-them rivalries that easily escalate into violence. Toler’s downward spiral came after his childhood hero, Benji Wilson, was murdered on the streets. Toler—and everyone else—assumed it was a rival gang. He set off on a search for the killer. But Toler didn’t even know Wilson. He just assumed he was a brother gang member. After years of gang activity, a few stints in prison, and an awakening to a new life later, Toler finally meets the man who killed Wilson. His story is vastly different from Toler’s imagination. It wasn’t gang activity at all. It was just street violence born out of fear and youth.
Toler’s motivation throughout much of his life was born of a misconception of the truth. People were hurt because of a phantom us and them.
How can this happen? That’s what Ripley seeks to answer. Along the way, she finds four conditions that can act as fire starters in any conflict.
Group identities (us versus them)
Conflict entrepreneurs (those who delight in conflict and fan the flames)
Humiliation (an often-overlooked root cause of conflict)
Corruption (organizational influences that start the fires and can’t put them out.
Understanding the categories goes a long way to preventing high conflict, but it is no guarantee we won’t fall into it. To prevent it, we need to be much more diligent at a very personal level, which isn’t easy for any of us. We have to truly understand the story and realize the truth is more nuanced and complicated than our binary us-versus-them mentality. We have to push the fire starters to the edges where the oxygen level is too low to maintain a blaze. We need to make space for others.[2]
THE CHURCH’S ANSWER
What can the church learn from this research?
If I could boil down Ripley’s insights into a one-word answer to the problem of high conflict, it would be hospitality. Hospitality is what making space for others looks like.
The Bible calls us to a life of hospitality. Romans 12:13 says, “Seek to show hospitality.” Seeking means working toward it. It’s not automatic.
1 Peter 4:9 commands us to show hospitality without grumbling. We’re prone to grumble because hospitality puts us directly in each other’s path. It’s not easy.
So, to some degree, we narrow the responsibility to those like us. But Hebrews 13:2 says we must show hospitality to strangers. In the context of the ancient world, where hotels were not common, that likely means travelers to our cities. However, appropriating it to our modern definition of strangers is not entirely wrong. Unlike the relatively smaller towns of the ancient world, many of us do not even know our neighbors. Nearly everyone around us all the time is a stranger.
And, to lift the matter to even more importance, in two places, we are told that hospitality is a requirement for those in church leadership (1 Tim. 3:1-2, Titus 1:7-8).
God’s call on our lives to practice hospitality is an unignorable command throughout the New Testament. We cannot overlook this. If we want to be obedient to God’s word and a faithful presence as witnesses for Christ in our day, our only option is to learn how to do hospitality well.
One problem today is that our modern sense of self is fragile and competitive. We aren’t sure exactly who we are, so we use other people to prove our worth. No wonder we struggle with hospitality.[3]
With such an impure mindset toward others, we cannot be welcoming, especially to those unlike us. But recovering the Christian practice of hospitality can speak a powerful word to our world. Listen to author Rosaria Butterfield’s exhortation on what she calls “radically ordinary hospitality.”
Engaging in radically ordinary hospitality means we provide the time necessary to build strong relationships with people who think differently than we do as well as build strong relationships from within the family of God. It means we know that only hypocrites and cowards let their words be stronger than their relationships, making sneaky raids into culture on social media or behaving like moralizing social prigs in the neighborhood. Radically ordinary hospitality shows this skeptical, post-Christian world what authentic Christianity looks like.[4]
This kind of ordinary hospitality is something we can all do. But, of course, there are ways we can do it that feel more like duty than delight. Pastor Michael Keller believes that the way to fight against the weakening cultural bonds and fragmentation we experience is to invest more deeply in joyful hospitality.
A church that celebrates, a church that does meals for those inside the church, but also those outside the church becomes a curious space. Christians should be the best at hosting parties and celebrating others as we have every reason in the world to have joy about the coming kingdom, including present “wins” whether they are simple birthdays that highlight the created-ness of others, or milestones of our neighbors’ achievements.[5]
Hospitality is one thing we can all do to reduce the high conflict culture we all live in and hate. It is not a pathway to no conflict but to the good kind, where we can all be changed as we learn to love one another for Jesus’s sake. Avoiding all conflict is only realistic if we refuse to open our doors. But the answer to high conflict, bad conflict, is the good conflict of everyday life where sinners interact with sinners in all the small things of life that make relationships grow and develop and lead to a joy that this world longs to experience. All it takes is a willingness to open the door.
Our world is filled with high conflict. It’s everywhere we turn. People make a lot of money off creating and sustaining it. But everyone longs deep down inside for a kind of hospitality that cuts through the tension and creates a place where people of all stripes can come as they are and be who they are. It’s why the theme song of Cheers is so great. You wanna go where people know, people are all the same. You wanna go where everybody knows your name.
IT'S NOT EASY, BUT WE CAN DO THIS
God’s people should be the most hospitable people in all the world. Only when the Church outshines the local bar as the most welcoming and honest place in town will we start to experience the kind of biblical hospitality on a wide scale that heaven is made of. If we want to make heaven on earth, there isn’t a much better place to start than with true, biblical hospitality. It’s not easy, but we can do this.
We can move from high conflict to good conflict. We can move from making assumptions about others to being curious about others. We can cut off our monologues and create dialogs. We can seek solutions to our problems together rather than sizing our fists for the right boxing gloves. We can stop rejoicing in “their” losses and learn to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).[6]
In her book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, Rosaria Butterfield devotes a chapter to the kindness of hospitality in our post-Christian world. I will list the main points of that chapter and add some additional commentary of my own drawn from her insights.
1. Respect the reality of your neighbors’ lives and households.
We can respect and even accept others even if we do not approve of their views or lifestyle. If we are to bring people inside, unbelievers must see genuine acceptance and genuine love. Our acceptance is not approval. It is an invitation to a relationship. Hospitality means opening the door to people as they are before offering the hope of Jesus that shows them who they could be.
2. Pray that you will be a safe person to hear the burdens of your neighbor’s hearts.
We live in a culture where safe places outside of one’s home are almost nonexistent, and for many, the home isn’t even a soft place to land. Our modern world is so fast-paced and self-focused that many don’t have any deep relationships. Loneliness is an epidemic.
To be hospitable people, we must be willing to invest in others for the long haul. People will only share their burdens if they sense we will bear the load. As Butterfield says, “Invest in your neighbors for the long haul, the hundreds of conversations that make up a neighborhood, and stop thinking of conversations with neighbors as sneaky evangelistic raids into their sinful lives. Maybe our own lives are actually more sinful. Is it not more sinful to openly sin while claiming Christ’s lordship than to sin while claiming false rights to self-autonomy? Stop treating your neighbor as a caricature of an alien worldview.”[7]
3. Understand the biblical difference between holiness and goodness and don’t be afraid to celebrate the goodness of your unbelieving neighbors.
Jesus said God makes the sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45). Many good things happen in and through the lives of unbelievers because of God’s common grace. You might be surprised at how nice and decent unbelieving people are.
Perhaps one practical step you could take to reach out to your neighbors is to get to know them well enough that you can throw a party for their next win—when they get a promotion at work, when they pay off their car loan, when they finish the big project, when their kid does something great. Goodness should be celebrated where it is found. This takes getting very close to those around you. Close enough to share in their joys.
4. Don’t accuse of ill will people who hold to a different theology.
We’re not talking about the difference between Calvinists and Arminians or Presbyterians and Pentecostals. Theology is much more nuanced than that and spills over into all kinds of places in our lives. In today’s world, it takes almost no time to find out if someone is a Republican or Democrat. The politicization of everything makes it obvious almost immediately. If your neighbor won’t shop at Target anymore because of their support for the LGBTQ community, don’t cut them off because of that. Don’t think less of them just because of that. Keep engaging them. Don’t make them your enemy—endeavor to make them your friend. Politics will come and go, but relationships can last the long haul.
5. Know why it matters most that we are made in God’s image.
We must rest in our identity in Christ for ourselves. Only there can we find the grace to press into hard and, at times, uncomfortable relationships. But we also must remember that those who don’t believe are made in God's image, even if they derive their identity from somewhere else. The more we recognize our common heritage, the easier it will be to live together. Unbelievers may be offensive to us. But we must remember we are likely offensive to them too. Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our neighbors in today’s modern world is the ability to remain truly hospitable even when our feelings get hurt. Hear Butterfield’s exhortation.
Practicing hospitality in our post-Christian world means that you develop thick sin. The hospitable meet people as strangers and invite them to become neighbors, and, by God’s grace, many will go on to become part of the family of God. This transition from strange to neighbor to family does not happen naturally but only with intent and grit and sacrifice and God’s blessing.[8]
6. Start somewhere. Start today.
Butterfield says, “One logical place to start is at the end of your driveway.”[9] We tend to overcomplicate mission. We look for something formal. We wait for the church to start a new program. But what if we all just went to the edge of our driveway and started talking to our neighbors for no other reason than to love them for Jesus’s sake? You can do that today. It’s not much, but it’s something, and we know what Jesus can do with a little something.
In our high conflict world, Christians ought to be the most reasonable, the most open, the most willing to admit weakness and wrongness. We ought to be those who walk through the world like Jesus, with eyes open to the weak and wounded, seeking to make friends with sinners, because we know we will find common ground with them. After all, we are sinners ourselves. Our only saving grace is the grace of God, and his grace will help us welcome others as he has welcomed us (Rom. 15:7).
[1] Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, pages 3-4.
[2] Ripley explains each of these ideas in Appendix III of her book.
[3] This insight came from James Eglinton, “Lemonade on the Porch – Why and How to Build Porches: The Gospel in a Post-Christendom Society,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/lemonade-on-the-porch-part-2/
[4] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with A House Key, page 13.
[5] Michael Keller, “Lemonade on the Porch: Redeemer Pastors Suggestions,” https://rpc-download.s3.amazonaws.com/Lemonade_on_the_Porch_Redeemer_Pastors_Suggestions.pdf
[6] These insights are drawn from page 286 of Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict.
[7] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 54.
[8] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 62.
[9] Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, page 62.
