Discussion Questions: The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Rosaria Butterfield)
Opening Caveat: Though the book is subtitled as “radically ordinary hospitality”, we must understand that the life and schedule of Butterfield isn’t that ordinary. It doesn’t mean that it is not helpful or instructive for us, but you don’t need to feel guilt or shame when you consider all that she is doing.
Feel free to use these questions as a rough guide for discussion. Our hope is that as a church we can read, understand and apply her book to our lives.
1. How does Butterfield define hospitality? (pg. 11,12,17,19)
2. How is her definition different from the way you/we/Christians commonly understand hospitality?
3. In your experience, what changes in our interaction with non-Christians when we invite them into our homes?
4. Butterfield is very intentional about “family worship” (praying, reading the Scriptures, singing) with anyone who is in her house. Have you ever tried that? Why or why not? How did it go?
4. Personally, what are your biggest internal barriers to having people into your home? (pg. 35- fear of being hurt, fear of our families being negatively influenced, longing for older days, etc.) What are the biggest external barriers? (roommates, location of house/apartment, busyness, etc.)
5. Butterfield argues (pg.41) that we shouldn’t build walls, thank God for a moat and draw up the bridge… but how do we build a thick/healthy Christian community while not abandoning our neighbours?
6. Considering a few special cases:
- how is hospitality offered by single Christians important (pg. 210)
- how is hospitality offered by introverts important? (pg. 214)
- how is hospitality offered to people very different from us important (pg. 122, but also everywhere)
7. What were you personally most struck by? Did you have any personal application from the book?
8. How could this book help our church to move forward in loving our neighbours? What are some communal/corporate applications?
Conclusion: Read the paragraph on pg. 14 quoted below:
My prayer is that this book will help you let God use your home, apartment, dorm room, front yard, community gymnasium, or garden for the purpose of making strangers into neighbours and neighbours into family. Because that is the point — building the church and living like a family, the family of God. My prayer is that you will stop being afraid of strangers, even when some strangers are dangerous. My prayer is that you will grow to be more like Christ in practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality and that the Lord would bless you richly for it, adding to his kingdom, creating a new culture and a new reputation for what it means to be a Christian to the watching world. My hope is that daily fellowship would grow your union with Christ and that you would no longer be that Christian with a pit of empty dreams competing madly with other reigning idols, wondering if this is all there is to the Christian life. My prayer is that you would see that practicing daily, ordinary, radical hospitality toward the end of rendering strangers neighbours and neighbours family of God is the missing link.
