that’s just what she does. She gives us a framework and she gives us practical tools. In a step-by-step journey of discovery into what radical welcome is and how it can work, Stephanie offers us a blueprint for planned growth, change and mission. She shows us that there is a great, untapped source of strength for every congregation. It is the presence of The Other within the pastoral neighborhood: that group of persons who stand just beyond the social/cultural threshold of the congregation. Engaging them honestly will not only expand the horizons of the congregation but revitalize it in ways that could never be realized otherwise. In simple language, radical welcome shows us how we need one another, and even more importantly, how we translate that potential into the blessings of a church renewed.
She is also honest about how hard the job will be. This is not a “feel good” book. It is not about how we should all be nice to strangers at coffee hour. This is a book about the very hard challenges that face any of us when we decide to step outside of our isolation for the sake of the gospel.
To make a commitment to explore the depth of what radical welcome means, we are asked to confront how we all “participate in systems of inclusion and exclusion.” We are asked to deal with the fact that in practicing radical welcome “there is no such place as a neutral space.”
In short, Stephanie is calling us to a much more mature and nuanced understanding of what it means for any congregation to truly open its doors to community. It is not a matter of just accepting difference. It is a matter of creating something new. Her book is a resource because it tells the story of how real congregations achieved remarkable results in allowing the chemistry of human cultures to mix more freely to produce a people of faith. This is not theory but practice. It is an articulation of the basic steps that any community of faith would need to take to experience transformation and renewal.
Consequently, this book is that rare combination of deep spirituality and pragmatism. Much like the Holy Scriptures on which it is firmly grounded, Stephanie’s vision of radical welcome talks about new life for the people of God. The call to take on the challenges of “radical welcome” is for the growth of the community, not only in numbers, but in spirit, imagination and strength. This is a book about the future envisioned by the gospel, a future that extends the love of Christ in all directions.
I believe that at its heart, radical welcome is about the new definition of evangelism for the twenty-first century. In the past, we have consigned evangelism to the simple exercise of duplication: creating more communities in our own image. In response to the cultural changes of the Civil Rights Movement and up to the present day, we have often spoken of evangelism as though it were sensitivity training for cross-cultural special events. What Stephanie is suggesting is something very different.
Radical welcome is not the welcome wagon. Her direction moves us through the mono-cultural dead end of traditional images of evangelism and beyond the boundaries of polite cultural interaction. It takes us directly to the heart of the nature of evangelism: the transformation of human life from the isolated to the integrated.
Radical welcome is a process. It is a process by which isolated parts of a whole community are brought together in creative and compassionate ways to generate a more integrated, balanced and dynamic mixture. Not a melting pot or a stew of differences, but a community that works well, prays well and plans well together. These communities are grounded in some of the most basic values we share as God’s people. Radical welcome describes how communities stay hospitable, connected, centered, open to conversion, and intentional. These are fundamental qualities for any meaningful congregational experience. They are, in short, what pastors are looking for. What radical welcome offers are methods and practices that bring the gospel alive in communities that work for everyone, not just for the few.
“Radical welcome is a fundamental spiritual practice,” Stephanie writes, and that is precisely what she offers here. This is a book about renewal. About growth. About intelligent change. I believe that any person who cares for authentic ministry in open and affirming ways will find a home in radical welcome. This is a resource many of us have been waiting for. It is a message whose time has come.
I hope you enjoy reading Radical Welcome as much as I did. I hope even more that you will share it with others. And finally, I hope most of all that you will put its lessons to work as you extend God’s radical welcome to every person without whom your community would not be complete.
The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston
Episcopal Divinity School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 2006
Come we that love the Lord,
and let our joys be known;
Join in a song of sweet accord,
join in a song of sweet accord,
And thus surround the throne,
and thus surround the throne.
We’re marching to Zion,
beautiful, beautiful Zion,
We’re marching upward to Zion,
the beautiful city of God.
“MARCHING TO ZION”
A Tale of Two Welcomes
I will never forget that winter’s day, sitting in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a grand Gothic edifice on New York’s Upper West Side. Though I had worshiped on the fringe of the congregation while living, working and writing in the city, this time I had come simply to celebrate a friend’s ordination.
Seated at the back of the church, distant from the action at the front of the chancel, I was slowly, inexorably tuning out. And then, with a sharp visceral tug, I tuned back in.
“Lord, I will lift mine eyes to the hills, knowing my help, it comes from you . . .”
Was I hearing right?
“Your peace you give me in times of the storm. You are the source of my strength . . .”
Could it be?
“You are the strength of my life.”
Oh my God, that was it!
“I lift my hands in total praise.”
Like a giddy child, I turned to my friends on either side, whispering, “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?” They nodded, but they really didn’t have a clue.
On the surface, we all heard a magnificent quartet from a local black church singing Richard Smallwood’s “Total Praise.” What I and perhaps a few others could hear was sweet memory. My mama used to play “Total Praise” on those random Sundays when she would pack me and my brother into the Oldsmobile Omega and cart us to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Later, I sang in some school-based gospel choirs and cobbled together my own gospel music collection. Even later, once I landed in the Episcopal Church, I played the songs religiously while I dressed for church, my private time to “get my praise on.” But hearing this music—a pop gospel hymn sung by soaring, expressive black voices—in an immense, dignified, European-American identified space? The tears poured, my hands waved, I lifted my voice, and deep inside I heaved a huge sigh of relief and gratitude for the welcome.
Years after my official reception into the Episcopal Church, a part of me that I didn’t even know was sitting outside finally opened the door and came in.
Rewind a decade. It was the early 1990s, toward the end of