to our story and then offers their own, without seeking to master or coopt; when someone sets aside their own preferences in order to joyfully, humbly defer to ours. When we are welcomed like this, we can experience the state of freedom and love I believe God wills for all people. It is a joy to receive this welcome. It is also a joy to offer this welcome, to say to another person: “May I know you better?”
But there is more to radical welcome, as the word radical signifies. Radical, in this instance, should not connote the unreasonable, undisciplined action some people associate with the term. Instead, radical amplifies the welcome, broadening and deepening and launching it to the next level. It also indicates a deep, fierce, urgent commitment to some core ideal. That’s not just any ideal, but one at the root of a tradition, a movement, and, in our case, a faith. As Bill Tully, rector of St. Bartholomew’s in New York, told me: “Radical is Jesus. Radical is getting down to the roots.”
If welcome is the drama of embrace, then a radical welcome is the embrace that is hardest of all, requiring the broadest extension and opening of self, even as it draws us back to our core values. It is the embrace of the marginalized, silenced, oppressed Stranger. “Here is the core of hospitality,” according to Father Daniel Homan, OSB, and Lonni Collins Pratt. “May I know you better? Will you come closer, please? No, it will not be easy, but make no mistake about it, your life depends on this saving stranger coming to you and stretching your tight little heart.”7
Who is this “saving stranger,” The Other, who is at once a full, complex, individual human being with a unique story and perspective and a member of a larger group that exists within the social hierarchy, as we all do? It’s best to take on this question in two chunks. Let’s begin closer to home. Depending on who the dominant, empowered groups are in your parish, The Others are the ones you have the power to systemically marginalize and/or oppress. They are, to borrow the language of the Visions Group, the targets of oppression, while those who hold certain privileges and power are non-targets.8 It matters not what you as an individual feel you have done to The Other, or even whether there are particular ways you as a congregation have consciously hurt another group. Identifying The Other requires only the recognition that, within the social system in which we all function, some groups have been given social, economic and political power over other groups.
Now, we can widen the circle. Every church is a social institution, woven into a complex cultural and historical tapestry that operates beyond but has great implications for the individual congregation. So we all have to ask, “Who are The Others in relation to our tradition or denomination—the groups whose voices and gifts have not been part of shaping our collective identity, the ones who have not held much power or been welcomed with open arms?”
This level of discernment is crucial, if a little tougher to grasp. Suppose your church has lots of working class members; do you need to think about whether you’re sending exclusive, classist signals? What if you’re a largely black church in a multicultural neighborhood: why would you need to worry about radically welcoming blacks and other people of color? Why? Because when people who have been marginalized see the sign hanging on your door—Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, Methodist, you name it—they may automatically leap to a number of assumptions about who you are, who is welcome to fully share your common life and who is not. Despite your diverse membership, you may still be participating in many of the exclusive patterns of your tradition: music that is culturally limited, leadership structures that reflect the expectations of European, privileged, older, or straight communities, and so on. It takes extra vigilance and care to reverse the effect of the exclusive stereotypes and patterns your tradition has laid on you. It takes understanding who your congregation and your tradition have pushed to the margins. It takes a recognition of who is The Other and why.
Those are hard words for most of us to hear and process. If you’re in a non-target group, you may feel the guilt and resistance creeping in: “I see where this is going. I’m now the enemy. Same old story.” If you identify strongly with a target group, you may feel yourself somewhat objectified: “Surely I’m more than my group, more than my victim or oppressed status.”
I can only promise you that this is not about guilt trips or victim complexes, but a statement regarding reality. We cannot transform systems without naming them. We cannot work for freedom and embrace unless we acknowledge what forces keep us from the reconciliation and compassion we know God is holding out for all of us. Part of what makes radical welcome radical is that it goes into the roots under relationships and systems, clearing debris and maybe even rewiring the motherboard so that we can live and welcome in new ways.
Radical Welcome Is . . .
How do all those elements finally come together at the congregational level? When I describe a church as “radically welcoming,” it means the community seeks to welcome the voices, presence and power of many groups—especially those who have been defined as The Other, pushed to the margins, cast out, silenced, and closeted—in order to help shape the congregation’s common life and mission.
Few communities could achieve the vision of radical welcome in its totality. Radically welcoming communities are the ones committed to transformed life, a life that aims to be:
• Hospitable: They seek to offer a gracious, warm space to all people, especially those who have been defined as “Other,” systemically disempowered and oppressed, pushed to the margins. In the Episcopal Church and most mainline churches, that could include people of color, poor people, children and young adults, gay and lesbian people, seniors, people with disabilities, and many other groups.
• Connected: They link to their neighbors, to their neighborhood, to brothers and sisters beyond their neighborhood with whom they actively practice what it means to embrace and be changed by Jesus.
• Centered: They possess a clear, compelling sense of Christian identity. That self-understanding is based in part in their cultural and denominational heritage, but primarily in the unapologetic and clear call to live out the dream of God as they have discerned it in light of Scripture, tradition, reason, and their context.
• Open to conversion: They attempt to listen carefully to, make room for, share power with, and learn from groups who’ve been silenced, closeted and disempowered, and they are open to genuine conversion and transformation based on this encounter with The Other. On the ground, that means they allow God’s Spirit and the gifts of The Other to enrich and transform their understanding of who is inside and who is outside, what ministries they undertake, how they select leaders, how they do business, how they worship, what they claim as their mission and purpose, and how they partner with other groups.
• Intentional: They engage in training, research, active listening, strategic planning: some conscious, contextually appropriate effort that addresses individual, congregational, institutional, and systemic change. They realize radical welcome does not come merely as a matter of goodwill or a by-product of enthusiastic outreach programs.
• Comprehensive: They recognize that the work cannot be left to a specialized ministry area, like the Outreach Ministry, the Social Justice Team or the Hospitality Committee; it is a way of being, and should eventually be cultivated by the chief leaders through formation, worship, mission, and other areas of congregational life.
• Becoming: They realize this journey is never finished, so they are always becoming, always looking beyond the congregation to see who has been left out or pushed out, always aware that the stranger’s face is the very face of Christ.
• Beyond diversity: They understand that radical welcome is not merely about diversity, evangelism, multiculturalism, inclusion, or getting it “right.” It is simply, profoundly about being faithful disciples of the Christ who welcomed and still welcomes all.
• Faithful: They honor radical transformation not as a necessary evil or as change for the sake of change, a response to misplaced liberal guilt or a church growth strategy, but instead because they are saying