In the Church’s infancy, most local communities of Christians (or followers of the Way as they were originally known) met in peoples’ homes for communal worship, fellowship, meals, etc. [1] That is to say, for our spiritual ancestors, many of the activities and functions we think that churches engage in, happened in peoples’ homes and not in stand-alone buildings or multi-building campuses. In recent years, we have seen a resurgence of house churches in both the West and the East, but the focus of these posts remains on a North American setting, so I will not address groups like the cell church movement in South Korea or underground church in China. As many Christians move out of traditional denominational settings, their primary place of worship and ministry becomes the home. To a lesser but still important extent, the burgeoning small group movement found in churches of all kinds can also be understood as something like “House Church Light.” In these settings, certain activities that we can define as ministry take place: people share their faith, read the Bible, pray together, evangelize, perhaps take communion, etc. I applaud these activities, but again, my focus in this series is not just to take what we do in church buildings and place it in the homes. My aim is to look at how we can use the mundane bits of our homes as places of ministry.

As I laid out in the previous posts of this series, to look at home or any property with a radically privatized view of it would be unbiblical. We see over and over again in both the Bible and in the writings of Christians throughout the centuries that God is a generous giver. We see this generosity in the love between the three persons of the Trinity, the acts of creation, the sustaining of life, the covenants with various people and peoples, the Incarnation, Jesus’ life, the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, the new life through the Resurrection, the impartation of the Spirit at Pentecost, etc. Moreover, the Bible is clear that anything we do have, or any capability to attain certain goods or capacities, originates from the generous hand of the Triune God. [1] In nearly every divine act of generosity detailed above, we see God creating community. Community is the second aspect of home Holt and Banks find in the New Testament. [2]

It is difficult to have a community without two things: hospitality and others. In our setting, hospitality has the tendency of becoming an opportunity to show off—either one’s possessions or one’s hosting skills (think of the Martha Stewart revolution) in order to impress others or move up the social ladder—and usually there is an expectation of reciprocity. Hospitality in the biblical sense, however, requires taking on a deeply vulnerable position. The willingness to bring people in and serve them regardless of their ability to reciprocate has consistently characterized biblical and Christian hospitality. The focus of the host is entirely on the guest. Jesus didn’t say much about what kind of food we should serve, but he clearly stated what hospitality should look like. In Luke 14.12-14, Jesus tells his host at a party,

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. (NRSV. See also: Mt 22.1-14; Lk 14.1-24)

This post is long overdue. I apologize. I have spent much time working on it, tweaking various drafts, dumping them altogether and starting over. The conversation around theology and home has been important in my life recently, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to interact with others over the topic.

Given the comments in the previous post of this series, more needs to be said about property and its ends. I tried pushing us forward from seeing property—in the case of these posts, owning homes—merely as a gift from God to also begin asking how we can use that gift for God’s glory and to participate in his reign. That is, I think that God gives us things for reasons beyond our pleasure. (Or perhaps pleasure needs redefining, but that should be in another topic.)

Also, I hope that by emphasizing the means by which we use things we will move beyond a purely binary ethic, that is judging behaviors simply as not sinful or sinful. For most of my life, I either explicitly or implicitly wanted to label every action as a sin or not a sin. Much of my time was spent avoiding sin with mixed results. I don’t think that outlook is very helpful, nor is it accurate to life. As a Christian, I believe that a goal in life is to glorify God in all that we do. For example, murdering is a sin, but I don’t think that simply not murdering someone brings glory to God. Rather when we serve the other, forgive the other, and bless the other, we glorify God. How this ethic relates to home ownership is the object of these posts. I would like to return to Holt and Banks’ description that in the NT, homes were expected to be places of spiritual encounter, community, ministry, and expectation. [1] The next few posts in the series will address each of these aspects of home. I would like to look first at spiritual encounter.

I am currently working on the fifth installment of the Theological Reflections on Home Ownership series. In the meantime, I offer some links to other thinkers dealing with some of the issues we’ve encountered.

Todd Hiestand has posted a paper, “The Gospel and the God Forsaken: The Challenge of the Missional Church in Suburbia.”

Scot McKnight has a post encapsulating a talk he gave in Seattle regarding “mistakes missional gospel folks need to avoid.” Two of his points I think is worth considering in this discussion of home:

4. Avoid defining sin as merely guilt for offending law; sin is rebellion against God manifested in four directions — against God, self, others, and the external world.

7. Avoid resolving the problem in one direction — with God — instead of resolving the problem in all four directions.

(Note: due to vacationing and moving, I took an unintentional hiatus from this series of posts. Sorry for the delay.)

In his speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination as their presidential candidate in 2004, President George W. Bush stated, “Another priority for a new term is to build an ownership society, because ownership brings security, and dignity, and independence.” Ownership, he argued, affords security in terms of health care, better access to good education, and retirement. At the time of his speech, the home ownership rate was 69%, the highest this country has seen since the US Census Bureau began to track the statistics in 1965. Even Jim Wallis could praise a good portion of the President’s vision for an “ownership society.” [1] In an earlier comment, James asked about the benefits of home ownership. I think the President is right on many of the benefits of ownership in general and home ownership in particular. In a 2001 study, researchers found that though home ownership isn’t perfect for everyone and everything, there are significant benefits for both the individuals and the communities. “Considerable evidence suggests…that homeowners are more likely to be satisfied with their homes and neighborhoods, more likely to participate in voluntary and political activities and more likely to stay in their homes longer periods of time.” [2] There is a pride that goes along with ownership that can be very healthy. If done wisely, home ownership can bring greater stability, financial and otherwise, both for the owner and the community around them.

In the previous post of this series, I offered a brief overview of the idea of home [1] found in the Bible. How do these views of home inform our views? At the basic level, we can say that the notion of home and having a home within a biblical understanding is good. God creates, gives, and brings people home. How the national and communal concept of land relates to the nuclear concept of private home ownership is a bit trickier. (The last post was rather long; I’ll try to keep them shorter by splitting up the topics into smaller pieces. Of course, many of these issues run together, so any division will be somewhat arbitrary.)

As we saw earlier, the home in biblical understandings is a place of safety and recreation. In our contemporary American setting, we continue in that tradition. We seek to make our homes safe from intrusions, physical and otherwise. In the home, we have the ability to control not only who but what comes into our lives (i.e., we can control the media we consume). We spend much of our time at home sleeping, which is a good thing. Sleep, other forms of rest, and other leisure activities afford us the ability to engage the God-ordained cycle of work and rest. [2] Our homes still act as places of hospitality, though our definition of hospitality is rather thin and is synonymous with entertaining guests. The biblical vision of hospitality is richer than merely entertaining, but at the least we can say that we haven’t given up on hospitality altogether. I believe where we see differences between a Christian vision of home and our dominant culture’s view of home is a matter of degree.

From Wendy Koch in yesterday’s USA Today, “HUD Gets New View of Who’s Homeless:”

A groundbreaking survey of homelessness being released today found that 704,000 people nationwide sought shelter at least once in a three-month period.

Families with children accounted for one-third of those seeking emergency shelter or transitional housing between February and April 2005, the most recent period studied, according to the report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The rest were individuals, mostly adult men. Nearly half were black.

The count covered only those seeking shelter, not people living on the street, so the total number of homeless people would be higher….

One of every three homeless kids has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, such as post-traumatic stress, by age 8, says Ellen Bassuk, a psychiatrist who is president of the National Center on Family Homelessness.

“They have trouble sitting still and learning in school,” she says.

Nine of 10 homeless mothers have been victims of violence, often domestic, she says.

I am on a committee at my church that has begun to look deeper at homelessness in Pasadena. We have hosted a bad weather shelter for the past 18 years and have seen the problem of homelessness grow worse during that time. There are far more women, children, and families living on the streets than there were just ten years ago. Our committee recently participated in a homeless census for Pasadena, though I am not sure when the results of that survey will appear. On a personal note, it is interesting to find myself in the process of buying a house while I grow in my knowledge of and care for people who do not have homes. Perhaps this is an issue that should be addressed in my Theology and Home series.

It is difficult to read any part of the Bible and not run into a discussion of land, or home—the issue of home is found in nearly all the meta-narratives of the Old and New Testaments. The first stories of the Bible concern God creating a home for all living creatures and humans getting themselves expelled from it. God makes a grand promise to Abraham and Sarah, that their descendants will have a land—a home—where they will grow into a great nation. The Hebrews later have to leave their home for Egypt during a famine and there they stay for several centuries and become slaves to an empire. At the great Exodus, God liberates the Hebrews and leads them on a journey back to the land they know to be their home. Many of the instructions God gives in the Torah to prepare Israel for their homecoming concern the land, its distribution, and the right care for it. Once they reach the land promised to Abraham, they must clear out the occupants. Generations later, the people of Israel grow unfaithful and God allows foreign powers to attack, overthrow, and take their home from them. The foreign invaders forcibly take large portions of the Hebrew people to distant lands where they become subjects of other empires. Several of the Old Testament texts come from this exilic period when the people of God had to make sense of the fact that they had lost their home. Once the New Testament comes, Israel is back in its home, but Rome, another mighty foreign power, is in charge. As the definition of the people of God expands, over and over again, the followers of Jesus learn that they have a different citizenship, that they are currently aliens or exiles, and will not be truly home until the end of all things, when Christ returns and establishes the new beginning of all things. The Bible can be understood as a story of God guiding his people home.

Carey and I are in the midst of escrow on a house in San Gabriel. I haven’t written anything about it on this blog because I’m a bit of a pessimist and didn’t want myself to become too attached before we held the keys in our hands. We haven’t reached that point yet, but it looks like we’ll be homeowners some time in March. The process of buying a house has proved to be thrilling, but exigent. Finding a realtor, looking at houses, receiving pre-approval and final approval for loans, negotiations, inspections, appraisals, paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. We have reached the place, however, where are beginning to dream. We visited hardware stores and pulled paint chips. We walked through Ikea, looking for ideas on how to decorate. (Confession: I like Ikea, but I can’t visit one of their stores without lines from Fight Club running through my head. “Where are you going with this, Ikea-boy?”)

Through this process, we have tried to reflect on buying a house, especially theologically. The discussion of property and ownership is one I fear that the Church has sadly given over to the dominant culture to determine without much of a fight. I will start a series of posts on thinking theologically about home ownership. The morality of purchasing a home will be discussed, but it’s not as easy as a binary decision, i. e., should a Christian own a house/home or not? We’ll explore biblical and theological notions of ownership, home, property, stewardship, and other areas that are relevant to this topic. These are blog posts, so don’t expect a thorough treatment of the Bible and historical theology, but I will try to incorporate the wisdom of others as much as I can. I welcome any thoughts or input.