Welcoming Week
September 13, 2024
It’s Welcoming Week!
Every year there is one remarkable week of September that is designated as Welcoming Week. During this special event, communities all around the country and the world take time to welcome our neighbors and appreciate the cultural and linguistic diversity in our neighborhoods. The calendar for the week is full of celebrations where multicultural neighbors share food, music, art, storytelling, and much more. Each event is an opportunity to meet people, learn from one another, and appreciate the value of welcoming. Welcoming Week offers many opportunities to practice hospitality.
What Is Welcoming?
Take a moment to describe in your own words how it feels to be welcomed, truly welcomed. How do you know when you are really welcomed? What does it look like, or sound like? Conversely, how do you detect when you are not genuinely welcomed? How does it feel to not be unwelcomed?
Welcome is an important opening line and some form of it exists in many languages. When it is sincere it means, “I’m glad YOU are here!” Genuine welcome means, “You are seen, your presence is appreciated, and you are invited in.” As we consider cultivating flourishing communities, welcome is important to convey to all of our neighbors, but most especially to neighbors who have joined our communities as immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and other internationals. Multicultural or multilingual neighbors can be most at-risk for feeling unseen, for feeling that their presence is not appreciated, or feeling that they will not be invited in. They are most at-risk for being unwelcomed. That is why it is so important to be intentional in voicing and displaying welcome. Welcoming Week is one opportunity to do just that.
Why We Welcome
As followers of Christ, we are called to welcome the stranger and love our neighbors. Throughout the Bible, welcoming foreigners and loving neighbors is a consistent and repeated refrain. We welcome people because that is how we welcome Christ. (Matthew 25: 35-41 I was a stranger and you welcomed me.)[1] We welcome people because that is how we love our neighbor. (Matthew 22:39 You shall love your neighbor as yourself.)[2] We welcome people because that is who we are. It is part of our identity to be strangers who are not yet home. (Leviticus 19:34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.)[3] In his book, You Welcomed Me, Kent Annon writes “in the deepest sense we’re all exiles trying to find home,” and “in our deepest hope, we’re sojourners ourselves, which should lead us into a special tenderness for the plight of foreigners.”[4]
Annon also writes, “Jesus taught us how to see each other. God’s love welcomes us, so we want to welcome others. In a way that is gritty and practical but also kind of mystical, welcoming the stranger is also welcoming God--in our tender frailty and shared sorrow, in our courageous resiliency and remarkable generosity, in our fierce commitment to finding ways forward. In the deepest sense, we have an opportunity to do nothing less than to find a way--even when it isn’t easy--to welcome each other and God into our lives.”[5]
What Comes After Welcome
I especially appreciate that the founders of welcoming week chose the continuous form (-ing) of welcome when they named this event. It is a good reminder that we must be continuous in our welcoming. We will not finish welcoming in a single week. In order to genuinely convey welcome, we must continue to be intentional about expressing it. This is simply a great place to start. Welcoming is valuable and important. It is also only a first step in expressing hospitality. Hospitality involves initial welcome followed by sustained belonging. As we participate in welcoming, let us view it as a first step. Let us pray, listen, and imagine what can come next as we learn to follow Christ and live into kingdom hospitality.
Hospitality Starts Here
Happy Welcoming Week! You can find information about events in your area at the welcoming week website. https://welcomingweek.org/ I hope you can find ways to be welcoming wherever you are this week. I hope you delight in the blessings of welcoming throughout this season. In her book, The God who sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong,” author and advocate Karen Gonzalez writes, “We must be biblically motivated, sociologically informed, and practically invited to love and welcome the stranger. Showing hospitality is not only for the benefit of the ‘stranger’ but for the mutuality and strengthening of the church.”[6] I hope you will consider participating in welcoming week. I hope you will invite someone to participate with you. This is your practical invitation. You are welcomed to be part of this movement of welcoming.
[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Bibles, 2005).
[2] The Holy Bible.
[3] The Holy Bible.
[4] Kent Annan, You Welcomed Me: Loving Refugees and Immigrants Because God First Loved Us (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2018).
[5] Annan.
[6] Karen Gonzalez, The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong (Herald Press, 2019).