What is language hospitality?

What is language hospitality?

When we truly welcome well, “we actually find a beauty that takes some effort but that also takes us closer to God’s kingdom in which every tribe and nation and language lives and worships together.”

from Kent Annan, You welcomed me: Loving refugees and immigrants because God first loved us.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023 BY KRISTYN KIDNEY

Where are we?

It is pretty easy to notice that our communities in the US are increasingly multilingual. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 American Community Survey report, the number of people in the U.S. who spoke a language other than English at home nearly tripled from 23.1 million (about 1 in 10) in 1980 to 67.8 million (almost 1 in 5) in 2019.[1]  In some communities, those percentages are even higher. Researchers project these percentages will see an accelerated increase in the decades ahead.

This changing linguistic landscape offers Christ followers both challenge and opportunity.  The challenge is not new.  From its very beginning, the Church has always been multilingual. We simply find ourselves in a time and place where swiftly shifting demographics invite us to live into our spiritual practices with a fresh multilingual approach. 

The opportunity we have is an exciting one.  Christ-following communities have rich opportunity to deepen our understanding of God and enhance our perspectives of His kingdom through meaningful fellowship with culturally and linguistically diverse neighbors.  Through exchanging stories and sharing life we can flourish as we practice language hospitality.  Language hospitality is all about loving our neighbors and cultivating unity while welcoming diversity.   

What does hospitality have to do with it?

Throughout scripture, God’s people are called to express loving welcome. Biblical hospitality is a long-standing Christian practice that is foundational to our identity as a community of believers. Expressing hospitality to one’s neighbors is a means by which God’s people worship God, connect with one another, and serve their communities.  God’s hospitality is about invitation and belonging. Hospitality is a means of living and communicating God’s love within the body of believers and with the world at large.

In the book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl writes, “For most of the history of the church, hospitality was understood to encompass physical, social, and spiritual dimensions of human existence and relationships.  It meant response to the physical needs of strangers for food, shelter, and protection, but also a recognition of their worth and common humanity.” [2]  People have needs that go far beyond physical needs.  These are important needs. Also important are needs for belonging, connection, and relationship.  People need to be seen, recognized, deeply known, and understood.  As Christ calls us to love our neighbors, we are invited to address these needs while—amazingly—having our own needs for community and belonging addressed at the same time. 

What does language hospitality mean?

We get to apply this kind of hospitality to our linguistically diverse neighbors through expressing language hospitality. Language hospitality is lovingly responding to needs of multilingual neighbors through sharing, learning, and appreciating languages within a community. “In practicing linguistic hospitality, we are. . . making room for the languages of others, welcoming those languages, and acknowledging that language is a vital aspect of a speaker’s identity.”[3] Multilingual neighbors may speak English very well or may still be working on their English proficiency.  Regardless of skill in the dominant mainstream language, our multilingual neighbors’ lives, feelings, thoughts, stories, spirits, relationships with God, and much more dwell and have meaning in other languages.  Language hospitality makes space for their whole selves within the community. 

Congregations can engage in language hospitality through things like teaching English or heritage language classes, learning languages together, offering multilingual services, or hosting multilingual events. While there are many practices of language hospitality, there is one primary goal—fostering healthy thriving multilingual community through positive connections that draw us closer to God and to one another. “Linguistic hospitality is a key factor in building bridges across racial and cultural lines to form lasting relationships.”[4]

One vitally important key to language hospitality is reciprocity—it goes both ways. The one expressing hospitality must also be willing to receive it.[5] Language hospitality invites monolingual English speakers to also be language learners (ranging from picking up a few words and phrases to more robust efforts toward fluency).  “Great neighborhoods are built on reciprocal relationships, on two-way streets.”[6] It is this element of reciprocity that is so essential to addressing needs for belonging and being a good neighbor.  Fred Rogers once said, "All of us, at some time or other, need help. Whether we're giving or receiving help, each one of us has something valuable to bring to this world. That's one of the things that connects us as neighbors--in our own way, each one of us is a giver and a receiver." How might this practice of reciprocal hospitality be better lived out in our multilingual communities?

Where do we start?

Engaging well in language hospitality is a life-giving spiritual practice.  “We discover that a life of hospitality brings us life.”[7]  We invite you to start by prayerfully considering, “Who is my neighbor?” and “What languages do they use?”  As you start, there are many resources at this site and more to come.  There are also many churches and organizations a little further down this path to language hospitality. In meeting with some of ministries, we have found them to be very gracious and open to share what they have learned along the way.  There are also resources for things like language learning and leadership that can help you consider carefully what your own context might be ready for.  Language hospitality has some guiding principles to it, but no prescribed practices.  It adapts to each community living it out.   

One great resource to explore as you begin prayerfully considering language hospitality is the book, Every Tribe and Tongue:  A Biblical Vision for Language in Society.  In it, authors Pasquale and Bierma write “If Christians passionately follow this call to linguistic diversity, communities can be transformed. This can start at the church level and can spread into surrounding neighborhoods and communities. Our loving response to others and their language is crucial. By affirming that God delights in worship that is diverse and multilingual and multidialectal, we welcome all to join in that celebration.” [8]

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey,” n.d.

[2] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room:  Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). p. 6

[3] Michael Pasquale and Nathan L. K. Bierma, Every Tribe and Tongue:  A Biblical Vision for Language in Society (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2011).

[4] Pasquale and Bierma.

[5] David I. Smith, Learning from the Stranger:  Christina Faith and Cultural Diversity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 22.

[6] Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon, The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2012), 120.

[7] Christine D. Pohl, Making Room:  Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 187.

[8] Pasquale and Bierma, Every Tribe and Tongue:  A Biblical Vision for Language in Society.