The Table Isn't Yours to Guard
Church became a door. It was supposed to be a table.
A friend told me about a conversation he had recently. He was talking to someone close to him. Someone who said, “I love God. I just could never be part of a church. It’s not for people like me.”
Not people who don’t believe. Not people who hate God.
People.
Somebody who loves God looked at the church and decided there wasn’t room for them there. We should not be okay with that.
Church was supposed to be a table. Somewhere along the way we turned it into a door, and we put ourselves in charge of who gets to walk through it. Come, but clean up first. Come, but agree with us on everything. Come, but don’t ask too many questions. Come, but only if you already look like the rest of us. That is not an invitation. That is an interview. And we did not get this from Jesus.
James stood in front of the whole Jerusalem council in Acts 15 and said something the church still has not fully learned: don’t make it difficult for people who are turning to God. Not “lower the bar.” Not “pretend sin isn’t real.” Just don’t make it difficult. We made it difficult. We made it so difficult that people who love God are opting out of the family of God, and we called it standards.
Here’s where the word gives us away. The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia. Two words fused together. Philos, meaning love or friend. Xenos, meaning stranger or foreigner. Love for the stranger. That word is the direct opposite of xenophobia, fear of the stranger.
Here’s how we actually do the keeping out. We give people labels. Backslidden. Liberal. Unrepentant. Not serious about their faith. Once the label sticks, we don’t have to wrestle with the person anymore. We already know where they stand, so we don’t have to sit with them and find out.
That’s not discernment. That’s a bouncer at a door, checking to see if you’re on the list.
We got so married to our theology and our traditions that we started treating them like the point instead of the path. Doctrine that was supposed to lead us to Jesus started functioning as a velvet rope instead. Get the categories right, use the right words, land on the right side of the right issues, and you’re in. Miss on any of it and we’ve got a label ready for you.
I used to think this fear was about who we don’t want sitting next to us. The wrong crowd. The wrong lifestyle. The wrong politics. Keep them at a distance and the room stays safe.
I don’t think that’s actually it anymore.
I think we’re afraid of what sitting beside them would make us face in ourselves. Because the second you let someone different into your life, close enough to actually know them, you can’t keep your categories as clean as they used to be. You start noticing your own contradictions. You start feeling things you’d rather not feel: guilt, doubt, the possibility that you might have been wrong about something you built your whole identity on.
That’s not comfortable. That’s not safe. So we don’t call it fear. We call it discernment. We call it protecting the church. We call it standing for truth. But underneath the language, it’s the same thing it’s always been. We would rather keep our distance and hand out labels than face what closeness would actually cost us.
Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners so often the religious leaders made it His reputation (Luke 15:1-2). They had labels for those people too. Jesus sat with them anyway. That wasn’t safe for Him. It cost Him His standing with the people who mattered most in that culture. He did it anyway, because the point was never His comfort. If the table was worth that to Jesus, it was never going to stay comfortable for us.
There’s a singer/songwriter named Justin McRoberts who wrote a song called “Safe.” In it, he pictures a version of peace that comes from staying far away from the noisy, needy crowd. Comfortable. Undisturbed. Earned by keeping your distance and calling it faithfulness. Then he asks the question that guts the whole thing: is grace even supposed to be safe? Because if it is, we’ve built something. If it isn’t, we’ve been playing it.
Most churches are not actually afraid of bad theology. We are afraid of what we’d have to see about ourselves if we let the wrong people get close enough to hold up a mirror. So we keep the table small, hand out labels at the door, and call it purity. Jesus called it something else. He called it the Pharisees.
If hospitality is love for the stranger, then the real question isn’t whether someone is ready for church. The real question is whether we’re willing to feel what it costs us to let them in. That means sitting with people whose lives make us uncomfortable, and staying in the discomfort instead of managing it with a label. That means letting someone’s presence expose something in you before you get to explain anything to them. That means admitting the wall was never about them. None of that waters down the gospel. It just gets the gospel out of our hands and back into the hands of the God who invented the table in the first place.
If someone who loves God still believes church isn’t for people like them, that’s not a them problem.
That’s us.
So what label are you handing out right now, and what are you really trying not to feel by handing it out?