Drawing the Hungry to the Lord’s Table
June 7, 2021 • by Sarah Zylstra
Nearly every evening, church members or neighbors drop by the Butterfield home for the evening meal and family devotions. That’s right: Not just every once in a while. Nearly every evening.
“I homeschool my kids,” Rosaria Butterfield told women at The Gospel Coalition women’s conference in 2018. She’s married to a Reformed Presbyterian pastor and lives in North Carolina. “So I’m probably like you. At five o’clock, when dinnertime is rolling around, I’m still beating my head against the table with a math lesson, and I have laundry all over the dining room table.”
But her guests help her stuff it back into the dryer and set out the plates and cut up the vegetables. They talk through their days, hear how they can help people in the neighborhood, and offer prayer for those who sit around the table. There’s always another seat around the table, whether or not you believe in Jesus.
“There’s always another seat around the table, whether or not you believe in Jesus.”
Reaching Those on the Margins
You’d never guess where Butterfield honed those hospitality skills—the gay and lesbian community of Syracuse, New York. More than twenty years ago, as a leftist lesbian English professor at Syracuse University, Butterfield watched AIDS creep into her community. The disease brought homosexual people together, and they formed a coalition around hospitality, Butterfield said. Each night of the week, a different couple opened their home to the community.
That hospitality was critical to a group of people on the margins. Many had been estranged from their families or were viewed with suspicion by society. Now even their health seemed to betray them. By coming together regularly for meals and conversation and encouragement, the gay community was forming its own family.
Butterfield learned many lessons in those years, but she practices a different kind of hospitality now with her husband, Kent. “What was happening in my lesbian community was a kind of liberal communitarianism,” she said. “It was based on the idea that people are basically good.... We believed that part of appealing to the goodness of people was bringing them in and feeding them. We believed that all you needed was a meal and a hug and a shoulder to cry on.”
Now she sees a much deeper need running through our increasingly lonely and polarized times. Her Christianity doesn’t assume goodness but still offers love.
Pursuing Persistent Hospitality
A few years ago, the Butterfields befriended a man who lived across the street. It wasn’t easy, because he was reclusive—he didn’t mow the lawn, owned a giant pitbull that sometimes got loose, and dismantled his doorbell after the Butterfields walked over as a family to introduce themselves.
But the Butterfields “genuinely believe that God doesn’t get the address wrong,” so they kept trying. They walked their dog with him, had conversations in the front yards, and talked him into coming over for Thanksgiving.
And then one morning, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration knocked on the front door. Turns out, their neighbor was running a meth lab from his home. The Butterfields were floored (“How did we miss a meth lab across the street?”) and felt vaguely guilty (“Did we do something wrong?”).
“We prayed, and we talked about it, and we agreed that this is what it means to dine with sinners,” Butterfield said. The Butterfields took in the neighbor’s pit bull, visited the man in jail, and continue to write him letters. Over time, both the neighbor and the woman who’d been living with him gave their lives to Jesus.
Opening Arms Wide
The Butterfields didn’t limit their love to the one neighbor. After the raid, they invited all the concerned and disgruntled neighbors over for coffee, then over for a cookout, then over regularly for meals. They talked about the crime scene tape, the neighbor’s dog, and whether having an illegal drug lab in your neighborhood lowers property values. And Kent Butterfield talked about the brokenness of the world, how nobody there was better than a meth manufacturer, and how everyone needed Jesus.
“You want to know the problem with you Christians?” one neighbor asked eventually. “You’re so open minded it’s like your brains are falling out your ears.”
Open minded? That’s probably not how most Americans would describe Christians today. But that’s how gospelbound Christians—those who are tied to the good news of Jesus—can come across to their neighbors. They even set a seat at the table for the meth dealer across the street.
“There are a hundred small ways we can show hospitality to our neighbors.”
Cultivating Intentional Hospitality
Our country has spent the last 18 months tied up in masks and social distancing, isolation and fear. It’s been so good to take off our masks and step back toward each other. Let’s take advantage of that momentum, if we can.
There are a hundred small ways we can show hospitality to our neighbors—join someone on a walk, start a conversation over the fence or on a playground bench, hand out popsicles to the neighborhood kids, ask someone over for hot dogs and potato chips.
Those actions not only make our neighborhoods more pleasant places to live, but they give a real-life testimony to the generous and hospitable nature of Jesus. In a country that’s less and less familiar with the gospel, our gentle answers and patience with the kids and open-handedness with our possessions embodies a different way.
In a world over-full of information, it’s the difference in your everyday life—the patience and grace and joy that come from the Spirit—that can draw the hungry to the table of the Lord.
Editors’ note: This blog is an adapted excerpt from Sarah's new book with Collin Hansen, Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age.
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra is senior writer and faith-and-work editor for The Gospel Coalition. She is also the coauthor of Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age. Before that, she wrote for Christianity Today, homeschooled her children, freelanced for a local daily paper, and taught at Trinity Christian College. She earned a BA in English and communication from Dordt University and an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband and two sons in the suburbs of Chicago, where they are active members of Orland Park Christian Reformed Church.
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