Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
We need difference—the difference between the Church and world is what we usually call holiness—and then we need to behave like Christians and radically welcome people within the bounds of our homes and churches, without having to knock down all the walls, expecting that the encounters around the table will change all of us.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? We think we know that to welcome is the very opposite of having a wall up. We’re wrong.
Ivan Illich taught that the welcome of hospitality requires a threshold. By definition, we need to move over a threshold in order to be welcomed. If there is no threshold to move over, I can’t welcome you.
To put it another way, if someone isn’t in some sense an outsider, I can’t welcome them into my space. Why not? Because if they’re already an insider there’s nothing to welcome them into.
We live in cultures that don’t like this from two angles. Either, we loath the idea of walls—groups that are not accessible to everyone without a process of entry—from the angle of inequality, imagining that the only way to get true equity is to tear down the walls.
Or, we are so radically individualistic that we’re instinctively allergic to the idea of welcoming someone into something private enough to have walls. From this angle we either bridle at the idea of walls because we can only imagine welcoming people in the broad public square, or because we cannot imagine welcoming someone into our lives.
I don’t think either of these thrusts is at the surface, these operate at the level of the stories that we live by, the ‘Social Imaginary’ that describes the space we live in, but that’s why the phrase “welcome requires walls” sounds paradoxical to us.
Tables
I think this is an important concept for Christians to get hold of if we think, as I do, that hospitality is the solution to many of our societal problems. If hospitality should define both the church and the ‘city,’ and is a broad principle that flows to us from the Cross and is encountered at the Lord’s Supper, then we need to understand that tearing down the walls doesn’t help us.
To take the most literal example, if you come into my home then I’m going to do my best to make you welcome. We will eat together and I will endeavour to treat you like you belong. Nevertheless, it isn’t your home, because if it was then I wouldn’t need to welcome you. You must cross the threshold into my world.
My world comes with my rules, even if we’re talking about as mundane things as which items you can stack in the dishwasher after we’ve eaten, or where the teaspoons live. If I’m a good host then I may well try to make you welcome by shifting some of my rules in your direction: perhaps I won’t serve something that I’ve discovered you don’t like to avoid making the threshold too difficult to cross.
You are still crossing into my world. This is always the case when we eat with someone, we enter their world. That’s as it’s meant to be—not least because we learn how to behave at a table by the grand hospitality of God in the Lord’s Supper. We enter his world as we come to eat, which has his rules. We’re invited, we’re welcome, our transgressions are forgiven, but we don’t pretend for one minute that this is our table.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 2, 2023
Discipleship is slow. Gamification is all about quick wins and rewarding incremental progress. Discipleship, the lifelong obedience towards God that transforms us into the likeness of his son, is often incremental, but it’s never quick. If anyone suggests a quick win for an issue of character or obedience, run away from them.

I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified.
On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing, I don’t have a problem generation.
Ah.
By gamified we mean having clear achievements, progress meters and rewards for levelling up: life being like a video game, and one where I beat the game instead of the other players. When I last worked in the private sector I ran graduate programmes at Rolls-Royce, and it was touted as the next big thing to include in graduate programmes and development activities, there was a desire to gamify to ensure that young talent was kept motivated and engaged through their training. I would be surprised if they got that far, the engineering industry would itself be resistant, but it was thinking ahead of its time.
Then, in the early 2010s all of our graduates were Millennials, the ‘participation trophy’ generation. Now, all of their graduates would be Gen Z, the ‘level up’ generation.
I see this in my own life. I track what I read on a website called Goodreads. I found it helpful to keep a log of how much I read in a year, and to easily look back at what the books were. It both encouraged me that I read more than I think and gave me a tool to review a year’s reading to see if I want to make changes to what I read the following year.
I do wonder how much my reading output increased once I started logging it though. Things change when we observe them, that’s basic quantum physics, and basic human behaviour too. There’s something motivating about my annual target (I’ve pitched for a lower 52 books this year, but the homepage helpfully tells me that I’m ‘7 books ahead’). I stopped logging how far through a book I was because I wanted to mark down the next page number rather than read the book, I wonder if the reading challenge has a similar effect (Ed: in the last two years I’ve stopped doing this, for this reason).
Have you ever found yourself wanting to finish a book to say you’ve finished it rather than to enjoy its pages? That’s gamification. When we remember that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, we might also see why they might desire me to finish more books.
Technology changes us in ways we might not expect. It’s difficult to throw useful tech away in monastic pique because it either is, or masquerades as being, useful. Telling the difference is harder than you might think, and your soul needs you to.
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If we claim to be Christians and are stingy, we need to look in the mirror and ask if we really are Christians. Have we been changed by God’s generosity? Do we really believe the first reason: that generosity is a grace, an opportunity, given to us by our Savior?  

No one argues that miserliness is an admirable character trait. The national convention of Ebeneezer Scrooge urging Americans to be less generous doesn’t exist.
Many perceive one of America’s strongest virtues to be generosity. There is some evidence for this. News reports gushed that over $471 billion was given to charity in 2020, the highest recorded number on record in U.S. history. That’s a huge amount of money. But that number represents a mere 2% of the US’s GDP, which stood at $20.94 trillion in 2020.
2% hardly seems a number to hang on our wall. What about Christians? Unfortunately, we do little better, giving approximately 3% of our income to charity. And fewer than 5% of Christians tithe.[ii] Generosity isn’t graded on a curve.
Most disappointingly is the self-deception of Christians. 17% of Christians report tithing despite the actual number of 5%. Worse still, 10% of those who claimed they tithe actually gave less than $200 to charity.[iii]
The Second Reason to Give
Paul would have something to say about this. In this series, we are exploring the reasons Paul says that we should be generous. The first reason was that giving is a grace; it is a gift offered to us by God.
Paul’s second reason is found in 2 Corinthians 8:8, Paul urges, “I say this [that you ought to participate in the grace of giving] not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine.”
Paul’s second reason for giving is that our giving proves that we love Jesus.
That ought to catch our attention. The ledger of my giving is the proof of my love of Christ?
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