Porch Culture in a Post-Christian World

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James Eglington
So welcome to this breakout group on church porches. If you don’t know me, my name is James. I’m from Scotland. I hope you can everyone can understand my accent. This is great to be here at TGC, and it feels really weird, unspeakably weird, to be a Scotsman talking to a room full of mostly Americans, I assume, about porches. Can I have a show of hands? How many of you have been to Scotland who’s had that second blessing in life? So quite a few of you. So those of you who have been there will know that Scotland is an amazing place. There’s so much common grace everywhere you look. But there are two things that we don’t have, and they are related, and one is actually the cause of the other. The first thing that we don’t have is good weather, and because of that, the second thing that we don’t have is porches. A porch would be the most completely pointless waste of money that you could imagine in Scotland. You would never use it. So we don’t have them. But anyway, I’m here to talk to talk to you about church porches, in part because it’s something that we the idea of a porch is something that we, as I said, we don’t have in Scotland, and that means that we don’t have porch culture. Very curious also, as a second show of hands, how many of you live in a house that has a porch? A literal porch, fantastic. So a lot of you so you experience something that we don’t have. So in Scotland, we have a kind of closed off indoors culture, where the front door of a house is a closed thing, and you don’t really get much of a sense of what your neighbors are like inside their houses, in part because of the weather, but we don’t have these. But last year, I was in Canada, and I was visiting a friend at his house, and like a lot of you, he lives in a house with a porch on a street where all the houses have porches, and we were just about to step up onto his porch when his neighbor, who was sitting out on her porch, said to us, oh, come on, hey, come up on the porch. So we did. And I was there for maybe three minutes. She said, Who are you? Where are you from? Made me feel really welcome in Canada. And then my friend and his neighbor talked about how they were doing, how their families were, and it was all over in about three minutes. And then we went on to my friend’s house a year later, I think that there is no chance. I’d be very surprised if my friend’s neighbor even remembered the three minutes that I had spent on her porch. Pretty confident that she’s not talking to a room full of people about how, a year ago, there was this random Scottish guy who appeared on my porch, but because for her, this was just everyday, very low key hospitality. But for me, coming from a country where we don’t have porches and where we, for a lot of people, don’t really know anything about their neighbors, and have never been in their neighbors’ homes. It was a strangely powerful experience, because I was there in my very Scottish way of thinking about the world. I was there to visit my friend and looking forward to his hospitality as somebody I already knew. I knew that I would go into their home, but I did not expect to receive hospitality from his next door neighbor. And I think that if, if his next door neighbor had invited me into their home, I already have a sense of what kind of people they are received some of their hospitality, have an idea of the kind of dynamics of life in her home, and the very weird thing is that in three minutes, I built up more trust with my friend’s next door neighbor in Canada, a country I do not live in, than I’d been able to with a lot of the people who live in the same apartment block as I Do in Edinburgh, where I’ve lived for years. So porches, even if they’re just a very ordinary thing to you, are actually an amazing thing. So don’t under appreciate them. But the reason that I’m telling you this story is to make you think about the metaphor of the hospitable porch for the church in secular Western culture and in helping unchurched people connect with the church. So I’ll sketch out the idea of the church porch in more detail a little bit later in the talk. But to get us started, the analogy is this, in a house, a porch is a different kind of space to the inside of the house, but the two are connected. And the porch is a place where a visitor can experience something of the kind of life that goes on inside the house without actually crossing the front door. And a porch is a place where you are prepared for. What you will experience if you do cross the front door. And in the same sense, a church that has a metaphorical porch has a place that is different to its worship services, but that porch is nonetheless connected to it to that worshiping community in its life, and the church’s porch is a place where people are prepared for what they will experience if they do go beyond the front door, if they actually do attend church services. Now what I want to do in this seminar is twofold. First, I want to make a case for why we need church porches in the secular West today. And then secondly, I want to set out what a porch is, and also is not, because the porch is a very distinct kind of outreach for the church. And there are lots of forms of outreach that we do that are important their own ways, but they’re not all what I’m talking about as a porch. I’m trying to communicate a really specific kind of idea to you. So first, why we need porches in the secular west today, I want you to try and imagine this. You are a religious none. Now, immediately, some of you are visualizing Sister Act, but I’m talking about N, O, N, E, okay, so you’re a religious none and you’re from a secular city somewhere in the West might be from New York or Seattle or Edinburgh or London or Sydney. And in your family, your grandparents maybe had some kind of very nominal sense of Christian identity, but they didn’t pass that on in any deliberate way to your parents, and your parents didn’t make any effort to pass on any sense of being Christian or the substance of the Christian faith or its beliefs and practices to you that wasn’t really a feature in your home growing up. So you’re the kind of person who I’m trying really hard to contextualize for American culture here. So you watch Jeopardy, that’s a thing, right? And the question comes up, what is the first book of the Bible? And you think that’s a tough question. I sincerely have no idea. People who do religion at college might know that, but how would I know? And you sincerely have no idea, you’ve never been to church, you’ve never picked up a Bible and read it. So here I’m actually just describing a huge section of the population of Scotland, but also you have many people like that in the United States and many people across the western world. So imagine that that is you, and you are an adult. Or to contextualize adults correct, need to get the details right, although we call them details. So you’re an adult, and for whatever reason, you’re in your mid 30s, and you end up at a church service, and it’s the first time you’ve been in that kind of a space. So what will that be like for you? What’s it like for post Christian Westerners to go to church for the first time, how do they make sense of what they see and hear there? And why is that question even worth asking? So my own thinking about this started when I was reading through the works of Abraham Kuyper. So he was a Dutch Neo Calvinist, reformed theologian. He was born in the middle of the 19th century, and he died in 1921 when he was born. Christianity was the Civic religion of the Dutch people. So nominally, this is what most people were. But that idea died out over his lifetime, and the backdrop of his life was de churching. It was increasing secularization. And so he died in 1921 but in 1909 there was a census of the Dutch population, and it showed something that was historically new, and that was a segment of the population who identified as religious nones. So these were, in effect, the third generation of a process of de-churching. So their grandparents regarded themselves as nominally Christian, but that was a kind of civic religious identity for them. And the grandparents had a basic Bible knowledge. They knew that Genesis was the first book of the Bible, and they took for granted that their marriages would take place in churches and that their funerals would be Christian funerals. So that was the grandparents, then the parents generation after that minimally participated in the grandparents’ civic religion, so they said grace before meals when the grandparents were visiting. But then the kids are like, what are they doing? They don’t do this normally, and they didn’t pass on any intentional sense of Christian belief or practice to the grandchildren’s generation, and the grandchildren then were the ones who’d come of age in 1909 and who ticked the none box in the census.

So they were the first to grow up without any explicit interaction with Christianity, and they’d grown up without anyone reading the Bible to them, no one. Praying with them. They didn’t take it for granted that their own big life events like getting married or being buried, that those would have anything to do with the church either. And these teens just thought we have a cultural identity. We’re from Dutch culture, and that’s enough, and that gives us everything that we need. Kuypers question then was, how do we reach these teenagers, this generation of where this new thing has happened? How do we reach the religious nones? And he wrote this, we will make it impossible to work effectively on them if we do not make a serious attempt to comprehend and understand their lack of religion. So what does it look like to make a serious attempt to understand someone’s lack of religion, what does that look like? Well, for Kuyper, it meant asking this question, what is it like for these teenagers, then, when they do, if they do end up going to church, and that’s the first time in their lives, what’s that like for them? How do we understand the experience in terms of what forms them and their their the how they bring this religious none background to church with them. And when Kuyper tried to answer that question, he came to this conclusion that for those teenagers, as is actually true for every single one of us, the cultures that we are shaped by play a formative role in how we experience church and how we make sense of what we see and hear there. Now, let me explain his argument for you really briefly. It goes like this for many centuries, Western people and well, Europeans in that period lived effectively in Christendom culture. For centuries, Christianity had been the only show in town, and it cast a shadow over all of European life. And wherever you went in your ordinary everyday life, the culture that you experienced assumed a sacred order that was rooted in Christian theology. So you were formed by that culture, and it gave you a set of intuitions about God, about yourself, about morality, about truth, about shame and guilt and grace and forgiveness, about your your body and your soul, about hope, about what happens to you When you die and you simply absorbed those intuitions by being in the culture. It was the narrative that was always there being that was being played in the background, and it was so constant that you didn’t even notice it, but it was always there. And when you went to church, then Christian worship was something that was in step with that sacred order that was there in the background in the rest of your life, and church actually enabled you to make more sense of the life that you were living in the culture around the church. So Tim Keller’s way of describing this was that in Christendom, Christianized culture, the culture gave people a set of dots. So intuitions on your value as a human, or your sin or forgiveness, or the afterlife or God, so the culture gives you all these dots, and then the church’s task is simply to join all of the dots. And this happens when you go to church, and it’s a relatively easy task in that sense, because all that the church has to do for you is narrate for you explicitly, what the culture had already given you implicitly, and the coming together of the two is really, in its own way, beautifully harmonious. It’s not a jarring experience. So in Kuypers arguments, medieval Europeans often only went to church once a year, but when they did that, even that kind of annual experience had tremendous power to reach into their lives, because when it did so, it did not meet a whole load of culturally ingrained resistance to the gospel, and That’s maybe a very different way of imagining medieval Europeans than than you might be used to. So I go to church twice a Sunday throughout the whole year. And I grew up imagining that my medieval ancestors in Europe, well, they went to church a lot less often than that, so only going to church once a year for them must have been kind of meaningless because of the infrequency. But Kuyper challenged that. And his idea is that if you swim in thoroughly Christian waters all year, even a single there’s so much juice that you can squeeze from even just one church service a year. But Kuyper saw that in his day, all of that had changed. Cultural Christendom was gone, and the kind of secular culture that replaced it was a very different formative environment for people, if they then would experience church, and the culture around the church was no longer a reliable formative environment. So what does the church do about this? So here Kuyper turns to the Bible, and he goes to the Old Testament and to the temple. And what he argued is that in the temple in the Old Testament, you have two things, you have a holy place, and in front of it, you have a forecourt. And those two things are connected. And if you’re really paying attention, you can, you can totally see where this is going. But how he described this, if you go to the forecourt rather than the holy place, the forecourt doesn’t need you to have the same kind of personal commitments, the same kind of intensity, the same kind of sharpness of heart and mind that you will have if you go into the holy place and take part there. But nonetheless, the forecourt basks in the glow of the holy place, and it’s shaped by it, and it’s actually a preparatory space. So if you mill around in the forecourt, the forecourt gets you ready to enter the holy place. And if you had to define what the forecourt was, you can’t define it for very long before you have to talk about the holy place, because that’s its whole purpose. It’s about like, if someone asks you define a glove, okay? You can talk about, you know, the stitching and the fabric and so on. But at some point you have to talk about a hand, right? Because it only makes sense referentially. Otherwise, you know, gloves in a world without hands are also kind of pointless. So Kuypers argument was then that for centuries, the culture of Europe’s Christendom was a huge forecourt around the church, and it prepared people it or it was a culture that oriented people to cultists to worship, and the two were connected in that way. But that forecourt he saw in 1909 had changed profoundly. It was still, in many ways, deeply shaped by Christianity, but it was not exclusively shaped by it. And the way that that works is really complex, but it’s so important for you to grasp, if you want to think about the benefit that we get from this thinking through in our context. So there are three things that are going on here, this way of thinking about the change and the kind of waters that we swim in around us. One is so the first is this, that Christian intuitions remain part of the picture, so they’re still there in these murky cultural waters that we see in secular secularization. So these Christian ideas are still there, but the fact that they are Christian was forgotten, and they people simply started to think of the heritage of Christianity as obvious, as self evident. They’re just universal. We just have these. So Christianity was still depended on for a lot, but Christianity was anonymized in the process. So that’s point 1.2 Western people then set other guiding intuitions alongside the Christian ones. So they are the values of Nietzschean atheism and ideas taken from Eastern philosophies, ideas borrowed from Buddhism, two, three, the life sustaining resources that people get from Christianity, which have been anonymized, but they’re there and they work. Those are used to shore up the deficits from other world views that cannot generate them, and they prop up those other world views. And those other world views, weirdly, are the things they get praised for, the things they depend on, as though they produce them. So in Kuypers tradition, we call this borrowed Christian capital. So this is happening to people all around us, and that kind of forecourt where all of this is going on produces a very particular kind of person. So the picture that you find in Kuyper is somebody who will quote Jesus one minute turn the other cheek, although obviously without realizing that they’re quoting Jesus, but they are quoting him, and then in the next minute, they quote Nietzsche, God is dead because we have killed him and not really seeing that. Jesus and Nietzsche are the two most incompatible people in history, quoting them both anyway, and then they’ll see someone that they hate get their comeuppance and say, ha, karma.

So let me give you an anecdotal example of this. Not long ago, I was listening to a talk by a British academic, a religious none, and he was speaking about how he became interested in Buddhism, and he quickly became really cynical of the kind of Buddhism that you see a lot amongst religious nones in British culture. So the dead giveaway that someone is a religious none is usually, if you go into their garden, there’ll be a Buddha head or a Buddha statue. So he became really cynical of this, because he was really thinking about Buddhism in its substance. And you know, the Buddhist teaching is that you have to lessen your attachments to things, and you want to have fewer possessions. And you know, if you. If you add to your possessions by buying a Buddha statue, it’s kind of ironic, right? So he became really cynical of the sort of British way for thin Buddhism that he saw all around him. So he decided that he was going to go to Southeast Asia and actually try and immerse himself in the real deal, in different Buddhist traditions. But then he said he came back to the UK from that, and was cynical about that too. And when he was describing why, he basically said this, well, in my experience is there, and they didn’t treat all people as fundamentally equal, regardless of their ethnicity or gender. And he spoke about these things simply as values. What without realizing that what He is drawing on is borrowed Christian capital, and this is borrowed Christian capital in action as part of his reasoning for why he thinks that he doesn’t want to be a Christian or a Buddhist. So if you’re that kind of religious none, what’s it like if you go to church for the first time? Well, the fore courts that someone like this has been shaped by is not a reliable formative environment for that for the first experience of church, it’s a complex environment, complex formation in all the ways that it anonymously christianizes Some parts of your imagination, and it fills other parts of your way of imagining the world with opposing intuitions. And if that’s all that you have in your experience, then your first encounter of the church will be a really confusing one. So for example, imagine a religious none goes to church for the first time and hears about the combination of God’s grace and God’s righteousness. That person has been shaped by a culture that normalizes the idea of unconditional self acceptance, and that in some ways, a kind of hollowed out by product leftover of Christianity in the past for that person. So his first reaction to the idea that God, in grace, accepts people unconditionally. That kind of makes sense, I can get on board with that seems intuitive, at least at first glance. But then the same person also hears that the same God stands in judgment over him and demands his repentance and demands after that his obedience. And that is totally counterintuitive and repellent and offensive, and that person then really struggles to work out, is the gospel good news or bad news? Do I like the gospel or hate the gospel? Do I agree with the gospel or am I repelled by the gospel? Right? It’s like Gollum and the ring. So if the forecourt has changed and if it’s no longer reliable, Kuypers, question at this point became, how can the church build new forecourts if we can’t rely on the one that’s there, outside us, outside the church, how do we create places where non Christians can experience the shape of the Christian faith in ways that are more holistic and are more intentional before they have a first experience of church. How do we give people a chance to taste the fruit before they go and behold the root? How can we help people implicitly experience the Christian faith, the Christian gospel, in a holistic way before they encounter it explicitly at church, Kuyper posed those questions, and they’re great questions, but he wasn’t a missiologist, so annoyingly, he didn’t come up with a whole load of answers. But it’s great that he asked the questions. So I read all of that, and if you want to read it, it’s in his book Pro Rege It was published by lexim Press. It’s out in English. I went away thinking about forecourts in my own context, and I started to ask others to think with me about it. And one person I asked was Tim Keller. And then Tim went away and spoke about it with Kathy, and Kathy pointed out that American culture already has its own perfect illustration of the forecourt, and that is the thing that so many of you have in front of your houses, the porch. The front porches is a place of low key, everyday hospitality, where trust is built, where people can get to know you and your family before they actually come into your home. It’s a halfway place between your home and the street, and it’s the thing that can make you and your household more attentive to the needs of your neighbors, and it can be a blessing to your street. It can make your streets safer. Can make your home less closed off and more readily hospitable to strangers. So Tim set out to write a two part series for gospel in life on church porches. And he finished the first one before he passed, and then I wrote the follow up article. Tried to do that in his place. And what we tried to do in those articles was set out why porches are necessary. We think and what they’re like. And thus far, in the breakout today, I’ve tried to give you an impression of why I think they’re necessary. Culture is a formative environment. It’s a catechetical School for the intuitions that guide your life. And that’s true of everyone. And in Western culture at the moment, it’s like that, but in very far from ideal ways, and people get mixed messages about Christianity that are ingrained in their inner lives by coming from Western culture at large. So the church needs to create porches where non Christians can experience Christianity more holistically, more thickly, more intentionally lived than happens now in the mainstream culture around us, and our conviction was that it’s part of the missionary task of the church that we create these porches. So that’s why they’re why I think they’re necessary. And secondly, what are they like? So a porch is primarily and necessarily relational. So relational before it’s transactional, it’s a relational place. Porches are places where non Christians can see the gospel at work in two ways, and that Christians relate to one another. And you know, there we’re thinking, what does Jesus say? By this? Shall all people know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another? So the portions are relational places where non Christians can see how we as believers relate to one another, but also secondly, where non Christians can see how Christians relate to them, and where they can experience that in relationships. So if the culture around us is this incoherent blend of turn the other cheek, God is dead and karma. A porch has to be a place where, in a relational setting, non Christians can can hear a very different picture together turn the other cheek because the living God shows grace to sinners, right? People won’t hear that and experience that all in the same way in the culture around us. So we have to create spaces where they will experience that. So it has to be a place where people, in a relational sense, can experience this, but also in that relational context, it has to be a place where non Christians get the opportunity to talk, to ask, Why are you like this? I haven’t heard anyone here talk about karma when they see someone you know, someone who should be their enemy to me, come undone. Why do you why do you treat other people like this? Why do you care about me? Why do you care about each other? So in that sense, the porch is a place that gives people the chance to talk explicitly about what in the porch they’ve experienced implicitly. Now, so far, I’m talking about the principles of a porch, and I don’t want this just to be an abstract idea in this talk. So let me say this, that talking about those principles is essential in clarifying what a porch is not. So I’m not talking about a catch all term for every possible kind of outreach.

In some places, churches live in settings where you can sometimes hold your services outdoors, believe it or not, we sometimes do this in Scotland as well, like you have to get sanctified by the rain and the wind and the snow. But some churches have the opportunity to do this, that on its own, as wonderful as it might be, is not a porch. Just removing the walls doesn’t change the if a religious none comes for the first time, it’s still the same kind of Content and Experience porches have to exist before that in the same kind of way. Let’s say a church has a stall in a public place that hands out leaflets to passers by that tells you we have services on Sunday at 11 o’clock. And that’s a really valuable thing. But by this definition that I don’t think that’s a porch either, it could be, but it’s not by necessity. Let’s say a non Christian passes, takes the leaflet, doesn’t actually talk to the Christians, and walks on. There’s something that’s been conveyed about Christianity. It’s hospitable. There’s an invitation there, but that’s very, very subtle, and what I’m talking about in the porch assumes that Christians and non Christians will have a thicker sense of relationship opportunity both to experience and to discuss before they go to church. And let’s say the stall example of handing out leaflets is as important as is. It’s fundamentally transactional, whereas a porch is fundamentally relational. It invites people to experience a community of relationships shaped by the Gospel before they attend church, and it creates scope for people to discuss the hows and the whys of those relationships, and it offers them a different kind of formative experience that challenges how they otherwise would have first tried to make sense of church and all of its weirdness now for. Concrete examples of this. So Tim gave examples of things like Christian schools that take on non Christian students, Christian ministries that meet the needs of the poor, small group book clubs that expect a meaningful balance of Christians and non Christians to be present. Want to give you a different example from my own experience in Scotland. So last year, I went to a public lecture. It was held in a hotel in the middle of town, and the speaker was this quite famous Christian writer, and the audience was pretty evenly matched. There were maybe 200 or so people there, pretty evenly matched Christians and non Christians, and the Christians had been encouraged to invite their friends. And the speaker, after the talk invited questions from the audience. He was kind of fiery in his own way. He said some spicy things, some very thought provoking things. So there was pushback from some of the Christian listeners, as well as from some of the non Christian listeners. After the talk, I was standing in a group of friends, some of whom were Christians, some of whom weren’t, and the Christians were in this group were having a sort of back and forth about what they thought of the lecture, and some of them really disagreed with some of the stuff the guy had said, and they disagreed with one another as well, but it was really amicable and really fraternal, and they all obviously loved each other a lot. One of my friends in the group was was an atheist, and she was watching these Christians talking like this, and was weirded out, but very drawn to it. And she said in the middle of the group, intellectually, for me, my people are, like, secular, left wing, atheist progressives, but we can’t talk like this, like you, like you people do, because in our group, it’s all about and she did this and said, purity of thought, and if you get anything wrong in the ideas that you hold together, you’re out. So we’re all really like, we can’t have that kind of a conversation. So she said, intellectually, those are my people. And then she said, but socially, I kind of want Christians to be My people, because where else can I talk like this? This was a porch. It was a pop up porch, a one off kind of thing, but it was a porch. It was a brief experience of relationships, where the gospel was obviously at work and how the Christians were treating one another, but also in how they were treating her, and she couldn’t help but notice the lack of brittleness that somehow these Christians were able to draw on and how they related to one another, even the boldness they had in disagreeing with quite a famous person from their tribe, which in her atheist circles, you just couldn’t do, never mind disagreeing with one another. And she was curious about the resources that seemed to be there in the background that these Christians had that her tribe doesn’t have.

And you know, what I really hope for my friend is that if she crossed the front door, if she went to church, into the worshiping life of the church, she would not be surprised to find that what she experienced there in the pop up porch is just a faint glimmer of what God is like, the God of the gospel, that He is not brutal in how he relates to us. That’s one example from recent experience. But you know, I think we can see this in the New Testament. So in Acts 19, there’s this passing reference that I think is really glorious, and it’s from Paul is in Ephesus, and he spent time at the synagogue trying to reason with people there about Christ from the scriptures. But then he has to move on from that. And there a couple of verses where Luke says that Paul set up shop in the lecture hall of Tyrannus, and he was there for two years. And, you know, in Greco Roman culture, these lecture halls are kind of philosophy as schools of life, where you could turn up and take classes, and it’s kind of a business of your Tyrannus. So Paul goes there, the place that the pagan Greeks and Romans go, and sets up a porch, but not as a pop up porch. It’s actually a two year effort for him. There are lots of different ways that you can build porches. There’s abundant scope for complexity, for scale, a large scale event like a public lecture in a hotel takes a lot of resources and planning, and it assumes a network of Christians who have meaningful friendships with non Christians and their neighbors. But not all porches need that level of organization. And actually, something that Tim pointed out was that the original model of the porch in the New Testament is simply what he called a highly hospitable Christian home, a place to which non believing neighbors and colleagues are constantly invited, and where Christian faith is unself consciously modeled and discussed. And maybe here in your American context, maybe your metaphor. Called porch, is also literally your porch. And, you know, to go back to where I started, with my Canadian friend and his neighbor’s porch. For him, this was, like, he didn’t even think about what had happened at first, you know, we just went to his neighbor’s porch and spent three minutes talking. And I was, like, bedazzled by this experience. It was so weird and so interesting for me from Scottish culture, and he was kind of surprised by how big a deal I thought this was, and how blown away I was by the experience of unexpected hospitality. Because his neighbor was she was just being herself. It was completely unself conscious, but the structure of the porch enabled her to come into my world and to bring me kind of into hers. And so I was telling my friend, like, This is crazy. This is amazing that you have this in your culture. And he said, Oh, yeah, actually. So my neighbor, like, she’s not a Christian, and actually, when we first moved in, she was really skeptical of us, because I’m a pastor, and she was a bit weirded out by having these people live next door, but actually, we just talk on the porch all the time, and she softened up a lot. I would just say we’re friends now, and we get along well. So my friend, in an unselfconscious way, was also just being himself, but had a porch that enabled him to be himself in some kind of third space that then brought his neighbor into his world. Now I want to close with an appeal. I am constantly looking for examples of porches, because there are so many ways that the gospel spreads in all of your different contexts. If you have a porch, porch is even better in your church. I would love to hear about it. So if you see me walking around over the rest of TGC, please tell me about your porch. If you if you Google me, you can find my email address, or you can reach out to me on Twitter. I’m constantly looking for this, and I’m trying to collate good resources of examples of porches. So please don’t be shy. I would love to hear about it. So thank you for coming for your attention. I really appreciate it, and really it’s just a pleasure to be here at TGC and to the chance to fellowship with you all to think together. Can I just pray as we close

Lord our God, our Almighty Father, the one who sends truth and light into our world? We, thank you for your gospel. We thank you for your church. We thank you for your love for the world and so you send your son into it. Thank you for what we can see in your word. When we think about the temple and the holy place and four courts for we see in the example of people like Paul, in Acts and for all the things that you’re doing, still through your spirit and through your word in the lives of your people, we thank You that You are supremely hospitable, that you’ve shown hospitality to us, that your son came into this world to be the host who showed us hospitality by laying down His life for us. So Lord, give us wisdom and give us prudence, give us passion and creativity and thinking about porches for our churches and all the different contexts that you’ve called us in where you are at work. So Lord, we pray that You would bless us, bless our reflections the rest of our time together at TGC, And we pray for this in Jesus. Name Amen.