Here is a link to an insightful post, Welcome vs. Feeling at Home, by Pastor Peters on his blog, Pastoral Meanderings.
He contrasts the experience of feeling welcome to feeling at home; the former should be offered to everyone who comes through a church’s door, while the latter takes time and learning. If the excerpt below catches your interest, go on over to Pastor Peter’s blog to read the rest. Enjoy!
There are some who believe that in order for us to be welcoming, new folks must feel perfectly at home in Church. There are those who would say that if someone off the street — who had never been in a Lutheran service before — walks in on Sunday morning, they should be as “at home” in the service as the folks who have been there for a long time. Advocates of this run the gamut from those who practice extreme non-liturgical (contemporary) worship and those who do use the liturgy. I do not believe welcome and feeling at home are the same. In fact, I believe it is largely impossible to structure what you do on Sunday morning so that the stranger off the street feels entirely at home. More than this, I think that if we do structure what happens during worship on Sunday morning so that the unchurched stranger feels at home, what you are doing will make it so that God is not at home in His own house.
And finally, if you have a comment, please share it on Pastor Peter’s blog, rather than on Edge of Discovery. Thanks!
