Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

EMQ » July – Aug 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 3

Reviewed by Rachel Jones, PhD student at Fuller Theological Seminary. She lived for over twenty years in the Horn of Africa and has written about life at the crossroads of faith and culture for publications such as Christianity Today and the New York Times.

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The practice of hospitality is a command for all Christians. In this 25th anniversary edition of Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl rescues hospitality from the realm of domesticity and cozy tea parties and places it squarely in the sphere of vital Christian discipline. Hospitality may involve providing food and shelter but at its core, it is about welcoming the stranger and about being welcomed as the stranger. A central call of God to the Israelites was to welcome the stranger, remembering that they, too, were once strangers in a strange land. Jesus depended on the hospitality of men and women throughout his three-year ministry. He also played the role of gracious host, demonstrating the power of intermingling the roles of guest and host required in hospitality. Paul urged Christians to offer hospitality, and it was a necessary practice for leaders in the church.

Section 1 of Making Room establishes the historical and theological roots of the call to hospitality. The end of the first chapter includes a full page of questions most readers will likely bring to this topic, demonstrating in the text Pohl’s own hospitable posture of welcome and openness. The next two chapters root hospitality in ancient Israel, the early church, and the years leading to the Reformation, and then describe how the practice got lost in the West in the 18^th century.

Section 2 opens with overturning the notion of hospitality as “tame and pleasant” (61). Instead, Pohl presents hospitality as subversive and countercultural as it recognizes the dignity and sacred identity of every human being, made in the image of God. She writes that the practice of hospitality is a two-way experience as hosts experience Jesus in the presence of guests. In this way, hospitality becomes a lens for experiencing the welcoming nature of God. This section also includes important discussions such as hospitality from the margins and hospitality and power.

The theologically robust hospitality Pohl describes is far from easy and section 3 touches on issues of limits, boundaries, resources, and temptations. She also provides spiritual practices to support and strengthen hospitality, and ways to transform it into a lifelong habit exercised in churches, homes, intentional communities, and other spaces.

If hospitality is uncomfortable, risky, and carries with it the potential of failure, why bother pursuing it at all? In the afterword of this 25th anniversary edition, Pohl writes, “Hospitality is central to the credibility of the gospel and gives flesh to its content” (206). Hospitality as more than a lovely dinner for photos to share on social media remains a challenge for many Christians, especially in the West. In an era of division and loneliness, increased fear of the other, and of clinging to one’s own resources, this biblically grounded call to the radical practice of Christian hospitality is as vital now as it was in 1999.

Making Room will appeal to anyone eager for a compelling vision of how to engage across difference, hungry for tools in fulfilling the Great Commandment of loving our neighbor, and willing to be transformed ever more into the likeness of a hospitable God.

For Further Reading

Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life by Henri J. M. Nouwen (Image Books, 1986)

A Many Colored Kingdom: Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation by Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, S. Steve Kang, and Gary A. Parrett (Baker Academic, 2004)

Building Community Through Hospitality: Insights from Ethiopia for America’s Loneliness Epidemic by Jessica A. Udall (Wipf & Stock, 2024)

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EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 3. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.