All Are Welcome: It's Harder Than You Think
What’s your favorite part of being a member at First Lutheran? This is a question I ask often. And I have heard a variety of answers ranging from a person’s favorite ministry program, to the work we do together in the world. But the most common, agreed-upon value we share seems to be something we say every week at worship. As a way of inviting everyone to the communion rail, Pastor Karyn or I say, “ALL are welcome, to this the LORD’S table.”
I have been wrestling a lot, lately, with the idea of ‘welcome’. What do we really mean by saying all are welcome? Do we say it enough? And, do we mean it enough? If ‘welcoming’ means so much to so many, how could we get better at it?
“It is worth our efforts to not only say “all are welcome,” but to actually make people FEEL welcome.”
When I think of ‘welcome’ I think of saying, “You’re welcome” after someone else says, “thank you.” It’s simply polite to say, “you’re welcome.” It’s nice.
Another time I use the word is when someone comes to my house and as they enter the door I say, “Welcome!” It is friendly to greet someone with a word that means more than “Hey there.” There is something in the word, welcome, that is more explicit and intentional.
But a welcoming church is called to be more than ‘nice’ and ‘friendly.’ A gathering of brothers and sisters in Christ seeks to receive the gifts and burdens of fellow humans… whether they have a different color skin, different ethnicities, are from a different tax bracket, are LGBTQ, are differently abled or just plain ‘different’ (as my grandmother may have used that word). A church is called to not just open its doors to all, or in our case, opening our communion rail to all. To follow Jesus means we need to do the work of welcoming.
It’s pretty easy to say, “All are welcome.” It’s much more difficult to make people FEEL welcome because it takes work to know what ‘they’ need, who ‘they’ are and how to meet ‘them’ where ‘they’ are at. Making people feel welcome might even make us (the hosts of First Lutheran) feel uncomfortable or at least stretched outside our routine thoughts or practices. But the sacrifices we make are small when compared to the enormous gift we offer: community grounded in God’s grace. It is worth our efforts to not only say “all are welcome,” but to actually make people FEEL welcome.
This 2019/2020 program year will provide our whole congregation with a couple of significant opportunities to learn how to become a transformationally welcoming congregation full of individuals and systems that go out of our way to live out one of our favorite values. Our leaders are working on the first stages of what it will take to create a ‘welcome statement’ that would be used everywhere. The whole congregation will eventually lend a hand to that conversation and a conversation around race, too, as we read, “Waking Up White” during Lent. You may have heard that our Churchwide Assembly met in August and declared the ELCA to be a ‘Sanctuary Denomination.’ We’ll be offering opportunities to dive deeper into that declaration, too.
Welcoming humans who are LGBTQ, or are members of a minority ethnicity, or are undocumented immigrants or who have been harmed by a church body in the past, or are a new family in town… it all takes work that requires more of us than to simply be nice and friendly. Being nice is the least we can do. Creating a church that makes people truly feel welcome so that they may enter into God’s grace will be worth our special efforts.