by Debra Paxton-Buursma with Becca Brasser, Shanna Pargellis, John Booy, Mark Ponstine, and Mark VanZanten

The topic of hospitality and the Christian life floods books, blogs, conferences, and conversations. Scholars revisit biblical hosting of angels and Medieval pilgrimage inn practices, sip tea from east to west, and critique Martha Stewart in defining hospitality. Hospitality metaphors influence school websites, orientations, and curricula. A hospitality theme that included practices of “knowing and being known,” emerged across school data as integral to Christian learning communities. The sacrament of communion nourishes connections between hospitality and instruction, including “being known” through practices of encounter and embrace.

Learning Hospitality at the Table

In Sacred Space Pedagogy, learning communities are welcomed and nourished as a natural extension of communion. Eugene Peterson calls us to imagine how “the Eucharist, in which we remember and proclaim salvation in Christ, spills out of the sanctuary chalice and flows into the details of our common lives” (212). How might communion’s essential truths—coming broken yet fully loved, freely forgiven, and freshly refueled—spill into learning sanctuaries? Schools developed learning communities in ways that seemed rooted in central features of communion (see “Grace in the Midst of Missteps”). We saw and heard about metaphorical communion markers such as a table loaded with donated bakery bread, which flanked The Potter’s House entrance. John Booy, head of The Potter’s House school, spontaneously spoke of communion as a metaphor for community-building:

Our opening day of school is . . . a worship session—it’s like communion with each other. We intentionally say, you are going to . . . be uncomfortable at times, but . . . everyone [has] the freedom to bring what they have to the table.

Communion invites and welcomes all to shed self and receive Christ’s saving grace. The table provides a collective sense of belonging through uncommon humility, counter-cultural equity, and freedom. Hospitality routines boldly invited all members of school communities into belonging by being known through “communion” practices of encounter and embrace.

Encounter and Embrace

Practices of encounter invite others in. Invitation begins with learning and using names. This kind of naming counters common forms of bullying (such as name-calling) by welcoming others into learning spaces and saying, “We want to get to know you; come learn with us.” Invitations also welcome individuals into a collective identity through named spaces. As articulated by Shanna Pargellis and Becca Brasser at the Mustard Seed School, naming practices humanize encounters, opening a space for safe belonging through “knowing and being known”:

Our focus is on knowing each student, knowing our colleagues, knowing our practices and procedures, knowing the spaces we work in, knowing our learning community. We invite children into classroom space, and many of these classrooms have a name connected to nature: sky, rocks, water . . . strong metaphors which can capture the imagination, and inspire and nurture a connection to creation. It gives each class a unique identity, rather than being named as 1A or 1B or being identified by a teacher’s name. Each learning community . . . develops its own identity,            . . . building a climate of trust, creativity, collaboration, and community among the students and teachers—all part of knowing and being known.

Knowing and being known is essential before risky learning encounters can take place. Getting to know the learners was initiated through greeting routines or, in one teacher’s words, making a connection every morning. This knowledge was deepened amongst teachers through shared, professional conversations about students, with rubrics and thickly-worded learner descriptions as aides. As one administrator put it, parents have said, That teacher knows my kids better than I do.

Encounters that deepen relationship through the practice of sacrificial love-acts support mutual growth. Barbara Brown Taylor challenges us not to make people our projects but to respond with caring community. “To encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control . . . to become that person, even for a moment, is to understand what it means to die to yourself . . . at least entertaining the possibility that this is one of the faces of God” (93, 94). Teaching encounters that lovingly embrace vulnerability in knowing others and being known open a sacred space for God’s sacramental activity. Listening and prayer both emerged in our educational conversations as practices that embrace how being known can build a sense of belonging.

The hospitality of communion reminds us that we, fully known with our imperfect stories, are fully enfolded within God’s story. In our symposium, we became intrigued by listening to others’ stories as hospitable teaching. We imagined the historic innkeeper leaning into the lives of pilgrims passing through. Hospitality requires an open heart and attentiveness to the other and “rejects an understanding of others as threats to be feared, as too much trouble, or as resources to be used” even if our relationship is temporary (Smith and Felch 67). Instead, the host recognizes the pilgrim’s need for nourishment and capacity for blessings. One educator suggested that good innkeeper-teachers listen to pilgrim-students, always ready to adjust teaching agendas in order to receive and embrace student stories as gifts. A phrase common at Mustard Seed reminds teachers that knowing students requires attentiveness: “I see you, I hear you, I know you.” A listening embrace leads to routines that reveal and celebrate being known. Pargellis and Brasser explain one way students are celebrated in the Mustard Seed community:

At the end of the year. . . all K–8 students attend commencement. Each child . . . is recognized with a character quality, and older students are also recognized for academic work. By the time a student graduates, he or she will have been recognized with nine words (honest, prepared, creative, helpful, industrious, etc.) that honor their strengths and gifts to the community.

Prayer Practices

As with the embrace of responsive listening, prayer communicates belonging. Prayer practices deepened relationships between all members of school communities. At The Potter’s House, prayer routines were spontaneously discussed at length in recorded and written conversations. Staff consistently referenced prayer for community-building and reported engaging in risky, vulnerable work through regular devotions, walks, or prayer spaces. Intentional, consistent prayer routines committed, united, sustained, and stretched the learning communities.

John Booy and Mark Ponstine, administrators at The Potter’s House, explain that prayer plays a central role in their community:

A staff that prays together, shares together. This is what we invite the kids to do. All the teachers feel like they are on a journey, growing spiritually and asking the kids to grow, to join into that. . . . We spend every day together in devotions and prayer. . . . We tell [new teachers] it is a big commitment. . . . You are not an island to yourself. . . . You are part of a community academically but also spiritually. You will find community here, . . . and we expect you to be community here. . . . For people that haven’t experienced [an hour of prayer] it’s often new; we are unashamed about stretching people and making many of us uncomfortable in some way, shape, or form during that time. It might be a prayer line where you have people on both sides and every person takes a turn walking through, and everyone else could just lay a hand on that person and pray for that person for a lot of different things.

Mark VanZanten, a fourth and fifth grade teacher at The Potter’s House, adds, I think [prayer] has really been a sustainable piece. . . . That’s something we don’t compromise. . . . There are so many incredible benefits. . . . You become really tight as a community and then you’re really on the same page. . . . The kids feel it too. . . . It creates stability. . . . I remember I am part of a bigger picture here. There’s something about being united, being together.

According to Ponstine, his staff agree with the emphasis The Potter’s House places on prayer. He notes that there are morning devotions where our staff will say, ‘Let’s . . . pray over this place today . . . pray through the hallways, the park; let’s walk in circles around this place and pray God’s protection over it. Let’s pray for the church next door and get into classrooms . . . pray in the office . . . walk into the bathrooms . . . let’s cover this space with prayer.’

Prayers spill over from the school community, seeping into instructional acts of knowing and being known within local and global contexts. Prayer, a seamless loom of learning, weaves problems, places, and people together through objects like prayer pillows, journals, boards, pebbles, and twine, and a “prayersline” (a clothesline on which students hang prayers).

Aubree Cantral illuminates how practices of prayer show up in the classroom:

We try to infuse journal and prayer time throughout the day. A prayer journal [serves] several different purposes. One is to record gifts that God gives us every day. I want the kids to see very specifically how God is working in us. . . . So, a lot of it is recognizing God’s movement in our midst. . . . I also use it for kids to express themselves in a healthy way if they are upset—. . . to listen to God and take time to let Him speak. . . . I encourage kids . . . to be intentional with the way that they are thinking and praying.

Kathy DeJong explains how she, too, incorporates prayer into her classroom routines:

Prayer goes on constantly as we interact with kids. Lessons lead to prayer. There are times that we meditate on what we are reading and thinking about and then pray about those things. My fourth and fifth graders are reading I Survived Hurricane Katrina. We have looked at the whole issue of Katrina and they have been surprised that it is still a problem for New Orleans. So every time we study the book, we pray for a different issue that is still going on. There is the planning of prayer time, but then there is also the spontaneity of being open to praying .                . . . students pray[ing] over a student, . . . students praying over teachers, . . . prayers through letters.

The embrace of communion nourishes freedom and responsibility. Sacred space learning leans into the coming of God’s kingdom through loving embrace of others. We teach to prepare students for renewal encounters in the world.

Extending the Cup to Others: Learning Hospitality

Educators recognized that safe, hospitable spaces were necessary for the stretching needed to learn the practice of loving embrace in a complex, messy world. The practice of welcoming students at the door signaled welcome . . . and responsibility. At The Potter’s House, we were consistently welcomed at each classroom door by students. Mark Ponstine’s in-depth discussion helped us understand how hospitality is practiced and taught at The Potter’s House:

I want classrooms to be places where students receive hospitality. I also want them to learn it so they can be hospitable also.          . . . Teachers are standing at the doorway of their classrooms as students come in . . . each morning. . . . I want teachers’ body language to say, “Welcome, come on in.” . . . It is important that students hear with their ears, and feel . . . that they are welcomed into a safe place of learning where they belong and are valued. In turn, I want to provide ways for our students to return this level of welcome . . . to others, . . . whether it is a new family . . . , a supporter . . . , or other visitors.

Not only do teachers pray for each other, the school, and the students; they apprentice students in developing prayer lives. Students and staff join together to pray with neighbors, community leaders, prayer counselors, and parents.

We were challenged . . . to get Potter’s House kids not just being a light here in this place but praying in our neighborhood. When you pray, you invite God’s presence to that space. Our staff has done prayer walks through our community often. We have kids knocking on doors saying, ‘Hi, we’re from Potter’s House. We pray a lot. Are there things going on in this street or things that we can be aware of?’ . . . We will often pray, ‘God saturate this space.’

It’s something we do in a whole group context and a small group context. . . . If someone comes in and shares with us, . . . one of the teachers will say, ‘I need five students who are willing to just say thank you and pray over you before you leave.’ It’s kind of amazing.

Hospitality through encounter and embrace also commissioned students out into service of the kingdom.

On our graduation days for eighth graders and high schoolers, we ask students to join at 7:30 for devotions, and we invite all the parents to come and pray over our graduates. So we have the kids sit in a big circle. We say, ‘Teachers and parents will walk around behind you and lay a hand on you and say a prayer of blessing over you on this day.’ And for a second grade teacher     . . . to see the kid they taught ten years ago and . . . pray into their future; that’s become a powerful tradition for us.

When hospitality is reimagined through our experience at the table, teaching encounters embrace others they find on their path, anticipating God’s activity as they lean into Christ’s sacrificial and grace-filled renewal project. We encourage you to deepen attentiveness as you listen to student stories, talk and listen to God, and extend the cup to others.

Note: Read about difficulties in hospitality practices in “Tensions and Transformations.”

Works Cited

Peterson, Eugene H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology. Eerdmans, 2005. Print.

Smith, David I., and Susan M. Felch. Teaching and Christian Imagination. Eerdmans, 2016. Print.

Tarshis, Lauren. I Survived Hurricane Katrina. Scholastic, 2011. Print.

Taylor, Barbara B. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. HarperCollins, 2009. Print.