Welcome to my world

on suffering each other

by Jody Stowell

Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God

ROMANS 15:7 (NRSV)

I think I was always rather an ‘odd’ child: philosophical of nature, with a tendency to preoccupations that did not occupy my friends’ minds. I was just out of kilter enough to be weird in a good way, though, and not in the way that got your head shoved down the nearest toilet. When I entered the world of work, my office friends just used to put my eccentricities down to me being from another planet and when I left they presented me with a little toy alien that exclaimed ‘I am totally spaced out’ when you whacked it against the wall.

If I’m honest, I quite liked that.

I’ve never really been one to be happy with monotone. I like the oddities that present themselves any, and every, time you meet another human person. And the more people I meet, the more I realise that the question that confronts us is not whether others are odd or not, but rather how odd are they and how do I welcome their ‘oddness’? Or to put it into more ‘theological’ language, for those who like that kind of thing: how do I accommodate their distinctiveness?

You see, christians talk quite a lot about distinctiveness. We have precedent for doing that, of course. The persons of the Godhead have their own distinctiveness and as creatures made in God’s image, it seems only sensible that we too are understood as distinctive persons among persons. The notion of distinctiveness allows for the positive connotations of otherness to be heard, it allows for an understanding of unity that is not uniformity. It has been the corrective to the polarisation of conformity vs revolution.

And yet...

Have we, perhaps, sanitised the concept so that we forget the pain of accommodating someone not like us? Is it easy enough to speak of another’s distinctiveness, without feeling the reality of what that means? What does distinctiveness mean, when we have to move something of ourselves in order to let it in? What does it mean when that distinctiveness is something that we find hard to stomach, or downright do not like? Surely, distinctiveness should not be yet another way of living in side-by-side isolation: the way that so many today attempt to overcome the corrosive nature of individualism. Distinctiveness should not become simply one more saccharine-sweet pseudo-christian concept! Because another’s distinctivess, or odd-ness, demands a response. It is asked of us that we either accommodate, in the best sense of the word, or deny entry. We are to make a choice: to welcome another’s distinctiveness, or to leave them on the threshold.

Our challenge of discipleship, then, is to discover along the way, what it means to accommodate, or to welcome each other. In the biblical quotation above ‘welcome’ is substituted for ‘accept’ in the NIV. The greek word, proslambano, carries meanings including companionship, hospitality and the taking of something into oneself. It seems that to ‘welcome’ is something to do with actively granting access of another into our space. And it is a welcome not only to those who we like, or who we agree with, but it is a welcome on the basis that Christ has done the welcoming first. It may be a little painful, in fact. After all, for those who follow Christ, the pain of welcome is summed up in a life lived and a death died.

Pain is part of the welcome, as we learn to ‘suffer’ each other.

But perhaps I am being contentious.

As we go into the New Year and it stretches out ahead of us, I am aware that we have an interesting time ahead of us – I too pray with Elaine that we can speak effectively and prophetically. And I also pray that we learn more and more what it means to welcome as Christ welcomes: to be rootedly, radically welcoming in our discipleship; to rise to the call of opening our arms, hearts and person to each other.

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

ROMANS 15:5

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Jody Stowell is the Editor of Fulcrum and her own blog the radical evangelical. She is an Ordinand training for Anglican ministry at Ridley Hall