Church on the Way: Hospitality and Migration

The practice of Christian hospitality reaches back to the early centuries of Christian life as well as deep into Jewish history, life, and Scripture. This practice is alive today in Christian churches and in parachurch organizations within the United States, but new contextual realities--in particular twenty-first-century global migration patterns--have altered the conditions under which hospitality is practiced. The reality of migration and its effect on human lives disrupts static conceptions of hospitality and challenges ecclesial communities toward contextual appropriation of hospitality practice.

This volume explores Christian hospitality practice in light of twenty-first-century U.S. Latino/a migration, and it develops the notion of a journeying hospitality of accompaniment with and among persons migrating, which fosters deeper relationships and formation. The shifting identities of persons "on the move" challenge assumptions about what it means to welcome another in hospitality and, ultimately, what it means to be church from within these new relationships. In turn, the new conceptions and expressions of hospitality offered in this book press how the nature and mission of the church will be oriented toward new ecclesial patterns and alternative forms of residing on earth.

Nell Becker Sweeden (PhD Boston University) is Assistant Professor of Theology and Richard B. Parker Co-chair in Wesleyan Theology at George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

Miguel A. De La Torre has authored numerous articles and more than thirty books, including the award-winning Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002); Santeria: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (2004); Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (2014); and Hispanic American Religious Cultures (2009). He presently serves as Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He was the 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics.