Parenting As Hospitality

Dr. David Hadley Jensen, Professor of Constructive Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, encourages Christian parents to consider their relationships with children as gifts of hospitality.  Today we offer a quote from a recent article he wrote on this topic:

"We learn Christian faith by practicing it.  The relationships between parents and children offer abundant spaces for learning and nurturing faith, especially if we consider parenting to be a practice of hospitality, where the daily, often mundane, acts of care-giving instill patterns of concern for the world beyond the home. . .

. . .theologian Rodney Clapp, in his book Families at the Crossroads, has suggested that we consider the family as a school where we learn to welcome others: 'Christians have children so we can become the kind of people who welcome strangers.' All of the others whom we welcome first come to us as strangers; biological and adoptive children are no expectation.  Toddlers' temper tantrums, teenagers' body piercings, and young adult children's unconventional life choices can cause parents to ask, Whose child is this anyway?  Children, likewise, are often bewildered by the household rules and family customs that parents create.  Parents and children both love each other immediately, automatically, as they receive one another as gifts, and learn to love each other in their idiosyncrasies.

Parents and children, in other words, surprise each other every day.  This surprise makes parenting an act of hospitality: where the host offers hospitality to the guest, and in receiving hospitality, the guest also shares with the host."

-"Parenting as Hospitality: Children Offer Parents Opportunities to Model Christian Faith," in Windows: Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Spring 2012