Gregory admonishes Baptists to show concrete concern for ‘the stranger’

Posted: 2/01/08

Gregory admonishes Baptists to show
concrete concern for ‘the stranger’

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

ATLANTA—Obedience to God’s command means showing specific acts of hospitality to “the stranger before you right now,” not just abstract concern for the marginalized of society or for the oppressed of the world in general, Joel Gregory told a gathering of Baptists from throughout North America.

“We like to generalize. God likes to particularize,” said Gregory, professor of preaching at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. He addressed the morning session of the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, Feb. 1 in Atlanta.

From the oldest covenant code in the Hebrew Scriptures to the Gospel account of Jesus’ teaching about Judgment Day, concern for the stranger is at the heart of God’s message to humanity, not peripheral to it, he stressed.

“The stranger is central to God’s concern,” he said. “Everybody is a stranger sometime. So, be kind to the next stranger you meet.”

Baptists in particular should remember their rural, working-class roots and demonstrate a welcoming spirit to the poor, oppressed and uneducated, Gregory admonished.

“How easy it is when we get our piece of the rock to forget the rock from which we were hewn,” he observed. “We dare not forget where we came from when it comes to the stranger.”

Too often, Christians join society in general in building walls to keep out “the other,” Gregory noted.

“We often don’t harm the other, but we don’t acknowledge the other. We go past the other in the night,” he said.

Gregory pointed to the New Baptist Covenant gathering—which drew a diverse, interracial crowd representing 30 Baptist groups from throughout North America—as holding potential to help break down walls that allow Baptist Christians to insulate themselves from others.

“Could it be that the wind and the fire of the Spirit will move here and the walls come down?” he asked.

Hospitality to strangers characterized the early church, and it should mark Christians today, Gregory said.

God’s people should welcome the stranger not just because it is commanded, but also “because we need to and because we want to,” he insisted. “I need the stranger more than the stranger needs me.”

Concrete acts of hospitality to strangers break complacent Christians out of their routines, compel them to open their hands and their pocketbooks, and enrich them by putting them into contact with people unlike themselves, he added.

In Jesus’ teaching about final judgment, as recorded in Matthew 25, the criteria of judgment will not be adherence to the details of a creed, Gregory noted. Rather, people will be judged by how their faith was made tangible in acts of compassion to the weak, the marginalized, the stranger and the disenfranchised.

“May we not grow wary of the stranger but become strangers to our own wariness,” he said.