Curing Openhomeaphobia

WILLS POINT, TX — Gospel for Asia (GFA) — Discussing openhomeaphobia — its symptoms and remedies.

Open-home-a-phobic, noun (op-en-hom-a-fo-bick) From Latin phobicus; Greek phobikos;
 1. Someone terrified to open his or her home to guests.
 2. Someone filled with anxiety due to the overwhelming feelings that his or her home is not good enough for company, the rooms not large enough, the food not tasty enough.
 3. Someone who panics at the thought of fitting hospitality into a schedule jammed with deadlines, timelines and bottom lines.


Symptoms include:
 • Gagging at the word “guest”.
 • Uncontrollable urges to hide when the doorbell rings.
 • Sweating when the church bulletin pleads for people to include internationals for holiday meals.


If there ever was an age in which the beneficial, healing properties of scriptural hospitality was more needed than in this one, I don’t know which age that might be. The AARP Bulletin reported,
“Social isolation has become such a problem in Great Britain that Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a ‘minister of loneliness’ to measure it, determine its impact and develop a strategy to address it.”
In addition to watching what we eat, exercising daily and developing an overall strategy of attempting to be healthy, researchers on aging are discovering it is also important to focus on realizing a sense of purpose, developing positive mental habits and developing meaningful social connections.

What an opportunity for the church in society and for the Christians who follow Jesus to reach out with antidotes to overcome the social isolation that exists and is growing in our contemporary world.

At the Gospel for Asia campus in Wills Point, Texas, we actively promote hospitality in various ways by encouraging staff members to open their homes to one another for times of prayer or fellowship, to have people over for dinner, meet ups or get-together, and to build a community among-st ourselves that cares about the needs of our colleagues and neighbors in practical and substantive ways.

Yet a majority of Christ-followers don’t seem to understand that the One they follow was without a home of His own or a place where He knew he could lay His head. And yet He was the most hospitable human ever to walk the surface of this planet. We are not aware that we have developed a raging neurosis, which I term openhomeaphobia, the fear of inviting people into our homes.

For instance, how many of us have recently invited a small group from our church, a few neighbors from our apartment or condo-complex, colleagues from work, even members of our own extended family into our home for a dessert evening or for a meal? How many of us have prayerfully considered who around us are alone, who are suffering from social isolation (maybe we ourselves are part of that statistic!) and have asked, “Lord, what can I do about it?”

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