Hospitality is at the heart of the Gospel. What are the unique challenges in practicing hospitality in suburbia?
Does it mean more than inviting people into our religion and our church buildings?
What would it look like to offer hospitality to these people? How can our hospitality extend and reflect the Reign of God?
Martina wonders about Jesus, but sees the Christian church as an arrogant bastion of homophobia, racism, misogyny, and jingoism.
Dave, a professing Christian, no longer affiliates with the institutional church because he has been burned or burned out too many times by “the Church”. 
William's family doesn't want the neighbors to know that they struggle with abuse, addiction, and poverty.
Debra, a worship leader in a suburban megachurch, secretly feels that she no longer 'belongs' because her theology has gradually changed.
Ignacio struggles to adapt to a neighborhood with so many suspicious neighbors.
Maria, with serious doubts and questions about her faith, received condemnation and condescension when she tried to share her concerns in her church.
Rachel feels that she would be totally unwelcome in a church simply because of who she is.
James has never been in a church in his life. "Jesus Christ" is simply a handy bit of profanity."In most neighborhoods in suburban America we have lost our sense of what it means to be a neighbor." Todd Heistand
The much maligned suburbs are characterized as self-contained environments with endless strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, and the ubiquitous SUV. This is the habitat of patio man and soccer mom. But behind those stereotypes of mindless consumerism, there’s a diverse mixture of affluent and poor, longtime residents and newly-arrived immigrants. For better or worse, most of them are striving to find some degree of safety and comfort in the isolation and superficial homogeneity of the suburbs.
“It’s not that suburbanites don’t suffer as much as rural or city folks, but that perhaps we struggle more to deny suffering’s reality.”
David Goetz, author of “Death by Suburb”
