My address for World day of prayer service 2013...

Je vous souhaite la bienvenue ici ce soir car nous considérons l'accueil que nous donnons à des étrangers. Les églises pense qu'ils sont bons à accueillir, mais ce n'est pas toujours le cas.

Did you all get that? What I tried to say was -

I welcome you all to this church tonight as we consider our them how we welcome strangers. Churches claim to be good at welcoming but this is not always the case. (Please excuse my french - it is not perfect)

Being welcoming is a state of mind. We in this country are very poor at learning languages. I have a colleague from Finland who learnt five languages in high school as well as all the ordinary subjects like history, geography and the sciences. That was normal there. She works in Scotland as a minister and goes every year to the kirkentag to keep her German up to scratch – as well as a couple of visits a year to Finland to speak her native tongue. When someone is from another place we can welcome them with a smile and gestures – communication only partly involves words and signs and pointing will go a long way but it helps if we know a few word. We had a Polish decorator working in our house a few years ago. He was a sullen guy and had very basic English. He hardly ever smiled . But his face lit up when I learned to say dzień dobry (Good day). Those remain the only words of Polish that I know. 

But we need to be welcoming to all people, not just those that don't speak our language. Let me tell a story..

I was once part of a church that thought it was a very friendly place. They had tea and coffee after the morning service every week and people so enjoyed each others company the coffee time sometimes lasted as long as the service itself.

But then a visitor came to a service and her experience was quite different. She gave me the outsiders view. This was not a friendly church. Very few people talked to her. People talked over her as if she wasn't there while she waited in the queue for coffee. A church full of friends isn't a necessarily a friendly church. And that was a mistake that church had made. Because they were all friends they assumed that outsiders would find them friendly but the outsider only saw the backs of people talking to each other in small groups and ignoring her.

Many of the people we now count as friends were once strangers. Today's central message is that before you get to know them everyone looks strange (Once we do get to know then we find out that they are just as strange as we are!) Christians have a role as the yeast to leaven our societies and communities by welcoming the newcomer and making them feel at home.

Image courtesy of zirconicusso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

Image courtesy of kjnnt / FreeDigitalPhotos.net