what to do when you’re hosting a party
Hosting a group of people for an event is not an easy task. Between inviting the guests, preparing the food and drinks, and making sure everyone has a good time, hosting can be a stressful experience.
But while you can find plenty of tips, tricks, and techniques about how to host a party, there’s almost no information on why you should host a party. Like with many things, we get so fixated on methods of hosting that we forget all about our motives for hosting. What should motivate you when you host an event, whether it’s a reception, a dinner, or an all-out party?
If you’ve never considered your motives for having a party, your reasons for hosting are likely more influenced by the cares and concerns of our culture rather than being shaped and formed through Jesus’ teachings on hosting. Jesus went to a lot of parties, after all, and surprisingly, had quite a bit to say about our social lives. So what does it look like to let Jesus’ gospel impact why we host?
why are you hosting this party?
Because motives are something that we rarely talk about, we often default to our culture’s motives for hosting without ever taking the time to examine what is going on in our hearts.
While every event has an acknowledged motive, whether it’s to celebrate a birthday, honor a holiday, or celebrate a wedding, underneath that is our true motive, the thing that drives us as we host. In our culture, the true motive of hosting is almost always to create and display social wealth.
Whether we’ll admit it or not, we often host as a way to both impress other people and form socially advantageous connections. We use our parties to show off our talents and resources, receive praise from other people, and strengthen our relationships with people who could help us. Parties become a litmus test for our social status and as a way to build social wealth. If we can get the popular, attractive, and well-connected people to come to our event and enjoy it, then we’ll raise our sense of self.
We learn in our culture to approach hosting transactionally, only inviting and serving people who can help us get what we want, whether that’s affirmation, security, or access to social power. That means that our root motive so often in hosting isn’t to love others, but rather through serving them to love ourselves!
If you don't believe me on this, then consider the common fears around hosting. We worry about whether people come, whether they'll have fun, whether the most popular people will leave early, whether your guests will like your choices for food or drinks or music, and lastly, whether the one person (or group) whose opinion you care about most will be impressed. All of these common hosting fears have one thing in common, they all revolve around the question: "What will other people think of me?"
These fears show the true motives of our hearts: we host others to help ourselves. After all, why do couples spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding reception? Why do people rent out fancy event spaces? Why do we anxiously obsess about every little detail at our party? Because we all see the parties that we host as more than just events, we see them as displays of our social status and worth.
While it’s great to do things with excellence and enjoy the fruits of our hard work, hosting in our culture is too often about a desire to get other people to like us, respect us, and enter into mutually beneficial relationships with us. We’re willing to go through the stress and expense of hosting as long as the other people can help us get what we want out of life. But when we approach hosting from this perspective of "What's in it for me?" then we don't serve other people in love, but rather use them to love ourselves.
Jesus' problem with this approach
So much of the hosting in our culture is done in this transactional mindset: I will serve you, as long as you can help me. This kind of hosting isn't new, though; Jesus was confronting it 2,000 years ago as well.
We see this in Luke 14, at a dinner party given by a prominent Pharisee for the social elites of Jesus’ day. As they were all eating, Jesus turned to the host and told him:
When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid.
But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
This passage would have shocked his original audience and still makes us uneasy today. Is Jesus telling us that we can never host our family or friends? That we can never spend time with those closest to us?
But that's not what Jesus is trying to do. He’s using an idiomatic expression (i.e. it's raining cats and dogs) to get our attention. Jesus often used expressions to get our attention, similarly to when He said elsewhere that to be His disciple you need to leave your spouse, children, and entire family. Jesus isn’t telling you to literally hate your family or never hang out with them, to do so you’d have to disobey large parts of the Bible.
Rather, Jesus is trying to get you to see that when you host a party, you should invite people not for what they can do for you, but rather just because of your love for them. If this is your motive for hosting an event, then you’ll invite people who can’t you back and have nothing to offer you in terms of social advancement.
In God’s kingdom, other people aren’t a means to our ends, but rather an end to love in and of themselves. We aren't supposed to show love to other people because of what they can do for us, but rather just because they are made in God’s image.
If we're honest, we all know how hard it is to live like this. We gravitate toward the people around us who can help us advance in life while avoiding everyone who doesn't promise any return on our social investment. James echoes Jesus’ thoughts in his New Testament letter:
Believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the poor man, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet," have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
We so quickly dismiss the poor, the outsider, and anyone different, so that we can chase after the time, attention, and approval of those who are wealthy, attractive, and well-connected. In God's kingdom, though, there's a radical reversal of values. As James says in the next verse: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?
When Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, we are to love all of them, even the ones we'd rather never be around. These are the people, the ones who are forgotten and passed over by the world who are going to be at the center of God's eternal party in heaven.
So, do you host and invite people primarily on their ability to help you out (by feeling connected, cool, successful, and secure), or because you want to love others and help see them thrive in community? When we host out of a God's kingdom mindset, we don't use other people for our glory but rather serve them for God's glory.
what would this look like in real life?
At this point, I hope you feel the tension between our cultural motives for hosting and Jesus’ kingdom motives. But, I don't want you to think that the main takeaway from this passage should be that you need to disown your friends and anyone with money.
I hope instead that you consider why and who you host and spend time with. As the hymn writer John Newton commented on this passage:
I do not think that it is unlawful to entertain our friends. But if these words do not teach us that in some aspects we must give preference to the poor, I am at a loss to understand them.
So what are some practical ideas to change how you host? While there are many things you could do, my main suggestion would be to adopt a "gleaning" policy for your hosting. Let me explain. In the Old Testament, God told the Israelites:
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner.
In this principle, God shows how to balance success in life with compassion. He doesn't tell the Israelites that they have to leave all of their harvest, yet He also requires the people to act intentionally to love the poor and outsider. To apply the principle of gleaning to hosting, whenever you host a party, set aside 10-20% of the invites to people who you wouldn't normally invite to your event.
How do you do this? When you draw up the guest list, instead of asking: "Who do I want to come to my party?" and filling your party full of people who you like, enjoy, and feel comfortable around, ask another question: “Who could use an invite?” This second question turns our focus away from people who could help us in some way so that we can invite people just out of a desire to love them, serve them, and welcome them in.
As you invite people to your event, reserve 10-20% of the spots for people who could use an invite. Try to think of people who are on the edges of your community and could benefit from being invited to your party. Maybe they are new to your city, haven't gotten connected yet, or are seen by most people as unpopular and undesirable? Or maybe they are from a different class or race or marital status, one that your group doesn't naturally hang out with?
A simple step I've tried to make towards this principle is to buy an extra ticket whenever I go to a concert or game or event. It's usually $15-20, and then I use it to invite a younger or newer guy to join the group. And if you don't know of anyone who could use an invite, then ask your pastor or some ministry leader for suggestions. Chances are they know of people who are new, lonely, or just struggling to make friends at this moment in their lives.
So many people on the edges are struggling socially, mainly because they don't have the looks, status, or confidence that causes other people to want to invite them to their events. Invite these people to your events, not because they will help you to look cooler, build status, or find the most attractive spouse, but because you love these people and want to help them thrive.
There's also a silver lining to this approach. When you invite people from the edges of your community they will be glad to be invited, unlike high-status insiders who are flooded with invites. These people won’t play social games and since you aren’t evaluating them transactionally, they won’t be evaluating your party based on how much they can get out of it. Instead, they will bring a real spirit of joy and excitement and will be thankful for being included in the group.
Again, I'm not saying that you need to throw away your entire friend group and hang out with strangers every time you hold an event. But if you try to give away 10-20% of your invites to those who need them, you'll introduce those people to your friends and help give them the social connections they need to thrive.
where do you get the ability to do this?
There's just one hiccup to all of this; it's hard. When you start extending invitations to people based on love rather than for what they can do for you, it will be painful to some degree. Your social status will take a hit and you may find yourself in some awkward or uncomfortable situations.
But when you understand the gospel and God's heart for you, everything should change. Why? Because the gospel tells us that Jesus didn't have to invite any of us to His wedding feast, but only did so because of His love for us. Imagine if Jesus had stood in heaven and taken our approach, "I'm only going to let the cool, put-together, and morally perfect people into my party. And if they're annoying, awkward, or have messed up their lives, I don't want them around."
But Jesus didn't do that. Otherwise, none of us could ever be welcomed in. Instead, Jesus looked down on us in love, not because we could give Him anything, but because He wanted to see us thrive. Matthew 9 says that Jesus looked at the harassed and helpless crowds (us!) around him and had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
This sacrificial love is what motivated Jesus to come to earth, not just to extend an invitation to God's eternal party, but also to pay the admission price on our behalf: to give us the wedding garments of righteousness that we would need to be welcomed into the wedding feast of the Lamb.
While it’s easy to forget of our lowly condition before we were rescued by Jesus, Paul reminds us what we were like in 1 Corinthians 1:
Think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
Our parties aren't to be an opportunity to subtly boast about our affluence, connections, and social wealth, but rather as an opportunity to offer the same welcoming grace to others that we've experienced from Jesus.
When we realize the compassion and grace that the ultimate Host has had on us, may it melt our hearts and make us willing to extend ourselves to love our neighbors and invite other people in, even if they are, like all of us, a work in progress.
If God has blessed you with a solid group of friends, a secure social situation, and a home and financial resources to host, then use these blessings not to further your kingdom, but rather to be a blessing to others.
