2. Welcome
The second important principle is belonging. It is one of the deepest human desires and one of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour. Belonging concerns our sense of who we are, where we feel safe, and whether our lives matter to other people. Christianity does not simply satisfy this human longing. It reveals its deepest meaning. We were created for communion — with God and with one another — and salvation does not leave us as isolated individuals. In Christ we are incorporated into a people, a family, and a body.
Belonging helps answer three fundamental human questions. The first is: Who am I? Much of our identity is relational. I am someone’s child, friend, neighbour or colleague. We discover something of who we are through the people to whom we belong. Communities give us a story within which our individual lives begin to make sense.
The second is: Am I wanted? Here there is an important distinction between inclusion and belonging. Inclusion says, “If you are here, come in.” Belonging says something much more powerful: “If you are not here, we will miss you.” Inclusion permits presence; belonging confers significance. It says: you matter here.
The third question is: Do I have something to contribute? Genuine belonging does not simply say that there is room for me. It says that I am needed; that there are gifts which God has entrusted to me and which are intended to enrich the lives of others. St Paul says, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom 12:4-5). Elsewhere he makes the point even more forcefully: the members of the body which appear weaker are, in fact, “indispensable” (1 Cor 12:22). Christian community is therefore not simply a collection of people who happen to worship in the same building. We belong to one another.
The Church, then, is not merely an institution to which we belong, still less a place where individuals pursue their relationship with God alongside one another. She is the Body of Christ, into which we are incorporated and in which each member contributes to the life of the whole. Seen in this light, welcome is where belonging is first experienced: the earliest, often wordless, evidence to a stranger that they might have a place among us.
At first sight, perhaps, welcome can seem rather ordinary. We might think of a smile at the church door, hymn books handed out, coffee after Mass, or someone showing a visitor where to find the toilets. All of that matters. But if it is all we mean by welcome, we have missed something much deeper: Christian welcome is a revelation of the heart of God.
Our vocation goes far beyond making people feel comfortable. We want them to discover that they have come home: to the Father’s house, to the family of God, and ultimately to Jesus Christ himself. We often say that we have only one opportunity to make a first impression. That is why welcome matters so profoundly. For someone tentatively approaching Christianity, their first impression of a parish may also become their first impression of the Gospel.
The whole history of salvation is the story of a God who takes the initiative in welcoming humanity to himself. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). God did not wait until humanity deserved his love. He loved first and took the initiative in reaching out to us.
Again and again in the Gospels Jesus welcomes those whom others have rejected: tax collectors, lepers, sinners and outcasts. Think of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He does not wait in the house with folded arms for his son to complete an adequate act of contrition. While the son is still a long way off, the father sees him, runs towards him and embraces him. The son’s conversion matters, but it takes place within an embrace that has already begun.
That is what God is like. St Paul puts it beautifully: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom 15:7). The welcome we offer is a response to the welcome we have already received. Every parish ought to be a place where someone can think: If this is how these Christians receive me, perhaps this is how God receives me too.
Sadly, the opposite can also be true. Not long ago, while on holiday, I went incognito to a Sunday Mass in a parish where nobody knew me. I had already celebrated Mass earlier that morning and wanted simply to experience what it felt like to arrive as a stranger. The parish described itself as “a welcoming Catholic community”. Sadly, that was not my experience. Had I been a young adult tentatively approaching Christianity for the first time, would I have returned? Quite honestly, no. The striking thing was that there was no ill will. They were good people. They greeted their friends warmly, caught up on each other’s week, and organised lifts home. They simply failed to notice the stranger standing a few feet away.
There is an important difference between a friendly parish and a welcoming parish. A friendly parish is one in which people are pleased to see their friends. A welcoming parish is one in which people have learned to notice the person who has no friends there yet.
That distinction matters because what regular parishioners experience as harmless absent-mindedness can be experienced by a stranger as rejection. We know that nobody meant to ignore them. But the outsider does not know that. All they know is that they entered a room full of people and nobody seemed particularly interested that they had come. Indeed the very friendliness of the parishioners with each other served only to accentuate the experience of exclusion.
This matters enormously because long before people decide whether they believe, they decide whether they belong. Very few arrive asking whether this parish can explain the doctrine of the Trinity with theological precision. The questions they carry are usually simpler, and more human: Is this a safe place? Will anyone notice me? Will anyone remember my name? Is there room here for someone like me? Could I find a home here?
This is particularly important for those who have never lived the Christian faith. Belonging often precedes believing — not because faith is unimportant, but because relationship so often creates the space within which faith can become possible. People need somewhere from which to ask their questions, encounter Christian lives and discover the person of Jesus Christ.
Welcome, therefore, is not an optional extra added after evangelisation. Welcome is already evangelisation, because it makes visible the God whom we proclaim. The first proclamation of the Gospel begins long before the opening hymn. It begins in the car park and at the church door; in eye contact and a smile; in a warm “Good morning”; in someone noticing uncertainty and quietly offering help. It can equally be contradicted by the silence of someone who walks straight past. Before the priest steps into the pulpit, the congregation has already proclaimed something about Christ.
The New Testament takes this reality with the utmost seriousness. The early Christians used the word philoxenia — literally, the love of the stranger. It is a richer idea than our modern notion of hospitality, which can easily be reduced to entertaining friends or providing refreshments. Philoxenia means making room for the one who is not already part of our circle. The Letter to the Hebrews exhorts Christians: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers” (Heb 13:2). Jesus goes further still: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt 25:35).
Hospitality is therefore not a specialist ministry entrusted to a handful of naturally extroverted people wearing badges or lanyards at the church door. It is integral to Christian discipleship. It is also an act of profound humility, because we have no idea what it may have cost someone to cross the threshold of our church.
Someone may be grieving the loss of a husband or wife. Another may have received devastating news that week. Someone may carry a burden of guilt they have never dared to share. Another may have been deeply wounded by the Church and summoned immense courage simply to return. A young family may be wondering whether there is a place for them. A teenager may have come only because a friend invited them. Someone else may not have entered a church for twenty years. We cannot see any of this.
This is why Christian welcome must be freely given. It cannot depend upon someone already believing what we believe, behaving as we think they should behave, understanding the liturgy, knowing when to stand and kneel, or having their life neatly in order. Welcome comes first.
That does not mean that Christian discipleship makes no demands. The Gospel calls every one of us to conversion. But conversion is a response to grace, not a condition for receiving it. Christ welcomed Zacchaeus before Zacchaeus had put his life in order; indeed, it was the experience of being sought and received by Christ that began to put his life in order. Welcome is unconditional; discipleship is demanding. But the demands of discipleship are addressed to people who have first encountered the gratuitous love of God.
That is the pattern of the Gospel and the pattern our parishes must learn to embody. None of us was loved because we deserved it. We were loved first, and it was precisely that love which made our conversion possible.
A genuine welcome therefore says something before a single word of the Gospel has been preached: We are glad you are here. You matter. There is a place for you among us. For someone who has been far from God, that simple experience may be the first glimpse they have had of the love of Christ in a very long time
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