The Gospel Comes With a House Key, Rosaria Butterfield

It should be no surprise that Rosaria Butterfield sees hospitality as a key component of Christian witness: Without others demonstrating it towards her, then it's possible she might not have explored and come to faith until much later in life, if at all. She outlined that journey in an earlier book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. In 2018's The Gospel Comes with a House Key,, Butterfield enlarges on the ministry and lifestyle of Christian hospitality that grew from her own early experiences.

In House Key's ten chapters, Butterfield mixes slices from her own conversion testimony with those from life as a clergy couple and family the way she and her husband decided to live it. A key element was the decision to be actively open to interacting with the lives of other people they might encounter -- families at church as well as neighbors on their street. As Butterfield describes it, other decisions about family life flowed from that one. If they were going to be ready to host people breaking bread together as believers, then they would need to set a household budget that had room for the food expenses involved. Their readiness to give freely to those in need meant that they had to be ready to alter their own lives and handle the sudden absence of, say, their second car, because they have given it to a family without one.

House Key also offers some of the results of this chosen lifestyle. Butterfield describes how support from their friends and neighbors following a break-in and robbery helped them move past the sense of violation and nagging fear the crime produced. Her family's insistence on reaching out to the strangely-acting man across the street and his live-in girlfriend didn't stop the pair from being arrested for making and dealing meth -- but it did mean that they could continue to correspond while the pair were in prison and offer them encouragement and guidance in trying to transform their lives.

The book overall has a loose, chatting-in-the-living-room quality that helps make it feel real but at the same time leaves a lot of gaps. Butterfield obviously believes there's a connection between the New Testament-outlined protocol for church discipline and the hospitality ministry she helps her family practice, but she doesn't connect it all as well as she might and leaves a lot of information on the table. The level of hospitality for which Butterfield advocates strikes a lot deeper than most Christians would consider and so it could use a little less storytelling and a little more explanation.

Perhaps Butterfield intended readers to discuss the ideas she presents in groups and hammer out a consensus understanding, instead of relaying more concrete definitions. And there is probably enough material to make that kind of discussion possible -- but it's a little too haphazardly presented to make it as likely as she might have wished or envisioned.