Becoming a Community of Disciples

Chapter 8 Spiritual Teachings – Hospitality

Some of us are, by nature, “people persons”; that is, we love to meet new people and/or we love to be around others. Some of us, on the other hand, like to be alone more than we like to be with others. Furthermore, many of us are uncomfortable with meeting others, either because of our own shyness or introversion or because they are too different from me. But the whole point of community is to bring people together, despite their differences, and unite them into one common group. In doing so we are practicing a kind of hospitality in which we welcome others into our lives and voluntarily weave our lives together into a new kind of life. Good leaders will do this by example, not just by word. Congregational leaders need to see themselves as not standing above the community but as members of the community. In the monastic context, the abbot or abbess of a community is still, at the end of the day, just a monk like everyone else. And this should be true of all leaders.

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