Unconditional Love and Relational Faith

Came across this post the other day and I think it follows on nicely with the 3rd place and Radical Hospitality posts:

The Call to Radical Hospitality

"Despite my utopian tone, none of these Third Places really serve as God's ideal for a focal point of human community. The Village Square is too passive. The Market is too hectic and money-driven. The Pub is too alcoholic. The Coffeehouse is too expensive. The Church is too culturally exclusive. The Mall is too frenzied, too homogenized and too big. And the Internet is two-dimensional... too flat and too digital to give us real social fulfillment.

Except for the relatively passive spaces of the Village Square and Internet, every one of these examples is fraught with agenda. Get his money! Get his attention! Get her phone number! (Nightclubs... Third Place or Third Base?) Isn't God calling us to something better? Maybe he wants his children to be creators of Third Places that honor him, that welcome everyone, that shun hidden agendas and just love people like Jesus. The institutional church may have yet to serve as a real God-intended Third Place, but who better than a community of Christ-followers to make it happen?

Even with God's help, we have no utopian aspirations short of heaven. But we know we can do better than this. Isn't it tragically obvious how much our society suffers from a lack of community and public life? Third Places have been the scene of revolution in the past... why not create a space to start a new revolution of unconditional love and relational faith? "

Recently had a meeting where we talked about 'where our third place was?' and the idea was made that for some their place will be dictated by their soci-economic positioning. The suburb that our church buildings are located in is mainly lower socio-economic, they don't have have a suitable 3rd place, cafes are expensive and are often more geared to middleclass and upper people. So the church complex could become the ideal place for these people to meet. I would caution that we need to careful it doesn't end up being a place where church members socialise together, only. The attractiveness of the church as third place will depend on the amount of trust it has within the community, the connection it has with people from the commuinty, the ease of access and the environment it portrays. There should be no hidden agendas, with the venue enabling relationships not evangelism.

Other questions arise as to how it is run: should we charge for the coffee? What hours do we open? How professional do we become? Is this a beginning of 'radical hospitality', how would we relate or engage a glue sniffer who comes in for a coffee?