Come As You Are-ish

The Impossible Possibility of Christian Hospitality in Metamodernism

A quick note: This post explores the intersection of faith and culture in a more academic tone. While I dive into some philosophical concepts, I hope you'll find these reflections helpful for navigating everyday conversations about faith in our current cultural context.

The Sandwich Board Incident

When I was doing an apprenticeship at a church plant, we had a single sandwich board that stood outside our rented space each Sunday. In bold letters, it proclaimed:

“Come as you are.”

As a child of the 90s, this slogan took me back to Kurt Cobain—cigarette dangling from his mouth, torn jeans, unwashed hair hanging in his face—sing-mumbl-ing that now-classic Nirvana anthem.

Perhaps this grunge subtext helped me reconcile the seemingly contradictory act of being a once grunge kid (and emo young adult) stationing a church sandwich board. The irony wasn’t lost on me either: using the same countercultural mantra of Nirvana to invite people into a religious space. There I was—sincere about the invitation while also feeling it wink back to an old sub-culture that once took the world by surprise.

I witnessed people walk through the door of a church gathered in the gymnasium of an elementary school precisely because of this inviting message. It offered acceptance in a world that often demands we be something other than ourselves.

One weekend, I forgot to bring the sign back inside after service. The pastor firmly reminded me of my responsibility the following day. The irony wasn’t lost on me: the sign invited people to “come as they are,” yet I couldn’t remain a forgetful or neglectful apprentice. The ideal of radical welcome collided with the reality of (reasonable) expectations.

I was reminded of this sandwich board experience when I read an interview with the theologian Stanley Hauerwas titled 'Come As You Are' Is Not A Slogan for the Church. Ruh roh. In his trademark way, Hauerwas rebukes this popular slogan. Here’s a few snippets:

I don’t want you to accept me as I am; I’ve got too many problems. I want to be challenged to be better than otherwise I would be able to be. And so this idea of Come as you are—there are a lot of people who I don’t think should come as they are. I mean, what is baptism? It’s not coming as you are. It’s being drowned in the water of the faith that makes you a different human being than you were before baptism. So Come as you are is a slogan that might be good for self-help groups, but it’s not a slogan that’s good for the church.

This is classic Hauerwas. And it’s a splendid provocation.

Perhaps an honest Christian sandwich board would read:

“Come and die with us.”

Signage and slogans aside: Hauerwas makes an important point and I want to consider it in light of Christian hospitality in the current metamodern mood.

The New Circle

The tension of Christian hospitality—welcoming people into transformation, that is: come as you are, leave who you were, become who God says you will be—finds its roots in Jesus’ ministry.

Jesus routinely scandalized religious authorities by associating with tax collectors, sinners, and social outcasts. He touched lepers, spoke with Samaritans, and defended those caught in sin. We love to celebrate these moments—and so we should. Yet this same Jesus established demanding ethical standards in the Sermon on the Mount, told the rich young ruler to sell everything he owned, commanded people to “go and sin no more,” and warned that following him meant taking up a cross.

Jesus drew a new and larger circle that was more inclusive—it extended well-beyond the comfort-zone of the religious elites. And yet, there was still a circle, drawn around Jesus himself. The circle did not expand for inclusivity’s sake but because of who stands in the centre.

Jesus would recline at the table of sinners and attend the dinner parties of Pharisees. He accepted any invitation of hospitality—even if it had nefarious purposes. But inevitably, the hosts at the dinner parties discovered that their guest was no ordinary guest. He was in-fact the Host inviting them into a new way of life—one that requires dying and rising with him. Because Jesus is the centre of this new expansive circle—its gravitational pull is always toward Christlikeness through the cruciform path of discipleship—which means we must embrace the process of being de-centred.

Theologian Miroslav Volf calls this “the decentred self”—not self-erasure but a reorientation where our identity becomes defined in relation to Christ rather than our own self-interest. This decentring is precisely what makes true hospitality possible: we welcome others not from positions of superiority but as fellow travellers being recentered around Christ.

The point Hauerwas helpfully reminds us to take to heart is that any invitation to our table as Christians is an invitation into discipleship—and discipleship is costly. Should we choose to use the slogan “Come as you are” it should inevitably lead to saying “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”

Back to Church Signage

When I planted St. Peter’s Fireside in Downtown Vancouver, our first sandwich boards simply stated our vision:

“Joining God in the Renewal of Vancouver.”

It was straightforward and earnest (and adaption, with permission, of the vision statement of Trinity Grace Church in New York City at the time)—an approach that reflected our sincere desire to participate in God's work in our city.

A few years later, we embraced irony with bright orange flags featuring messages like:

Church is that thing your Grandma always told you to do … If you want to make Grandma proud, come on in.

Sex, Politics, and _____. We are the other thing you’re not supposed to talk about at dinner: Good thing it’s Sunday morning!

We aren’t as funny as Tina Fey, or refined as the Queen … But we still crack jokes and we love our tea. If you want a splash of humour in a cup of Anglicanism, come on in.

The approach was witty and self-aware—capturing the postmodern sensibility of the mid-2010s. We were trying to acknowledge the cultural wariness toward church while still inviting people in. But when we unveiled these signs, a thoughtful church member (rightfully) pointed out that this Buzzfeed-esq embodiment of culture might not age well. They were right. We were trying to be relevant by distancing ourselves from traditional church identity, while simultaneously inviting people into that very tradition.

Around the ten-year mark, we pivoted again.

Our new sandwich boards featured simple passages directly from Jesus: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” and “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” No irony, no clever cultural positioning—just the words that have drawn people to Jesus for two thousand years.

This evolution—from vision statement, to ironic cultural engagement, to the unadorned words of Jesus—mirrors the way many churches are navigating the tension between welcoming people as they are and inviting them into transformation. Like our sandwich boards, our efforts to embody Christian hospitality move from earnest simplicity, through self-conscious irony, to a renewed embrace of the paradoxical invitation Jesus himself offered.

At the end of the day, embodying the hospitality of Jesus cannot be reduced to any slogan or signage board. And, honestly, this isn’t really about sandwich boards or flags or any church signage—it’s about the genuine tension we experience in extending hospitality to people who are yet to encounter the transformative power of Jesus and the path of discipleship.

The Impossible Possibility of Hospitality

This paradoxical approach to hospitality embodies what cultural theorists have called metamodernism—our current cultural mood that moves beyond both modernism and postmodernism.

As I explored in the article Yes, I Still Believe That, metamodernism represents a pendulum swinging “between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness.” Unlike modernism with its rigid certainties or postmodernism with its cynical deconstructions, metamodernism doesn’t reject either perspective. Instead, it oscillates between seemingly contradictory positions, creating space for both sincere conviction and ironic self-awareness.

This metamodern sensibility helps illuminate why Christian hospitality can feel so paradoxical. Our welcome swings between sincere and enthusiastic invitation and the awareness that genuine community inevitably requires its members to change—the tension between the generosity of hospitality and the demands discipleship. How are we supposed to sincerely invite people to participate in the life of our communities when there is a giant asterisk attached? Perhaps our sandwich boards should have footnotes?

It’s worth noting that Christian churches are not the only places stuck in this tension. The rock climbing gym with its own sandwich board that says, “Come as you are” and they expect you to scale their walls. The food truck that says “Come as you are” expects you eat their foot—I’ve left this spelling error on purpose because it made Julia and I laugh. And so forth. All invitations are ultimately invitations with spoken, but more often than not, unspoken stipulations. The church sign that says “Come as you are” expects you to come as you are to church.

The church doesn’t need to see these contradictory impulses as problems to resolve but as a creative oscillation to inhabit. Even Kurt Cobain seemed to understand this tension in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” with its contradictory promise:

Come as you are,
as you were,
as I want you to be.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Cobain was reading Derrida. Because this tension resonates with the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “impossible hospitality.” For Derrida, true hospitality presents a paradox to be embraced as ethically generative—not avoided. He distinguishes between unconditional hospitality (the ideal of total openness without restrictions) and conditional hospitality (the practical reality with necessary limitations). The “impossibility” of pure hospitality mean we now have an ongoing ethical responsibility to negotiate between openness and boundaries.

There is wisdom here.

The pendulum swing between sincere welcome and inevitable transformation isn’t a problem to solve but a creative tension to inhabit. In other words, we aspire to embody the radical/ideal welcome demonstrated by Jesus Christ while embodying how his hospitality is bound up with our identification in his death and resurrection. But before we can get to the waters of baptism (where we die and rise with Jesus), we have to start somewhere and so outward facing invitations into Christian community are inevitably seeking to inhabit the tension between openness and boundaries. After all, someone can only begin to weigh the cost of remaining within the hospitality of the church by encountering how the church embodies her discipleship.

Hospitality as Christian Practice

The work of the late ethicist Christine Pohl has been instrumental in recovering hospitality as a Christian practice. In her seminal work Making Room, she shows how hospitality in Christian communities involves both welcome and expectations, grace and truth. The welcome remains genuine, and so does the call to transformation—applied equally to everyone in the community, not just newcomers.

Early Christian communities distinguished themselves by welcoming strangers across social boundaries while forming distinctive moral communities with clear expectations. Pohl helpfully demonstrates that hospitality was practiced within a moral framework but wasn’t primarily an instrument of moral change. The transformative aspect emerged organically from life together—not as a prerequisite for welcome.

I’ve found theologian David Fitch’s framework of three circles illuminates how Pohl's insights can take practical shape in our metamodern context:

The Closed Circle: This is the gathered church community where we practice the fullness of our faith. Here, we proclaim the Word, share in the Eucharist, and engage in the practices that form us as disciples. The boundaries are clear—this is explicitly Christian space. In Pohl’s terms, this is where the moral framework is most visible, yet the welcome remains genuine. Transformation emerges from participation in communal practices rather than serving as an entrance requirement. If “come and see” is how someone found their way into this space, they will likely see that ongoing participation requires transformation—not on their own terms, but on Christ’s terms.

The Dotted Circle: These are spaces created by Christians but are intentionally porous to the wider community—neighbourhood gatherings, community meals, or service projects. Pohl might call these “threshold spaces” where host and guest roles begin to blur. Hospitality here looks like genuine presence without high expectations. We create room for relationships where transformation can happen through encounter rather than demand.

The Half Circle: This is Christian presence in the wider world—workplaces, third spaces, public forums. Here, we practice what Pohl calls “hospitality beyond the household of faith.” We listen before speaking, serve before leading. Our hospitality is embodied as attentiveness to God’s activity in unexpected places. Because we never bring God anywhere—we always join God in what he is already doing in the world. We enter others’ spaces as guests before we invite them into ours as hosts.

This framework helps us navigate the metamodern tension between welcome and transformation. Rather than seeing these tensions as contradictory impulses, Fitch’s circles remind us that hospitality takes different forms in different contexts. The pendulum swing between sincere welcome and the call to transformation can be distributed across these different circles of presence.

The implication is this: “Come as you are” might not be a bait and switch but a genuine welcome.

Like Jesus, we welcome those whom society and religious institutions have marginalized. They are welcomed as they are. But should they desire to embrace the hospitality of the church as an embodiment of the hospitality of Jesus, they’ll discover it leads to transformation—because everyone in the community is called to be shaped by the same story of death and resurrection; that is, to become like Jesus.

A Story of Hospitable Transformation

These concepts of welcome and transformation aren't merely theoretical. I witnessed them unfold in Lucy's life during my time in Vancouver.

We ran Alpha in a downtown cocktail lounge—a dotted circle where Christian presence was clear but boundaries remained permeable. The lounge stayed open to its regular customers who sat at the bar, some curious, others indifferent—creating a hybrid space between dotted and half circles. One week, when none of our guests returned, I felt a nudge to step into the half circle of public space:

The rainy downtown streets.

“Excuse me. Want a free meal?” I asked passersby.

Most replied, “What's the catch?”

I was honest: “You’ll watch a film about Jesus and tell us what you think.”

This is how I met Lucy.

She had no interest in God-talk, but as a student on a tight budget, free food was compelling. Her initial “yes” wasn’t to Jesus but to dinner—and that was perfectly fine. The invitation came with no demand for transformation—only the possibility of it.

Over weeks, strangers became friends. Lucy began asking questions, naming doubts, and sharing struggles. The dotted circle of Alpha created the threshold space Pohl describes—where relationships could form without prerequisite belief.

Lucy then joined a small group hosted in our home—another dotted circle with different expectations. While maintaining permeable boundaries, this space invited deeper conversation and relationships to form. Our group balanced welcome with an ongoing invitation into the Christian story.

Then came a shift.

Lucy began attending our church—the closed circle where boundaries and expectations are clearer. Here, the fullness of Christian practice was visible: worship, Scripture, and sacrament. Yet even in this space, the welcome remained genuine. She embraced our hospitality in the dotted circle and closed circle for quite some time before making her own confession that Jesus is Lord.

Over time, Lucy was embraced by the waters of baptism. This wasn’t capitulation to pressure but a response to her experience of Christ through the hospitality of his body. She later told me:

“Somewhere along the journey I went from thinking existence was meaningless to knowing that as long as I'm following Jesus, I'm doing something important.”

This wasn’t a sanitized conversion where Lucy abandoned her identity. She remained herself. But her centre had shifted as Volf describes. As she put it: “Living for myself wasn’t working.” She didn't say, “As long as I'm following my heart, I’m doing something important.” She said, “As long as I'm following Jesus.”

She stepped into the wide circle and embraced its centre.

Lucy’s story is an example of metamodern hospitality. We welcomed her as she was. Yet that welcome led to transformation—not because we demanded it, but because our hospitality centred on Christ rather than ourselves. The pendulum swing between welcome and transformation wasn’t a contradiction. It opened space to discover the goodness of God in Christ.

Inhabiting the Tension

In the metamodern mood, we don't need to resolve the tension between welcome and transformation—because the church can inhabit it honestly. This is what makes Christian hospitality both impossible and possible at the same time.

The pendulum swing between “Come as you are” and “Come and die with us” isn’t a contradiction to overcome. We don’t need to fit the entirety of the Christian story on a sandwich board. We just need to open the door: whether to a public gathering, our own tables, or as guests at others’ tables. The invitation begins with welcome but never ends there. Like Christ’s own hospitality, it leads to both death and resurrection—to the loss of an old identity and the discovery of a new one.

When we gather as the body of Christ, we all—newcomers and old-timers alike—continue the work of being transformed together. We live in the creative oscillation between welcome and challenge, between being fully loved as we are and being called to become like Christ.

This is hospitality in a metamodern key. Not a marketing strategy or a bait-and-switch, but an honest acknowledgment that true welcome always leads somewhere. For Christians, that somewhere takes the shape of the cross—the place where we are both most fully welcomed and most radically transformed.