Welcoming the Other
An Ethnographic Study of Hospitality
- Church Leadership & Ministry
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
As the church in Canada faces a post-Christendom future, the welcome and inclusion of diaspora communities offers opportunities for revitalization. In 2022, J. Greg Sinclair went on a yearlong ethnographic journey to understand the experience of hospitality at Willowdale Christian Reformed Church, a sixty-three-year-old congregation of Dutch ethnic heritage in Toronto, Canada. Using a pastoral cycle of experience-exploration-reflection and action and an ethnographic research method, Sinclair sought to understand and reflect on Willowdale's experience of welcoming many newcomers from Iran. Using Zoom interviews and in-person observation, this qualitative study investigates the changing nature of one congregation in Canada and the challenges and opportunities of welcoming increasing cultural and linguistic diversity. Willowdale's experience points to the potential of hospitality as a culture and habitus to move a congregation from an us-versus-them dynamic to mutuality. This book is for church members seeking new modes of hospitality and presents a hopeful vision of a multicultural, revitalized, and faithful church in Canada.
Endorsements (1)
“In Welcoming the Other, J. Greg Sinclair offers a deeply insightful and compassionate exploration of how a Canadian Reformed congregation in Toronto opened its doors to Farsi-speaking Iranians, and in doing so, rediscovered the transformative power of Christian hospitality. Blending rigorous ethnographic research with theological reflection, Sinclair presents a poignant narrative of mutual transformation between hosts and guests, offering an exemplary model for churches and scholars engaged in diaspora and intercultural ministry today.”
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