Our Vision of Hospitality

In offering hospitality we affirm that hosting our guests involves not only providing needed material goods, but more importantly honoring our guests’ humanity and personhood.  We are not a social service agency; rather we are persons welcoming other persons to share ourselves, our gifts, and gifts we have received from others.  We seek to know our guests as persons with names, histories, and hopes. 

We seek to be stewards of God’s graciousness, not possessors of power and privilege dispensing charity from above.  We seek to build relationships and we are not out to “save” people or remake them in our own image.  We recognize and repent of our racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism, and we seek to create a community of hospitality in which all are welcomed as children of God.  We recognize our own vulnerability and brokenness as we minister with our guests who are also vulnerable and broken.

We are committed to providing a place where everyone is treated with respect, both guests and volunteers.  In engaging with each other as persons we refrain from the posting of rules.  We do not ask for identification.  We reject racist, sexist, and any other form of denigrating language.  We respond to conflict in a spirit of peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution.  We sometimes have to ask a guest to leave who has become disruptive or abusive. 

We abide by the vision and practices of Manna House that are necessary for the good order needed for hospitality.  Among those practices is the recognition of the need for boundaries and limitations on what we can offer and when.  We affirm that sometimes it is necessary to say “no” to a request from a guest in order to continue to say “yes” to those forms of hospitality to which we are committed for the long haul.

Before we open at 8:00a.m., we gather for a brief prayer.  We also gather at the end of each morning at 11:30a.m. for prayer and reflection.  We consider this time together after we close to be crucial to our practice of hospitality as it allows each volunteer to share his or her experiences, to examine how we may improve in our practice of hospitality, and to bring all that we have done to God in prayer.