“Pray that the Master’s Word will simply take off and race through the country to a groundswell of response” http://bible.us/2Thess3.1.MSG

In my last post I talked about 4 elements of Viral content. God’s design for the Gospel was for it to spread virally as we see in 2 Thess 3:1. Here’s one practical thing you can do to in this regard: have dinner with some friends.

One way the gospel spread in the New Testament was “house to house.”

• Acts 2:46 (NASB) “day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart”
• Acts 5:42 (NASB) “every day, in the temple and from house to house, they kept right on teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ.”
• Acts 20:20 (NASB) “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you publicly and from house to house”

For the New Testament Church this was out of necessity – they had no buildings – and conviction – practicing hospitality was a core practice (Romans 12:13, Hebrews 13:2, 1 Peter 4:9). But there’s also a strategic advantage to using our homes and hospitality to spread the Gospel. There’s just something significant and sticky about sharing a meal with others that’s unforgettable and life changing. We tend to let our guards down around the dinner table and open up our lives to an extent that relationships are propelled forward and opportunities to share the gospel are cultivated. That may be why Jesus made this a core practice of his earthly ministry. One of my favorite post by Stuff Christians Like author Jon Acuff was about this:

SCLQ:Dinner

What an ineffective communicator Jesus was by our modern standards of platform building. He could have spoken to hilltops of thousands of people each night, but instead he wasted time at dinner with a handful of tax collectors and strangers.

Want to change the world? It’s easy. Have a long, time-wasting, friendship-generating dinner with someone.

Alan Hirsch said it this way in his book Untamed:Reactivating Missional Discipleship:

If every Christian household regularly invited a stranger, or a poor person, or a work colleague into their home for a meal with the family once a week, we would literally change the world by eating!

Sounds like fun to me! Allow your home to be more than a refuge from the world. Use hospitality and meal making as a platform for your faith in Christ and a way to build relationships that will lead to the gospel spreading. So, pull out the favorite recipe’s, clear off the dining table, open up your life, invite a neighbor over, and go viral w/your faith.