When a member of our online congregation asked how the church should welcome people who practice Christian nationalism, my first instinct was to say I don't want to. This sermon is what happened when I sat with that discomfort instead of dismissing it — and found it opening onto a much bigger question: how do we welcome anyone we deeply disagree with, without losing our own identity in the process?
Drawing on Jesus's scandalous dinner with tax collectors in Mark, Paul and Timothy's call to meet false teaching with compassion in Colossians, and Daryl Davis's decades of friendship with Klan members, this message argues that changed hearts come through relationship, not condemnation. It asks what's actually driving people toward extremism — and makes the case that it's less anger than fear: fear of losing relevance, identity, and control in a world that keeps destabilizing under people's feet.
The sermon closes with a hard question for the church itself: have we been offering people rules and doctrine when what they're actually hungry for is connection, belonging, and a place to lay their burdens down? A reflection on radical hospitality, and what it might cost — and offer — us to practice it.
