“I’m just trying to build relationships with people wherever they’ll let me.”
The Rev. Dan Isadore, the University and Young Adult Chaplain for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, has been serving in this role since 2016. His ministry, in many ways, seeks to reflect the quotidian, relational hospitality that Francis Schaeffer wrote about and fostered.
In his work The Church at the End of the 20th Century, Francis Schaeffer writes, “What about the specific tasks, the specific things we can do, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to make the church come alive for today – and tomorrow? Don’t start a big program. Don’t suddenly think you can add to your church budget and begin. Start personally and start in your homes. I dare you. I dare you in the name of Jesus Christ. Do what I am going to suggest. Begin by opening your home for community…You see, you don’t need a big program. You don’t have to convince your session or board. All you have to do is open your home and begin. And there is no place in God’s world where there are no people who will come and share a home as long as it is a real home.” (pg. 107-108)
Fr. Dan has taken this dare seriously long before his ordination and has sought to cultivate a home where he and whoever God puts in his path can become more human through knowing one another and through knowing God. “It’s always been about ‘come feel at home in our place.’ I think in the heart of God there is hospitality and the ‘why?’ for hospitality is personal connection, intimacy…there’s something about when we’re connecting with each other and not just connecting with each other, we’re participating in His Spirit and we’re not only coming to know each other more deeply, we’re coming to know Him more deeply.” This ministry of hospitality is about making space for people and cultivating friendships with them, enfolding them into your life as it is. Fr. Dan observes that “making space for someone else is not creating an experience for them. It’s just an invitation to come share in our lives… ‘Here, hold the baby! How are you doing?’ They’re just part of the family.”
This vision for hospitality necessitates one-on-one or perhaps even one-on-two kinds of interactions. While Fr. Dan and his family host several gatherings and these gatherings are for the purpose of simply being together, to help take care of each other’s kids, to eat. “This is not intimacy territory unless it happens, unless something just happens. It’s necessarily mostly one-on-one or one-on-two.”
These interactions tend to come about organically and, for the most part, are ordinary. But it is often through the ordinary that God moves and brings about the extraordinary. It can look like reconnecting with a woman he and his wife have known for years who, when they met her, had been dealing with grief and self-hatred, and inviting her over for dinner every couple of weeks when they realized she transferred to a college in the area after the pandemic. Fr. Dan invited her to read Dallas Willard’s book “Life Without Lack,” a book he is reading with many people at the moment, and, when they met, she expressed what a difference these invitations have made in her life. Fr. Dan says, “We didn’t think about that. We were just inviting her over every two weeks.”
People, more often than not, accept these invitations to coffee, dinner with his family, book studies etc. it seems out of a deep, intrinsic and mutual need for friendship and hospitality, which are both in the heart of God. Fr. Dan says, “I can’t point to anything in me. He’s just good and willing and gracious.”
Father Dan can be reached at isadoredj1@gmail.com.