Costly hospitality: Learning trust at Rutba House
After an experience in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams, Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove were inspired to minister to strangers. They founded Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina, and over the last decade have welcomed scores of guests—some for a few weeks, others for life.
Leah and I move to Durham’s Walltown, where we’re white outsiders in an African-American community. She takes a job as director of the only after-school program in the neighborhood. It seems like a good way to get to know the neighbors (through their kids, whose defenses often are not as sophisticated). The program is housed in an old elementary school building that a church owns and operates. Leah supervises 40 kids in a fellowship hall for three hours a day. Her job is to feed them, try to get them to do their homework and keep them from killing each other. That last task is not always so easy. One afternoon I lay all 200 pounds of my six-and-a-half-foot frame on a 12-year-old kid until he agrees to let go of a butcher knife.
The entrance to the room where Leah works is directly across from a corner where a few guys in their mid-twenties, dressed in long white T-shirts, stand around for eight to ten hours a day. These guys greet passersby at car windows, making quick exchanges while looking over their shoulders. Leah and I talk about how we might get to know these young men. We’re strangers to them and they to us, but we’re about the same age.
