Providing Hospitality: Churches as Polling Locations

Many congregations across our state serve as polling locations, opening their doors to support this important civic process. As we provide hospitality, it is important that we are aware of the rules and laws around voting locations and ways to support election officials and the rights of voters. In addition to offering theological grounding, our new guide, Loving Your Neighbor In Election Season: Hosting a Polling Location in Your Church outlines tips and provides resources for voter protection.

Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.  1 Peter 4:9-11 NIV

Our sacred texts illustrate for us that a basic obligation to care for others creates the foundation of a society. Hospitality is a matter of relationship, and relationship is a matter of survival. In the context of civic life in the 21st century, the pursuit of hospitality is no less urgent a teaching than it was for our first-century CE forebears. In order to safeguard the stability of civic space for all, we need to prepare spaces of safety, refreshment, and care.