Community of Hospitality

By Brad Schweers

My main peacemaking and social justice work these days is through the Community of Hospitality (COH). The COH is an intentional-living community, with shared values of spirituality, simple living, and social change. I lived in the house as a full-time volunteer from 1997-2000 while working for Café 458, a non-profit restaurant for homeless people on Edgewood here in Atlanta. I served as a case manager for homeless guests at Café 458 and have stayed connected with the COH group, worshipping with the interfaith Worship Circle weekly. I now have the pleasure to serve as Chair of the Board for the organization, which is a 501-c-3 non-profit.


As I have continued to volunteer with the COH, one of the roles I have been passionate about is supporting the community of young adult volunteers who come to the COH for 1-2 years of voluntary service. We have had volunteers ranging in age from 18-75 and from all over the US as well as Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Living in community was and is hard work, but so rewarding. It’s a change to live simply, to live in a place that matches the values I believe in, like relationships, responsible and sustainable practices like gardening and composting, and a balance of work, play, rest, and contemplation. I learned that peacemaking starts with the people who are around you, your community. When you live with people, you have to learn loving ways to support, listen to, and, when needed, confront people. All in a spirit of love. Hard work, but so rewarding! And these are the skills that transfer into larger peacemaking in the world.

The COH has recently formed a partnership with the Friends of L’Arche Atlanta. L’Arche, for those not familiar, is an international organization founded in 1964 in France by a man named Jean Vanier. Henri Nouwen, the great spiritual writer and professor, famously lived the last decade of his life in a L’Arche house in Toronto. L’Arche houses are places where people with intellectual disabilities—“core members” as they are called—live together with “assistants,” those who do not have intellectual disabilities. The idea is simple—bring those who are so often on the periphery of society into the very center. Of course this counter-cultural upside-down value (those at the margins are to be in the center) is straight out of the New Testament. Jesus the Savior came not as a warrior king, but through an unwanted pregnancy to an unmarried teenager. The Kingdom (Reign) of God was most alive, not in the rich, the powerful, the educated, and the upright, but in the outcasts, the poor and the women, the cheaters and prostitutes, the Samaritans and lepers and the demon-possessed.

The Community of Hospitality has always been about life in community with those on the margins, and now L’Arche will begin open their first house in Atlanta at the COH house. We are all excited about this merger, a merger that continues to have a foundation in radical hospitality and to live out the upside-down values of Jesus.