Nirup Alphonse: It Starts With Hospitality

Published by Outreach Magazine | July 16, 2025

Nirup Alphonse is lead pastor of LIFEGATE Church, a missional church plant in Denver, Colorado, where hospitality is key to reaching the community. He is also a main session speaker for the upcoming 2025 Amplify Conference, October 21–22 at Wheaton College.

In the following interview with Outreach, Alphonse discusses how his church uses invitations to table fellowship as an in-road to evangelism, how church members create margin in their schedules to have people over, and why telling stories is key to changing people’s lives.

You have created this table culture in your church. Could you speak to that and why you think that’s so key to having an evangelistic church?

Yeah, absolutely. I grew up overseas, and overseas everything is about hospitality. The way you express love is hospitality. I once heard someone say, “Poverty is the inability to be hospitable.” Even now, when I go to India and I travel, there are people who are just destitute poor, but as soon as they know I’m coming, they will go out and buy these two liter Coca-Colas and [say,] “Come to our home.” Out of their poverty they want to create a space of honor and presence and belonging.

So I grew up around that. Your home is always open. Your table’s always open. My entire life, someone was living with us [or] someone was in our house. And every Christmas Eve, my father would take my brother, my sister and I, and would invite men with leprosy from the city to come into our home, and my dad would share the gospel with them and we would give them clothes and food. I didn’t know that was a strategy. I just thought that’s how you live. We could create the space for people to feel welcome.

So when I came to church in America, I started to see that hospitality is really a weakness in the American church, that we are so disconnected. We value our autonomous life so much that hospitality … it’s like pulling people’s teeth to open up their home. When I came to America, I just thought, Wow, people are so expressive in their affection, but they’re so lonely and [lack] intimacy. It was really odd for me to see that because Asian culture is different: We’re not very expressive with our body about care or love, but we’re very hospitable people.

When we came to Denver, we didn’t start hospitality as a strategy. Every Wednesday we threw a party, and it wasn’t a bait and switch. It wasn’t invite people and then, you know, mid-appetizer, Let me tell you about the gospel. It was just create a space for people to show up and sit at a table, and let the natural conversation take over. And eventually, because nobody’s from Denver. Nobody. One of the questions you ask is how long have you been here? What brought you here? I’m like, well, this is a softball question. Why did I come here? Like we came here to start a church. We came here to reach people for Christ. And then that conversation gets rolling.

[Now] our entire strategy is just hospitality, and that’s how we started as a church. I would have a ton of these young Gen Zers come to our church, and we were so broke. But I would give them $25 gift cards. And I would say, “Just go invite people to dinner. Go do pasta. You can feed 50 people with pasta, spaghetti and meatballs for like 20 bucks. So our church grew, and it’s still growing.

I was just talking to our discipleship pastor the other day. I’m like, “Hey, listen, we can’t go away from this. Now that we’re bigger, we’re growing faster and people are coming and we’re putting energy into social media and streaming and all these kinds of things, we have to keep the table as the most important thing.”

The table of God’s people on Sundays is a table, breaking bread together, but the table in our city … we want to build more tables. We have this dream that I’ve been praying about for a long time: I think [2026] needs to be the year of 10,000 tables. We’re going to count the tables in our church. I would argue that hospitality is the only biblical practice that accomplishes the Great Commission and the Great Commandment at the same time. You can both love one another in a way that’s attractive, and say the way you love one another, but know you’re my disciple at the table.

So, that’s what we did. That’s how we started. And then once I started seeing, Well, wait a minute, people long for this. There’s a longing for an invitation to come and sit and to dine and to be known on this place, to break bread with others. That’s when we thought, OK, we can actually make this a strategy, but it can never be a strategic product of who we are. It has to be an embodied experience of the church.

We certainly don’t want hospitality to just be entertainment. It has to be embodied in the gospel. God made himself incarnate for us. God sets a table for us. God invites us to that table. And I just love that the story of the gospel begins at a table in Eden and will end at a table at the supper of the Lamb. And so we’re just saying, hey, there’s a story that God has been writing and the table seems to be where that story is happening. We want to pull up a seat and you’re invited to the table. We want to be known as the most hospitable people in the city.

You made a very intentional decision not to do a ton of ministries out of the church, but instead partner with community groups that are already doing things well. I think a lot of churches fall into the trap of overscheduling people, and Americans naturally overschedule ourselves, and it can very quickly turn inward. How do you build making time for hospitality into the culture of your church so that it doesn’t unintentionally turn [inward] on itself again?

Yeah, it’s really good question. We love to confuse busyness with maturity. The busier you are, the more mature you are; the busier you are, the more responsibility you have. And I often equate it to the guy that goes to the gym and he walks around for four and a half hours, doesn’t do anything. He just walks around four and a half hours, does one machine, and then tells you how hard he worked. Like, you didn’t really do much. You just walked around for four hours. So, I think a lot of our programming can be like that. You just walked around the gym for four hours, but didn’t really do much.

One of the reasons we partner with a lot of people in the city, and we bring them to our church, and we pray for them, and we have them share, we support them financially, we send them volunteers, is because I don’t think you can truly make a difference in the city or live out the gospel in a church until you believe that you are called to live in a particular city. And it’s countercultural. We live in such a transient culture now, where people are sort of like: I’ll just go date Chicago for three years, and I’ll just go date LA for four years. I’m never gonna bring her home to meet my parents. When I’m ready to get settled, I’ll move back to wherever that is.

You have to love the city that God has called you to. You have to seek the welfare of the city that God has called you to. One of the ways we do that is to say, hey, listen, there are great partners who are doing work in the city and they’ve been here longer than we have, and they are experts in their field. We want to partner with them, and we want them to share how we can contribute to what they’re doing, but let them lead the way.

We’re not asking you to do more things. We’re asking you to embody the gospel life here. A lot of that is oriented around how you use your time. What I like to tell people is hospitality, mercy, and love typically happen in the margins. Most of us have no margin in our money. We have no margin with our time. We have no margin in our day.

You’ve got to live, as Paul says, in a really unwise generation and make the best use of your time. So how are you orienting your time? We challenge them to do two meals a week. One of those meals needs to be your Sabbath meal. Your Sabbath meal is where you’re inviting believers who come and dine with you, break bread with you. We give them prayer liturgies and things like that. But hey, this is time for fellowship. So your Sabbath meal really isn’t the, Let me invite the nonbeliever into the space. This is for believers to gather, to break bread together. It’s also a way to practice church discipline, to say hey, if you are continuing to live in rebellious sin against God, unrepentant sin, you can’t break bread at the table. Like, you can’t come here. You can’t desecrate the table. Confess, repent, receive God’s forgiveness. The joy of the Christ in you will celebrate that. Come break bread at the table.

Then we say your second table should just be your—whether you call it your outreach table, whether you call it your friendship table, whether you call it your ministry table—have another table that you invite others [nonbelievers] into that space to break bread. [That table is] all about story. One of the practices we have is when people come sit down at your table, put the phones away and put the food at the middle of the table. So many Gen Zers in Denver haven’t had a home-cooked meal since Obama was a senator. They’re so used to going and getting their food and coming back. It’s like, no, put the food at the table so there’s no reason to get up. Sit at the table, no phones. And then we just say, everyone gets two minutes to share your story. If I’m there, I or whoever’s running it has a little stopwatch. People are doing this all over our city now. And what’s fascinating is nobody interrupts. Everyone is listening. When is the last time you’ve been in an environment where nobody’s trying to one-up you, no one’s trying to prove anything. You’re just in a space where people can share who they are and what they’ve gone through. It’s silent; it’s quiet. People are leaning in, people are crying, laughing; it’s beautiful.

The second thing I find interesting is within seconds of them finishing, they’re like, Wait a minute, you’re a military kid? I’m a military kid. Wait, you live there? I used to live there. You went there? I went there. C.S. Lewis talks about the beginning of friendship is that You also? I thought I was the only one. We see that happen so much. I think people are just longing to be at a table, longing to be known.

One of the biggest things when you’re talking about table fellowship—and this is a challenge for everybody of every generation—is making the gospel part of the conversation. So how do you help people be intentional about bringing Jesus to that table, especially if they have non-Christians?

Yes, great question. Because I would say the longer it takes you to talk about Jesus, the harder it becomes. So, at the Sabbath dinner it’s built around prayer and the liturgy we give them. It’s centered around life, death, burial, resurrection of Christ, so it’s a little bit easier because who you’re inviting are believers. But even as believers, we need to continually come back to the cross and come back to the resurrection of Christ and to say, I want to know nothing other than Christ and Christ crucified.

Yeah, for sure.

When we’re inviting nonbelievers to our home, that’s why that story piece is so critical. If you were the believer there, the center of your story is your baptism, when you came to Christ, what God has done in your life, the freedom he has helped you experience. So we’re trying to teach people, how do you share the story of what God is writing in your life, not just, Well, I grew up overseas and moved to Chicago and then I went to college and you know, got a job, and I went to law school, and now I have four kids. It’s not just the facts of your life, but the story, the thread of the gospel moving through. The person who is sharing the stories, they’re talking about Jesus. And that’s what we’re trying to teach them to do is you have to give witness to the resurrection life in that story. But it’s framed in a story. It’s not framed in, Before we break bread I want to walk you through the four spiritual laws, and I want to walk you guys through the Emmaus road experience, and then ask you if you’ve ever sinned before, and then time of confession. You’re, framing it in a story.

One of the downsides of Western culture is it’s a linear cause-and-effect culture. Eastern culture is a narrative culture. And this is Jesus. Jesus is like:

Hey, let me tell you a story. Let me tell you the gospel.

A woman had a coin. She lost it, but she found it, and she threw a party.

A man had a hundred [sheep]. Couldn’t find one. He went to go find it.

A father had two sons. One of them ran away …

Somewhere in this story there’s something happening. And what we need to do at the table is pull people into a better story. The reason people live in their trauma, the reason people still live in the divorce of their parents, the reason people still turn to pornography or addiction, is because they have not found a better story.

Western culture, secular culture, does not offer a better story. It offers solutions [in order] to escape. It does not offer a story that heals. The gospel is offering us an eternal cosmic story that is healing us inside of the story and the person and the life, death, burial, resurrection of Jesus. So everything, all of our sermons, all of our preaching, all of our music … they need to be stories. How are you inviting people into the story of God?

I tell people all the time, why do grown men—I mean grown men, not adults still under their parents’ insurance; I mean grown men with children and a mortgage, with jobs—on Halloween, why do they still dress like Darth Vader or Storm Troopers? [It’s] because George Lucas tells a phenomenal story, and they were captured by a story.

At the table, we are not entertaining. The point of hospitality is not to entertain; it is to tell a better story and invite people into the story of God. That’s what people need. That’s what they’re longing for. They want to be a part of that story. And that story is transforming. That story is eternal. That story is enduring. That story is faithful.

So even when people are baptized, like the first thing you have to do is host a party. You have to throw your own baptism party, and you can tell people why you were baptized. Because the longer it takes you to do that, the harder and harder and harder it’s gonna be.

Our American kind of default discipleship is, All right, they got baptized. Plug them in a small group with other believers and get them to study Lamentations, and they’re gonna know like the doctrine of creation … which is all great stuff, but the longer it took to take them away from the witness of what Christ has done in their life, the harder and harder and harder it becomes. The quicker you learn to share, the faster it becomes, and it just becomes a part of who you are. You’re just constantly sharing what Jesus has done in your life all the time. We try to do that with everybody.

My wife, our kids and I go for a family walk, and [one time] I met a woman who was homeless, and just came out of an abusive relationship. Our first invitation is not [to] the church [service]. Our first invitation is, “Do you want to come to our house for dinner? Do you want to come sit at the table with us? Where your dignity can be restored? Where your life can be honored?”

Paul says, “Outdo one another [in showing] honor” in Romans 12. I think honor is so much about presence, being present with people. The gospel begins with God creating a garden for his presence to dwell with his people, and then the story of Jesus begins with God honoring us by bringing his presence to us. That’s what hospitality is creating: a space to honor others by bringing our presence to them, and where they can bring their presence to us.

I love Paul’s strategy in Acts 28:30­–31. He’s under house arrest, and it basically says he taught the kingdom of God, welcoming all who came to him. I mean, he’s sitting at the table. So my argument is that evangelism is at the table. I love that. You know, Rodney Stark says this, but Diana Butler Bass certainly says that Christianity exploded in the ancient Near East, not because of martyrdom, but because of hospitality. So there’s a sense of radical hospitality, care for the poor, care for the orphan, sick and the widow. We’ve seen our church grow simply because we want to open up space at the table. So we’ve just said, as God is opening up your life to your neighbors and your co-workers, build longer tables, not taller fences.

To hear more from leaders like Nirup Alphonse who are helping churches mobilize everyday Christians to reach their communities with the gospel, register your team now for this year’s Amplify Conference, and join us in advancing the kingdom of God.