At a time of undoubted challenge for Britain, Home for Good founder Krish Kandiah is calling on the church to model counter-cultural hospitality in the face of what he fears are unwelcome signs of hostility developing in British culture.

While it's hard to avoid talking about Brexit, it's not the only issue of concern for Kandiah, whose book God is Stranger has just been nominated for the Michael Ramsay Prize. 

A chain of recent events is making him wonder whether Britain is becoming increasingly inhospitable to outsiders and those they see as 'other'. 

One such incident is the Home Secretary's dramatic decision to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum, who was 15 when she left the UK four years ago to join the Islamic State.  

As the tide started to turn on ISIS, she found herself in a refugee camp in Syria, heavily pregnant and with few options.  When her plea for compassion was met with widespread scorn back home, Sajid Javid moved to revoke her of her citizenship, a decision that was called into question when her baby son died in the refugee camp just weeks after he was born - the third child to have been lost by the teenager. 

As the founder of a charity dedicated to finding children new homes with foster and adoptive parents, it's not surprising that this tragic turn of events sits uncomfortably with Kandiah.

Stripping her of her citizenship was driven more by "anger and fear" than careful examination of the facts surrounding her case, and "felt like a political move rather than necessarily a legally justified move", he says. 

And while he agrees that "people do need to answer for their crimes", he says he feels "some sympathy" for young women who were radicalised online in their teens and went to Syria riding on a wave of promises.

"What they were promised and what they received are probably very different - ISIS doesn't have a brilliant reputation for looking after women well," he said, adding that what many ISIS brides need is therapeutic support to address their radicalisation. 

The politics of the case aside, it's the death of Shamima's baby boy that really gets to him. 

"He was an innocent boy and he died of preventable diseases, all because of his mother's citizenship being revoked," he said. 

There are other signs too for Kandiah that things are not quite right in Britain. It's not long since the Windrush scandal, he notes, when thousands of people from around the Commonwealth, who had been invited to live and work in the UK to fill up a post-War labour gap, were suddenly regarded as illegal immigrants.  For those affected, the result was devastating, with some being thrown into poverty, barred from entry or deported.

"These are workers that we invited to come and help build up our economy and then we suddenly revoked their ability to stay here," he says. 

Immigration remains a hot button issue for Britain, not least because of the ongoing Brexit debate around what kind of relationship we want to have with Europe and, as a consequence, people who come from EU member states.

At a time when there are huge questions around Britain's future and its relationship with the rest of the world, it's also unsettling for Kandiah that the suspect in the Christchurch mosque killings appeared to have been partly inspired by an attack on a mosque in the UK. 

The question all of this leads him to ask is: who is welcome in Britain? 

"Because Shamima and her son were not welcome," he says. 

His answer to that question is that while "we don't want to be naive about hospitality", the church has a really important role to "offer the world a different picture of what life is supposed to be like", one modelled on "genuine Christian hospitality". 

"We're a taste of the future. When you enter the church, you're supposed to be transported, not backwards to the 'good old days', but forwards to what God's going to do.  And He invites all the nations to come and worship the Son," he says. 

For him, Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan offers some guidance on how we should embrace other people, including those we instinctively want to reject. 

The hero of the parable, who demonstrates how we should love our neighbour, is the Samaritan, the man who was from a hated ethnic group at the time.  

"We don't want to be naive about hospitality, we want to be wise," he says. 

"But it's interesting when we look at who Jesus asked us to love. He asked us to love God, our families, our neighbours.  And then he tells us to love our enemies.  So I'm not quite sure who's left once you include all of those categories." 

When it comes to Brexit, regardless of things work out, he wants Britain to affirm to the world that it is a nation that offers hospitality.  He fears that with all the terse debate around Brexit, that message is being lost on some people outside the UK.

"No one knows for sure and now's the chance to demonstrate who we are," he said.

What he doesn't want Britain to be like is Hungary, which has postured itself against refugees, particularly Muslim refugees, supposedly to protect its Christian heritage. 

"I think an unwelcoming Christian is an oxymoron - hospitality is supposed to be the defining feature of what it is to be a Christian," he says. 

The media can also be unhelpful and polarising, he says: "It's the Jerry Springer effect where two people from opposite ends battle it out and we lose the gracious, in the middle conversation."

What the church, by contrast, can do is offer a safe place for people with very different views to come together.  A good example of this, he thinks, is the Church of England, which last weekend - on what was supposed to be Brexit weekend - opened its doors with an invitation to members of the public to come in for prayer and a chat around Brexit over a cup of tea and cake - a typically British response to a time of national crisis. 

"The Church of England offered hospitality to both sides of the debate with their tea and cake offer and you know, it wasn't about the tea or cake but about a safe place to have a difficult conversation and that's really helpful," he said. 

To help the nation move away from hostility and towards hospitality, he believes the key is to model a "selfless, other-centric approach to life". 

"The church really is supposed to be a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, visibly living out radical hospitality as a sign to the world of the coming Kingdom of God and demonstrating a different reality, another more loving way that we can relate to each other," he says. 

He concludes: "The church should be the most welcoming community on the planet because as Christians, we were strangers who were far away and God welcomed us in."