Foreword — Living in Community
The people we live next to have a bigger impact on the quality of our lives than we usually stop to consider. In the grand scheme of things, relationships matter far more than bricks and mortar, and our neighborhoods are much more than collections of houses.
When we began reaching out to our neighbors, we quickly discovered that the benefits were far-reaching. We ended up being cared for by our neighbors as much as, if not more than, we cared for them. We began to experience what it is like to have a strong support system right outside our front door. We all have a deep need for genuine community, and nothing beats the frequency, availability, and spontaneity of connecting with people who live nearby.
The story of Jesus becomes evident whenever we connect with the people who live closest to us. As Jesus himself said, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). When we took those words seriously, our home became a dream home — not because of what it was made of, but because of the relationships we developed with our neighbors. Our street filled with people who knew and cared for one another.
The command to love our neighbors lies at the core of God’s plan for our lives, and when we follow this mandate, it changes everything. The journey begins when we choose a lifestyle of conversation and community over a lifestyle of busyness and accumulation. It is about making room for life and choosing to befriend those God has placed around us.
Chapter 1 — Who Is My Neighbor?
What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command, he said: love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. What if he actually meant your literal neighbors — the people who live right next door? The problem is that we have turned this simple idea into a nice saying. We put it on bumper stickers and T-shirts and go on with our lives without actually putting it into practice. Jesus has given us a practical plan with the potential to change the world. The reality, though, is that the majority of Christians don’t even know the names of most of their neighbors.
Start by looking around your own neighborhood. What problems do you see? The yard across the street is full of knee-high weeds, and you know the husband just got laid off. Next door, teenagers are smoking pot nightly. A few doors down, a family with several children clearly doesn’t speak much English, and you wonder if the kids are even in school. These problems aren’t hypothetical; they likely exist just outside your front door. We can always hope that somebody else will handle them — the government, the police, the school district. But what if we could be part of the solution? What if it all starts with getting to know the invisible neighbors that surround us?
It is so easy to draw negative conclusions about the neighbors we have only glimpsed. An unkempt yard, a slew of tattoos, a weird haircut, or loud music — all of it can cause us to make assumptions about the people who live around us. And it is precisely those assumptions that keep us from befriending them.
A group of pastors gathered with city officials and discovered exactly how deep the need runs. The discussion revealed a familiar laundry list of social problems: at-risk kids, dilapidated housing, child hunger, drug and alcohol abuse, loneliness, elderly shut-ins with no one to look in on them. The list went on. Then the mayor said something that inspired the whole joint-church movement: “The majority of the issues that our community is facing would be eliminated or drastically reduced if we could just figure out a way to become a community of great neighbors.” Frie shared candidly in that same conversation that, in his opinion, government programs are not always the most effective way to address social issues. Relationships, he said, are more effective than programs because they are organic and ongoing. In a word, the mayor had invited a roomful of pastors to get their people to actually obey Jesus — to obey the second half of the Great Commandment.
The Great Commandment is a teaching found throughout the Bible for the purpose of reminding us how important it is. As the apostle Paul puts it most succinctly in Galatians 5:14, “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Jesus is a genius. Asked to pick one commandment more important than all the others, he shares something that would change the world, if only every person who believes in him would actually do it.
When groups of believers began taking this seriously — simply learning their neighbors’ names and working with others to throw a block party — city leaders began to notice. The results were immediate. New friendships evolved, strangers became acquaintances, and acquaintances began moving toward genuine relationships with one another.
The solutions to the problems in our neighborhoods are not ultimately found in the government, the police, the schools, or in getting more people to go to church. The solutions lie with us. It is within our power to become good neighbors, to care for the people around us and to be cared for by them. There really is a different way to live, and it turns out to be the best way to live.
Sitting with this conviction led to an obsession with John 17, the entire chapter that recounts Jesus’s prayer just before his arrest. After praying for himself and then for his disciples, he concludes by praying for all who would follow him — that they would be one, brought to complete unity. Jesus has a burning desire for there to be unity among all believers. He tells us that there is something so sacred and beautiful about this oneness that it will draw people to God who are not yet in a relationship with him.
One of the worthiest endeavors any follower of Jesus can undertake is to take the Great Commandment seriously and learn to be in genuine relationship with literal neighbors. Get back to the basics of what he commanded: love God and love others. Everything else is secondary.
Chapter 2 — Taking the Great Commandment Seriously
When we don’t know our neighbors, misunderstanding thrives. A friend had a neighbor whose house was run down — the garage door falling off its hinges, two dead cars out front. The instinct was to call code enforcement, and officials came and issued a ticket. A few days later, talking to another neighbor, the story came out: the woman who lived there was alone, and her mother had cancer. She had stopped working to sit at her mom’s bedside around the clock for months. Without knowing someone’s story, assumptions fill every empty space.
Fear takes root the same way. Whatever is unknown feels threatening. When we don’t know our neighbors and they don’t know us, it is easy to imagine the worst about each other. But God invites us to love the way he loves — and that requires actually knowing the people around us.
When a lawyer once asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with a story. A man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. Two religious leaders — people who prided themselves on doing the right thing, good religious folks who should have known better — passed by without helping. They had schedules to keep and agendas that couldn’t be flexed. Then a Samaritan stopped. In Jesus’s day, Samaritans and Israelites despised each other; for his listeners, it would be the modern-day equivalent of a terrorist stopping to help. Yet the Samaritan bandaged the man’s wounds, loaded him on his donkey, took him to an inn, and even paid his medical bills. Jesus’s point was clear: the Samaritan was the true neighbor. “Go and do likewise,” he told the lawyer.
The lawyer’s question — “Who is my neighbor?” — is our question too, and we often answer it in a way that lets us off the hook. When we say “everyone is my neighbor,” it can become an excuse for avoiding the implications of following the Great Commandment. Our “neighbors” get defined in the broadest of terms: the people across town, the people helped by organizations that receive our donations, the people the government helps. But when we aim for everything, we hit nothing. When we insist we are neighbors with everybody, we often end up being neighbors with nobody. That is our human nature — always looking for a loophole.
There is a practical exercise that makes the abstract concrete: draw a simple block map showing the eight houses closest to yours. For each one, try to fill in three levels of information. First, write down the names of the people who live there — first and last names if possible, first names only if that is all you have. Second, write down some relevant information you would know only if you had actually spoken to that person — not something visible from the driveway, but something learned through conversation, like where they grew up, what they do for a living, or where they are from. Third, write down anything more in-depth you have learned through real relationship: their career plans, their dreams, what motivates them, what they fear, what they believe about God.
Most people are quietly humbled by this exercise. It reveals how little we truly know about the people closest to us. The starting place is entirely simple: learn your neighbors’ names. To love someone, it helps to actually know their name. We simply start getting to know the people that God has placed around us.
Chapter 3 — The Time Barrier
Even though we get more and more done, the tasks keep piling up. Our calendars continuously stay full, no matter how many time-saving devices are invented. Beneath all the busyness there are lies we tell ourselves, and until we name them, they will run our lives.
The first lie is that things will settle down someday. The truth is that things will only settle down when you die or when you get intentional about adjusting your schedule. The second lie is that more will be enough — that you are just one more purchase or achievement away from contentment, that if you could just buy more, do more, or be more, things would finally be all right. The third lie is that everybody lives like this, making chronic busyness feel like an unavoidable fact of modern life, a current you simply have to swim with.
The healthiest person who ever lived was Jesus. He got an enormous amount done, but when you read about his life, the word hurried never comes to mind. Jesus came to offer a different way of living. When he said, “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10), he wasn’t talking about a packed schedule. He meant abundance — a good, meaningful life. He lived passionately and purposefully but was never in a rush. The question for us, then, is how we can live like Jesus. The answer is learning how to keep the main thing the main thing.
As Psalm 90:12 puts it, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” If we can grasp our limitations, we may choose to prioritize differently. We all have limited time and energy, and if we don’t purposefully choose how to spend them, those choices will be made for us. Time spent surfing the internet, playing video games, or watching reruns of favorite sitcoms won’t amount to anything of lasting value. Relaxation is beneficial, but these mundane activities can swallow up the margin of our lives if we aren’t intentional. As one thinker put it plainly, “Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.” We have to stop making the commandment only about what is convenient and stop settling for a self-serving interpretation of it.
If our lives are out of balance and we don’t have time to get to know the person next door, the solution is clear: identify and eliminate the nonessentials. Three life-balancing principles help with this. The first is to make the main thing the main thing, which means reflecting on what is most important and then scheduling around those priorities. The second is to eliminate time stealers — to learn the art of removal, cutting activities that contribute nothing of lasting value. The third is to be interruptible, which means developing a willingness to be inconvenienced, a posture that accepts the interruptions of others rather than resenting them.
Think of your life like filling a single bucket with rocks, sand, and water. Start with the big rocks — your relationship with God. Then pour in the sand so it fills the spaces around the rocks — your family. Then pour in the water so it filters through and fills the rest — your neighbors and other priorities. Everything important fits, as long as you start with the biggest things first. If you mix up the order, it won’t fit. And if you don’t set your priorities, others will set them for you.
The question worth sitting with is this: do you live at a pace that allows you to be available to those around you?
Chapter 4 — The Fear Factor
If we are going to neighbor well, we must have the courage to wrestle with whatever holds us back. But much of what we label “fear” is more accurately described as timidity — not genuine danger, but a low-grade reluctance to put ourselves out there.
Tom and Angela discovered a beautifully simple way through that timidity. Their kids had always played in the backyard, which was the social hub of the family. So they made one small change: they switched to the front yard. They hung a swing in a front-yard tree and set out some lawn chairs. That was about it. What happened next surprised them — neighbors they had never spoken to began stopping by, conversations started, and connections began to form. And all they had done to attract that traffic was hang out where they could be seen.
The stakes of neighboring are higher than they might seem. Wes runs a homeless shelter, and a while back he mentioned something that stuck: most of the people in his shelter ended up there because of isolation. They became distanced from friends, family, and neighbors. And then it took only one bad break for them to end up on the streets. Neighboring isn’t just a nice thing to do. It is, quite literally, a safety net.
Chapter 5 — Moving Down the Line
One of the most surprisingly powerful steps is also the simplest: write down the names you are learning on a block map and tape it to the side of your fridge. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Once the chart is where you can see it every day, you find yourself thinking more and more about the neighbors you know by name — and about the ones you still need to introduce yourself to when the opportunity arises.
Lauren took that idea one step further and created a block directory — a simple map of the neighborhood that included everybody’s name, home and cell numbers, and email addresses. Then she gave a copy to everyone on the block. This one act transformed a collection of strangers into something that felt like a community. People who had lived side by side for years suddenly had a way to reach each other.
But Jesus didn’t tell us to become acquaintances with our neighbors; he called us to love them. That means moving toward actual relationship. We took Vicky’s words to heart on this and have been amazed to see how effective parties can be in fostering neighbor relationships. When we use the term block party, we mean a party thrown by and attended by people who live on a specific block or group of blocks. Block parties are natural environments in which neighbors often take the step from being acquaintances to actually becoming friends. They create space for us to talk with people we already know and to meet people we don’t.
Maybe this is why Jesus spent so much time at parties — he knew the power of a party. He understood they were an important means for people to share their lives with one another in very real and practical ways. When Jesus found himself among people who didn’t share his religious framework, he had every opportunity to apologize for being there or to step back from the mess. Yet Jesus actually did the opposite. He defended his right to be there and used the opportunity to be with people he might not otherwise see.
Not everyone in the neighborhood is easy to be around. We need to be willing to follow Jesus into uncomfortable situations, because we cannot always expect people to come onto our turf; we must also be willing to enter their world. The commitment worth making is this: at least one good block party every year, and then sit back and see how God uses it.
Chapter 6 — Baby Steps
Good neighboring doesn’t look heroic from the outside. One person who does it well makes time to invite his neighbors over for a meal a few times a month. Instead of watching football games alone, he watches them with the people who live around him. He lets his neighbors borrow his tools and helps them work on their cars. Occasionally he grabs a drink with a few neighbors and they talk about their jobs and what they think their kids will grow up to be. When one of his neighbors is going through a hard time, he is available. When a neighbor needs him to watch her kids because something unexpected comes up, he is always willing. It is not dramatic. It is faithful.
Scripture tells of a small boy who becomes a hero. He is so insignificant that we don’t even know his name, but he stands in a group of adults and gives what he has. Then a miracle takes place. His little effort combines with God’s power, and everything changes. The principle is the same in every era: when you give what you have, even if it is minute, God can make a miracle. He can work with very little and turn it into something no one could have imagined. When you give away what you have, Jesus will give you more to give. Even if what you have isn’t enough to solve the whole problem, just do what you can in the moment — give it anyway. Trust that God will fill you up with enough to supply the need right in front of you, and assume he will do it again for the next need as well. If you don’t give, you don’t get a chance to see God do a miracle.
You were built to connect with other people. So be who you are, and relationships will grow out of that. It makes friendship normal and natural — something that just happens rather than something that is forced. The most natural way to connect is through shared activities: baking or cooking, playing sports, watching a game, eating together. Just choose to do something with others that you were going to do alone anyway. Robb’s story captures this perfectly — little things really do make a big difference, and using your talents to serve others multiplies their reach. Do what you are already doing, invite others to the table, and watch what God does as a result.
The principle is simple: share what you love to do. Make small steps. Give the little you have and watch God do a miracle.
Chapter 7 — Motives Matter
If evangelism is your only motive for neighboring, you won’t be a very good neighbor. However, if neighboring is done with the right posture, people who don’t know God will most certainly come to know him. The challenge is that there are striking similarities between how some Christians share their faith and how a well-meaning salesperson works a room. High-pressure techniques, manufactured urgency, the spiritual equivalent of “What would happen if you walked out of this building and were hit by a car?” — the core desire behind all of it is honorable, but no one wants to come off like a telemarketer when talking about the most important message they have to share.
There is a crucial distinction between the ulterior motive and the ultimate motive. The ulterior motive in good neighboring must never be to share the gospel. But the ultimate motive is just that — to share the story of Jesus and his impact on our lives. There is a big difference. The agenda that needs to go is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people for the sole purpose of converting them. We don’t love our neighbors to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted. Many Christians have been taught to do nice things solely for an opportunity to have a spiritual conversation. But Jesus never called us to use a bait-and-switch approach, where we become friends with people only in order to later share spiritual truths with them. The Great Commandment says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The commandment ends there, with no other expectations given. Good neighboring is an end in itself.
One afternoon while walking through the neighborhood to invite people to a block party, the conversation took a revealing turn. A neighbor asked why anyone would bother throwing one. “We want the neighborhood to be more connected,” came the answer. “We know that most people feel isolated and really want to get to know each other.” Walking home that day, there was a fresh and uncomfortable recognition of how threatening even well-intentioned outreach can appear — the EvangeCube in one person’s hand, the door-to-door approach of others. People who have been targeted in the past are wary. When the topic of religion comes up, they simply leave the room or shut down altogether. That is the last thing we want to happen in a friendship we are trying to build.
The good news is that when people are in genuine relationship with others, they naturally share what they love. Jay loves golf. If you spend any significant amount of time with him, you will end up talking about golf. The same principle is true for everyone. If you love Jesus, he will naturally come up in your conversations. You don’t need to engineer it.
What does a friendly and ever-deepening conversation look like? Relationships follow a recognizable pattern of increasing depth. Early on, we talk about things we can both see — the weather, the newly painted house down the street, the increased traffic on our block. We rarely enter conversations of depth with someone we have just met. As trust develops, we move into basic personal information: how long have you lived here, where did you grow up, what do you do for a living, are you married, do you have kids. Deeper still come dreams and desires — what do you love most about what you do, if you could do anything what would it be. And eventually, in real friendships, we share our regrets, our losses, and our pain: the loss of someone we loved, a hard relationship, a challenging job situation. If you have a deep personal relationship with Jesus, he will naturally be a big part of your story as you reach those deeper layers.
Most people who don’t believe in God have had at least one negative experience with religion. For them, entering a spiritual conversation can be uncomfortable, unpalatable, and even feel threatening. But Jesus declared something extraordinary in Matthew 5:14–16: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” You can live in such a way that people around you will look to God because of how you are living. When they see you living a life of love, they will actually be seeing God in you. They may not even know who God is, but they will start to become curious because of the way you live.
This is the most effective way to share faith. One man, when a neighbor’s marriage was falling apart, didn’t prepare a speech or bring a brochure. He just got involved and shared his own story — how God had worked in his marriage. There was no eloquence, no canned program, no complexity. He offered hope when his neighbor felt hopeless. The beauty of the art of neighboring is that it is simple and genuine. You don’t need to memorize any pitches. You don’t need to chart out a master plan for evangelizing your neighborhood. You don’t need a canned speech in your back pocket. Don’t make your neighbors your pet project — make them your friends. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and body, and love your neighbor as yourself. When those things happen, everything else falls into place.
Chapter 8 — The Art of Receiving
Great neighborhoods are built on reciprocal relationships — on two-way streets. At the end of the day, no one wants to feel like a project. We want to feel that we bring something to the table. But one of the biggest temptations when it comes to neighboring is exactly that: turning neighbors into projects. We put on the superneighbor cape and rush out to serve and make a difference on our block. This really isn’t a bad thing, but if this is all we ever do, our relationships will be empty. If we don’t allow people to meet any of our needs, we limit what God wants to do in our neighborhood and in our life.
We naturally want to be seen as the capable one, the one with all the resources and answers. But being in a relationship where we allow others to meet our needs is always a good thing. The art of neighboring involves being able both to give of our time and energy and — just as important — to receive from others.
When giving is one-sided, it robs the person in need of their dignity, because it makes them dependent. But when giving is two-sided, everyone feels a sense of worth. Every person on our block has something to bring to a relationship. The goal is mutual exchange, not charity administered from a distance.
Chapter 9 — The Art of Setting Boundaries
The goal of good neighboring is to help people get back in charge of their own lives — not to rescue them. That means we want others to take responsibility, which means we can’t just hand them solutions with a smile and a handshake. Good neighboring is not about blindly giving handouts. Rather, it means walking alongside those in need and helping them find their way.
It is reassuring to know that Jesus himself set boundaries with the people he encountered. Often he didn’t help people in the way they wanted to be helped. He cured some people but not others. He stopped and talked with some but not all. Sometimes when the crowds were seeking him, he purposely left them and walked the other way, alone. Jesus was not afraid to draw a line or to put responsibility back onto others — and doing so helped them in lasting ways rather than creating dependency.
The hardest part about loving others is that you can always do more. You can always give more time, more energy, more money to those in need. But you can’t be everything to everyone, so stop making yourself feel bad about not doing more. The questions — have I done enough, could I have done more, am I doing too much, is there something else I should be doing right now — are natural. But they shouldn’t paralyze us.
Good neighboring must ultimately be an exercise in asking God what to do in any given situation. It means getting on our knees in prayer and asking for discernment to help in the situations we encounter. God doesn’t ask us to do everything, but he does ask us to do something — and something is much better than nothing.
Chapter 10 — The Art of Focusing
As you get to know your neighbors, you begin to recognize something: you can’t be everyone’s best friend. And let’s be honest — you don’t want to be. You don’t have enough time or energy to invest in every neighbor equally. To neighbor well, you must learn to narrow your focus. You can be friendly to everybody, but it is likely that you will be genuinely close with only a few. That focus, done well, allows you to have a significant impact where you live.
Remember that behind every door is a story. People may be too busy, wary of you, already relationally full, in a different stage of life, or afraid of exposure. There is always more going on with people than meets the eye, and that awareness should keep us from writing anyone off too quickly.
We naturally enjoy spending time with people we are drawn to. But in his ministry, Jesus was intentional about how he spent his time in a way worth imitating. He didn’t invest his energy in everyone equally. From the multitudes, he set apart a group of seventy-two disciples and commissioned them with a specific task (Luke 10:1–17). Of those seventy-two, he had a core group of twelve with whom he invested the majority of his time. And from among those twelve, he was even more intentional with three, spending the most time with them of all. He chose depth over breadth at every level.
Jesus also gave his disciples a specific strategy for finding the right people to invest in. He instructed them to look for a person of peace in every city they entered — someone hospitable and genuinely open to becoming a friend (Luke 10:5–6). Once they found that person, he told them to stay, not to move around. This seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t moving around produce wider impact? But Jesus wanted deep friendships with people who were gifted at relationships. A person of peace, by definition, would have a large relational network. By staying in that household, the disciples were introduced to that entire web of friends and neighbors. Jesus was directing his followers toward the best neighbors in each city.
One family discovered this principle on moving day. They noticed a party going on across the street and walked over. What they found was a karaoke bar in their neighbor’s garage — complete with televisions, beer on tap, an actual bar, and a poker table, with more than fifty people mingling in the garage and on the driveway. At that moment it dawned on them that they probably shouldn’t be the ones hosting the block party. The person of peace was already across the street.
Ask yourself who the two or three households in your neighborhood are with whom you really connect — and who really connect with you. By “really connect,” that doesn’t mean the relationship is always easy. It means they are genuinely open to a relationship with you, and you with them. Identify those people and invest in their lives. Be friendly with everyone and be close to a few.
Chapter 11 — The Art of Forgiving
It is important to examine those neighboring relationships that are strained and look for ways to heal them. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in us. The Bible has a great deal to say about being good neighbors even when we don’t get along with all of them. Romans 12:18 is a good place to start: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”
When we examine that verse further, we see that living at peace means seeking to bless those who have cursed us. Paul goes on: “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Jesus takes the principle even further in Matthew 5:44: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Love your enemies. Pray for the neighbors you don’t get along with. This is radical teaching.
If we choose not to forgive, we are forgetting how much we ourselves have been forgiven. Jesus makes this unmistakably clear in a parable, where a master hands over an unforgiving servant to the jailers to be tortured until he repays all he owed, concluding: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Forgiveness, Jesus teaches, is not optional.
It is important to hold two things in tension. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. Reconciliation is the hard work of how we go forward together; forgiveness is an attitude of the heart. We should offer everyone forgiveness, but we will not always be reconciled with everyone who has wronged us or whom we have wronged. As Pete put it plainly, “Real relationships are almost always messy. But if we’re to love people the way Jesus commanded, we need to be willing to push through when things get complicated.”
When a neighboring relationship is strained, begin by identifying the issue and assessing its severity, starting from a posture of humility. Choose to obey Jesus’s command and pray for your neighbor — pray for their well-being, that God will make a way for reconciliation, and that God will change your own heart and convict you of anything you could have done differently. If God convicts you of wrongdoing, look for an opportunity to apologize for your part. A genuine apology can be incredibly disarming and go a long way toward restoring a relationship. Go the extra mile — ask yourself what it will take to genuinely lean in and love this person unconditionally. Sometimes engaging face-to-face simply won’t work and will only escalate the tension; in those cases, find indirect ways to bless the person and show care without direct confrontation.
Above all, don’t run because there is adversity. Maybe God wants to use that very adversity to make you more like Jesus.
Chapter 12 — Better Together
When Jesus was asked to pinpoint the most important commandment, he narrowed everything down to this: love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself. He gave us a simple plan that, if every believer actually took it at face value, would change the world. And the good news is that we don’t have to do it alone.
The neighbors we invite to join us in this don’t all have to be Christians. There may be someone in our neighborhood who has a completely different spiritual orientation but knows far more about neighboring than we do. We simply identify a neighbor who would be a good partner and ask them to join us in this journey. The collaboration can be wonderfully practical. Gina sewed together some old fabric to make a screen that covers the entire wall of a garage, while another neighbor supplied a DVD player, projector, and sound system. The result was neighborhood movie nights with a drive-in feel. The families involved began planning a summer schedule and talking about expanding the movie nights to include grilling and eating before the film. Creativity and collaboration multiply what any one household can do.
Keep in mind that local churches play a very important role in God’s plan to build the kingdom, but each local church is just one part of the kingdom. Jesus uses the word church only three times in the Gospels; he uses the word kingdom one hundred and twenty-one times. The neighboring life is kingdom work, whether or not it happens under the formal banner of a church program.
If it seems like there simply isn’t time for this, the invitation is to take out a calendar and answer one honest question: is everything currently on that calendar more important than taking the Great Commandment literally? The answer to that question is the beginning of the neighboring life.