By Jay Pathak
My Personal Takeaways →When Jesus was asked to boil the Bible down to one command, he said: Love God and love your neighbor. Pathak and Runyon take this literally — what if ‘neighbor’ means the actual people who live next door? The book walks through the barriers to neighboring — busyness, fear, awkwardness — and provides a framework for moving from stranger to genuine relationship.
What stuck most is that the problems we call the government or church to fix often start with relationships never built. The book provides a simple diagnostic: draw a 3×3 grid with your home in the center, fill in the eight neighbors’ homes, and see how many names you actually know. That gap is where you start. Implement it by making your first move low-stakes — a wave, a conversation, a shared meal — and building consistency over months, not grand gestures.
The individuals we live next to have a big impact on the quality of our lives. In the grand scheme of things, relationships are much more important than bricks and mortar, and our neighborhoods are much more than collections of houses.
As we began to reach 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’s like to have a strong support system right outside our front door. We all have a need for genuine community, and nothing beats the frequency, availability, and spontaneity of connecting deeply with others who live nearby.
I also learned that the story of Jesus becomes evident whenever we connect with the people who live closest to us. Jesus said, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).
It became our “dream home” because of the relationships that we developed with our neighbors. Our street was 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’s about making room for life and choosing to befriend those God has placed around us.
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 meant that we should love our actual neighbors? You know, 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. But the fact is, Jesus has given us a practical plan that we can actually put into practice, a plan that has the potential to change the world. The reality is, though, 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. You know the husband just got laid off from work. Should you call code enforcement? Maybe the local government will be the one to help. Next door there are teenagers, and the smell of pot seeps out the windows on a nightly basis. You wonder if you should call the police. That will take care of the problem. Won’t it? There’s a family a couple of doors down with several children. It’s clear that none of them speak English very well, and you wonder if the kids are even in school. Should you contact someone in the school district? Surely they are equipped to handle this sort of problem. Aren’t they? These problems aren’t hypothetical; they likely exist just outside your front door. We can always hope that somebody else will handle them. But what if we could be part of the solution? And what if the solution is more attainable than we think? What if it all starts with getting to know the invisible neighbors that surround us?
It’s so easy to draw negative conclusions about the neighbors we’ve only glimpsed. An unkempt yard, a slew of tattoos, a weird haircut, or loud music. It can all cause us to make assumptions about the people who live around us. But it’s these very assumptions that keep us from befriending them.
The ensuing discussion revealed a laundry list of social problems similar to what many cities face: at-risk kids, areas with dilapidated housing, child hunger, drug and alcohol abuse, loneliness, elderly shut-ins with no one to look in on them. The list went on and on. Then the mayor said something that inspired our 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 with us that, in his opinion, government programs aren’t always the most effective way to address social issues. He went on to say that relationships are more effective than programs because they are organic and ongoing.
I mean, here we were asking the mayor how we can best serve the city, and he basically tells us that it would be great if we could just get our people to obey the second half of the Great Commandment.”
In a word, the mayor invited a roomful of pastors to get their people to actually obey Jesus. You know the Great Commandment, right? Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a teaching found in Matthew 22:37–40 and repeated in the Bible for the purpose of reminding us how important it is. In Galatians 5:14 the apostle Paul says it most succinctly: “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Jesus is a genius! He is asked to pick one commandment that is more important than all the others. And he shares something that would change the world, if only every person who believes in Jesus would actually do it.
City leaders began to talk about the initiative—as well as the value it created in their communities—all from people simply learning their neighbors’ names and working with others to throw a block party. 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 aren’t ultimately found in the government, police, or schools or in getting more people to go to church. The solutions lie with us. It’s within our power to become good neighbors, to care for the people around us and to be cared for by the people around us. There really is a different way to live, and we are finding that it is actually the best way to live.
I soon found myself becoming obsessed with John 17, an entire chapter that recounts Jesus’s prayer just before he is arrested. First, Jesus prays for himself, then for his disciples. Then he concludes by praying for us. What he prayed is powerful. He prayed that everyone who follows him would be one, that we would be brought to complete unity. Jesus has a burning desire for there to be unity among all believers. In fact, he tells us that there is something so sacred and beautiful about our oneness that it will draw people to God who aren’t in a relationship with him.
I have come to believe that, as followers of Jesus, one of the worthiest endeavors we can undertake is to take the Great Commandment seriously and learn to be in relationship with our literal neighbors. We all need to get back to the basics of what he commanded: love God and love others. Everything else is secondary.
Misunderstanding. When we don’t know our neighbors, it’s easy to get the wrong idea about one another. For instance, a friend of ours had a neighbor whose house was run down. The garage door was falling off the hinges. Two dead cars sat out front. So he called code enforcement, and officials came by and ticketed the house. A few days later he was talking to another neighbor about the blighted house. “Yeah,” said the neighbor. “I guess the woman who lives in that home lives alone, and her mother has cancer. She had to stop working to care for her mom. She’s been by her mom’s bedside twenty-four hours a day for the past few months.”
Fear. We will be wary of our neighbors, and they will be wary of us. Whatever is unknown is scary. So when we don’t know our neighbors and they don’t know us, it’s easy to imagine the worst.
God invites us to love the way he loves.
The lawyer’s question and ours is, “Who is my neighbor?” To answer the question, Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan. A man was headed from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They beat him badly, robbed him, and left him for dead. Though two religious leaders passed by on the road, they did not help the man. They were both people who prided themselves on doing the right thing, good religious folks, people who should have known better. But these two people had other things to do, schedules to keep, agendas that couldn’t be flexed. And so they kept going. In Jesus’s story the obvious point is that they failed the test. Finally, a Samaritan stopped and helped the injured man. The Samaritan was from a culture known for hating Israelites, and the feeling was mutual. In the ears of Jesus’s listeners, it would be the modern-day equivalent of a terrorist stopping to help him. Even so, Jesus said the Samaritan bandaged the man’s wounds, loaded him on his donkey, and took him to an inn, the ancient equivalent of a hospital. The Samaritan even paid the man’s medical bills. How’s that for adjusting a schedule to help someone? Jesus’s point was that the Samaritan was actually the true neighbor. He told the expert in the law to “go and do likewise.”
We say, “Everyone is my neighbor,” it can become an excuse for avoiding the implications of following the Great Commandment. Our “neighbors” become defined in the broadest of terms. They’re the people across town, the people who are helped by the organizations that receive our donations, the people whom the government helps. We don’t have to feel guilty, we tell ourselves. After all, we can’t be expected to really love everybody, can we? The problem is, however, that when we aim for everything, we hit nothing. So when we insist we’re neighbors with everybody, often we end up being neighbors with nobody. That’s our human nature. We become like the lawyer looking for a loophole.
Write the names of the people who live in the house represented by the box. If you can give first and last names, that’s great. If it’s only first names, that’s fine too.
Write down some relevant information about each person, some data or facts about him or her that you couldn’t see just by standing in your driveway, things you might know if you’ve spoken to the person once or twice. We don’t mean drives a red car or has yellow roses by the sidewalk, because you could see that from your driveway. We mean information you’ve gathered from actually speaking to a neighbor, such as grew up in Idaho, is a lawyer, plays golf, is from Ethiopia, had a father in World War II.
Write down some in-depth information you would know after connecting with people. This might include their career plans or dreams of starting a family or anything to do with the purpose of their lives. What motivates them to do what they do? What would they say about God? What do they most fear? What are their spiritual beliefs and practices? Write down anything meaningful that you’ve learned through interacting with them.
Let’s start by learning our neighbors’ names.
To love someone, it helps to actually know their name.
We simply started to get to know the people that God had placed around us.
Even though we get more and more done, we still pile up the tasks. Our calendars continuously stay full, no matter how many time-saving devices are invented.
Lie #1: 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.
Lie #2: More will be enough. With this lie we convince ourselves that we’re just one more purchase or achievement away from contentment. If we could just buy more, do more, or be more, then things would be all right.
Lie #3: Everybody lives like this. This lie makes us believe that being overly busy is simply a way of life in our culture. Everybody lives at a frantic pace, so we need to follow suit.
The healthiest person who ever lived was Jesus. He got a lot done, but when we read about his life, the word hurried never comes to mind. Jesus came to offer us a different way of living. He said, “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10). He wasn’t talking about “full” in the sense of having a packed schedule. He meant it in the sense of abundance. In other words, a good, meaningful life.
Jesus got a lot done but he never seemed to be in a hurry. He lived a passionate, purposeful life but was never in a rush. The question for us, then, is how can we live like Jesus? The answer: we must learn how to keep the main thing the main thing.
As Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The psalmist is saying that if we can grasp our limitations, we may choose to prioritize differently. No question, we all have limited time and energy. And if we don’t purposefully choose how we will spend it, those choices will be made for us. In essence, we just let life happen, passively. Time spent surfing the internet, playing video games, or just watching reruns of our favorite sitcoms won’t amount to anything of value. Of course we’re not suggesting you eliminate such downtime activities from your schedule, because relaxation is beneficial. But it’s also these mundane activities that can swallow up the margin of our lives if we aren’t intentional. We are merely suggesting that you make room for other, more meaningful endeavors.
“Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.”
In other words, we have to stop making it about what’s only convenient to us and our often self-serving interpretation of the commandment.
So 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. Following are three life-balancing principles that will help you do just that: (1) make the main thing the main thing, (2) eliminate time stealers, and (3) ‘
Making the main thing the main thing means taking time to reflect on what is most important in your life and then scheduling around those things. Be intentional about planning your life around the priorities you identify.
To understand this point, imagine three buckets that are almost full: a bucket of sand, a bucket of water, and a bucket of baseball-size rocks. The challenge is to put the contents of all of the buckets into one. The secret is starting with the rocks, then pouring in the sand so it fills the spaces around the rocks. The final step is pouring the water in so it filters through the sand and fills the bucket. The lesson is that all the important things fit, as long as you start with the big items first. For us it means prioritizing our life with God first, followed by our life with our family. Then we suggest you prioritize the thing that Jesus says is most important—your neighbors. If you mix up the order, though, you won’t be able to make it all fit. And if you don’t set your priorities, others will do it for you.
We have to learn how to stop wasting time with the activities that contribute nothing positive to our life. To do so, you have to learn the art of elimination;
Be Interruptible: The idea of being interruptible is being willing to be inconvenienced. It means developing a mind-set that accepts the interruptions of others. This might not feel natural at first, but it’s part of living at a healthy pace.
Do I live at a pace that allows me to be available to those around me?
So if we’re going to neighbor well, we must have the courage to wrestle with our fears.
Actually, much of our “fear” is better labeled “timidity.”
They began by taking one simple step. They switched yards. Their kids had always played in the backyard, and that setting was the social hub of the family. So Tom and Angela simply switched to the front yard. They put up a swing in a front-yard tree and added some lawn chairs; that was about it.
And all they had done to attract this traffic was hang out where they could be seen.
A friend of ours, Wes, runs a homeless shelter. A while back he mentioned to us that 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.
We wrote down the names we were learning on a simple block map that we taped to the side of the fridge. This may not seem like a big deal, but it was. Once we put the chart up where we could see it every day, we found ourselves thinking more and more about the neighbors that we knew by name and about the ones we needed to introduce ourselves to when the opportunity arose.
As we began to realize the power of learning names, Lauren took the idea one step further and created a block directory.
Lauren put together a simple map of the neighborhood, including everybody’s name, home and cell numbers, and email addresses. Then she gave a copy to everyone on the block.
However, Jesus didn’t tell us to become acquaintances with our neighbors; he called us to love them, and that means we need to have an actual relationship with them.
We have taken Vicky’s words to heart and have been amazed to see how effective parties can be in fostering neighbor relations.
When we use the term block party, we are talking about a party that is thrown by and attended by people who live on a specific block or group of blocks. Block parties are natural environments in which neighbors will often take steps from being acquaintances to actually being friends. Parties create space for us to talk to others we already know and to meet people we don’t. Maybe this is the reason 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.
Jesus has every opportunity to apologize for spending time with “sinners.” Yet Jesus actually does the opposite. He defends his right to be there and doesn’t back down because he is using the opportunity to hang out and party with a group of people who don’t have any religious framework and whom he might not see otherwise.
Not everyone in the neighborhood is cleaned up and easy to be around. We need to be willing to follow Jesus and choose to be with others in uncomfortable situations, because we can’t always expect people to come onto our turf; we must also be willing to enter their world.
What would it be like to make a commitment to throw at least one good block party every year, and then to sit back and see how God uses it on our block?
He makes time to invite his neighbors over for a meal a few times a month. Instead of watching football games by himself, 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 of his 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’s available. When a neighbor needs him to watch her kids because something unexpected comes up, he is always willing.
Give What You Have: There’s a passage in Scripture about a small boy who becomes a hero. This boy 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.
When you give what you have, even if it’s minute, God can make a miracle. He can work with very little and turn it into something that 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 that’s 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’s forced. And the most natural way to connect with people is through shared activities.
Baking/cooking.
Playing sports.
Watching sports or other shows on TV.
Just choose to do something with others that you were going to do alone.
One of the easiest things to do is eat together.
Robb’s story is a perfect example of how little things can really make a big difference, as well as the power of using your talents to serve others. The idea seems so simple—just do what you’re already doing, invite others to the table, and watch what God does as a result.
It’s simple: just share what you love to do. Make small steps. Give the little you have and watch God do a miracle.
And if evangelism is your only motive, then you won’t be a very good neighbor. However, if neighboring is done with the right posture, then people who don’t know God will most certainly come to know him.
But as a pastor, I have noticed some striking similarities between the sales industry and how some Christians share their faith. In a well-meaning attempt to “sell” a good thing, we have all heard pastors use high-pressure sales techniques to sell the gospel. “What would happen if you walked out of this room today and were hit by a car and died? Would you go to heaven or hell?” The core desire behind these questions is actually very honorable. But no one wants to come off like a telemarketer when talking about the most important message that we have to share. Is
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’s a big difference. The “agenda” we need to drop is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people for the sole purpose of converting them to our faith.
We don’t love our neighbors to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted. And the truth is, many Christians have been taught by well-meaning people that they should 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 to share spiritual truths with them. We are called to love people.
The Great Commandment says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The commandment ends there, with no other expectations given. Thus good neighboring is an end in itself.
Walking a bit farther, we bumped into another guy and invited him to the block party. He asked why we were having one. “We want the neighborhood to be more connected,” I said. “We know that most people feel isolated and really want to get to know each other.
Was I coming off like the guy with the EvangeCube or like the door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses? Now I was the one feeling weird. Walking home that day, I was suddenly aware of all the different ways people share their faith and how threatening it can appear to others. After all, people who go door-to-door “selling” religion tend to be perceived as pushy and annoying.
When we take Jesus seriously, we really do want to share with others what we love, what we enjoy, what we believe. The challenge, though, is how. Remember, we don’t want to come off as preachy or force our beliefs down others’ throats. Those who have been targeted in the past are wary. So when the topic of religion comes up, they simply leave the room or shut down altogether. And that is the last thing we want to do while developing relationships.
When people are in relationship with others, they naturally share what they love. For instance, I (Jay) love golf. If you are around me for any significant amount of time, we will most likely end up talking about golf at some point. And this principle is true for everyone.
If you love Jesus, then he will naturally come up in your conversations.
What does a friendly and ever-deepening conversation look like? We’ve noticed a pattern that often takes place over time. Conversations follow this pattern: first we talk about the things we can see, then basic personal information, later our dreams and desires, and after some time our regrets, losses, and pain.
The Things We Can See Early on in relationships, we talk with our neighbors about the things we both can see—the weather, the crazy color of a neighbor’s house, the increased traffic on our street, to name a few. We rarely enter into conversations of depth with someone we have just met.
Basic Personal Information: How long have you lived here? Where did you grow up? What do you do for a living? Are you married? How long? Where did you guys meet? Do you have kids?
Our Dreams and Desires: What do you love most about what you do? If you could do anything, what would you do?
Our Regrets, Losses, and Pain: Often people want to talk about the loss of someone they love, a hard relationship, or a challenging job situation.
And if you have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus, he will be a big part of your story. Our dreams, desires, and pains are intertwined with our relationship with God.
Chances are most people who don’t believe in God have had at least one negative experience with religion. For them, to enter into a spiritual conversation can be uncomfortable, unpalatable, unappealing, and perhaps even feel threatening.
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. Jesus is declaring that we can live in such a way that people around us will look to God because of how we are living. When they see us living out a life of love, they will actually be seeing God in us. They may not even know who God is, but they will start to be curious because of the way we live out our lives.
We believe this is the most effective way to share our faith.
He shared about how God worked in his marriage. But there was no eloquent speech, no canned program, no brochures or complexity involved. He just got involved and shared his story with them. He offered them hope when they felt hopeless.
The beauty of the art of neighboring is that it’s 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 to worry about having a canned speech in your back pocket. In short, you need not make your neighbors your “pet project”; make them your friends. You simply need to 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.
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 when it comes to neighboring well, one of the biggest temptations is to turn neighbors into projects. We put on the “superneighbor cape” and rush out to serve our neighbors and make a difference on our block. This really isn’t a bad thing, but if this is all we ever do, then 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 our life.
We want to be seen as the capable 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 our 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 “needy” one of his dignity, because it makes him dependent. But when giving is two-sided, everyone feels a sense of worth. We need to understand that everyone on our block has something to bring to a relationship.
The idea is simply to help people get back in charge of their own lives, not to rescue them.
You want others to take responsibility for their own lives, so you can’t just hand them solutions with a smile and a handshake. Good neighboring is not about blindly giving handouts. Rather, it means you walk alongside those in need and help them find their way.
It’s 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, to put responsibility back onto others, which would help them in lasting ways.
Have I done enough? Could I have done more? Am I doing too much? Is there something else I should be doing right now?
The hardest part about loving others is that you can always do more. You can always give more time, energy, and money to those in need. But you can’t be everything to everyone, so stop making yourself feel bad about not doing more.
At the end of the day, good neighboring must be an exercise in asking God what to do in any given situation. It’s about being on our knees in prayer, asking for discernment to help in the situations that we encounter. God doesn’t ask us to do everything but he does ask us to do something—which is much better than nothing.
As you get to know your neighbors, you begin to recognize that 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 one of your neighbors equally. How should you decide with whom to spend your time?
To neighbor well, you must learn to narrow your focus. You can be friendly to everybody, but it’s likely that you will be good friends with only a few. Being focused is a good thing. If done well, it will allow you to have a significant impact where you live.
Remember, behind every door is a story. People may be Too busy. Wary of you. Already relationally full. In a different stage of life. Afraid of exposure.
It is important to remember that there is always more going on with people than meets the eye.
We enjoy spending time with people to whom we seem to be naturally drawn. It’s nice to be around people we like, especially if they like us. But it is important to note that in his ministry, Jesus was intentional about how he spent his time. Throughout the Gospels Jesus was repeatedly focused on small groups of people so he could invest in their lives in big ways. So we see that from the multitudes, he set apart a group of seventy-two disciples and commissioned them with a specific task (see Luke 10:1–17). Of those seventy-two, he had his core group of twelve, with whom he invested the majority of his time. And then from among those twelve, he was even more intentional with three and spent the most time with them.
He didn’t invest his energy in everyone equally.
Jesus instructed them to find a certain type of person in every city they entered—a person of peace (Luke 10:5–6). You may wonder what this has to do with neighboring. The term person of peace refers to someone hospitable and open to becoming a friend. Once the disciples found a person of peace, Jesus told his followers to stay with that person. He told them specifically not to move around. At first glance, this seems odd. Shouldn’t the disciples have moved around as much as possible? Wouldn’t it have been best for them to stay with several different people throughout the towns? Certainly this would have allowed them to have a wider impact. But this was not the path Jesus chose for the seventy-two. Instead, his desire was for them to set up camp in one spot, specifically in a house where the owner welcomed them. This allowed the disciples an opportunity to form deep friendships with those who were gifted at relationships themselves. Not only did they connect with the host of each house, but undoubtedly they were also introduced to the host’s entire network of friends. If a person of peace was someone skilled at being hospitable, then logically they were people who would have very large networks. By directing his disciples to look for the person of peace, Jesus directed them toward those in each city who were the best neighbors.
Can you think of someone on your block you know to be very hospitable?
“The day we moved in, we noticed a party going on across the street. We walked over and discovered that our new neighbors had a karaoke bar in their garage. It was complete with televisions, beer on tap, an actual bar, and a poker table. There were fifty-plus people mingling in the garage and on their driveway. At that moment it dawned on us that we probably shouldn’t be the ones hosting the block party.
To get started, ask yourself, Who are the two or three households in my neighborhood with whom we really connect and who really connect with us? By “really connect” we don’t mean that the relationship is always easy. We mean that they’re really open to having a relationship with you, and you with them. Identify these people and then invest in their lives.
Be friendly with everyone and be close to a few.
It’s important for each of us 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 you.
The Bible’s got a lot to say about being good neighbors, even when you 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 this text further, we see that living at peace with others means that we are to seek to bless them, even when they have cursed us.
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. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Matthew 5:44 takes the principle even further. Jesus says, “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.” This is radical teaching. Love your enemies. Pray for the neighbors you don’t get along with.
If we choose not to forgive, we are forgetting how much we have been forgiven.
“In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Jesus teaches clearly that forgiveness is not an option.
Sometimes a relationship will still be broken, even if forgiveness has been granted. Reconciliation is the hard work of how we go forward together, whereas forgiveness is an attitude of the heart. We should offer everyone forgiveness, but we will not be reconciled with everyone we have wronged or who has wronged us.
“Real relationships are almost always messy,” Pete told us. “But if we’re to love people the way Jesus commanded, we need to be willing to push through when things get complicated.
Identify the issue and assess its severity. Then begin from a posture of humility.
Choose to obey Jesus’s command to pray for those who are your enemies. Begin to pray for your neighbor’s well-being. Pray that God will make a way for you to be reconciled. Pray that God will change your heart and convict you of anything you could have done differently.
If you’re convicted by God of wrongdoing, look for an opportunity to apologize for your part in a matter. A genuine apology can be incredibly disarming and go a long way toward restoring relationships and bringing peace to a situation. Go the extra mile. Ask yourself what it will take to continue to live near your neighbor, to genuinely lean in and love this person unconditionally.
Find an indirect way to bless people. Sometimes engaging with a person face-to-face simply won’t work. It will only escalate a tense situation or bring about more hostility.
Don’t run because there’s adversity. Maybe God wants to use the adversity to make you more like Jesus.
When Jesus was asked to pinpoint the most important commandment, he narrowed everything down to “Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.” In doing so, he gave us a simple plan that, if every believer actually took it at face value, would change the world.
And the neighbors you invite to join you don’t all have to be Christians. There may be someone in your neighborhood who has a completely different spiritual orientation than you but knows way more about neighboring.
Just identify a neighbor you think would be a good partner and ask him or her to join you in this neighboring journey.
My wife, Gina, sewed some old fabric together to make a ‘screen’ that covers the entire wall of our garage, and then one of the other neighbors supplied a DVD player, projector, and sound system. We have movie nights for the neighborhood with a ‘drive-in’ feel. “The families who have been part of our series are hoping to put together a schedule for our neighborhood this summer and expand the movie nights to include some grilling and eating before the movie.
Keep in mind, 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. That’s what it’s all about. After all, Jesus uses the word church only 3 times in the Gospels; he uses the word kingdom 121 times.
If you don’t feel that you have the time to do this, then take out your calendar and answer this question: Is everything that I am currently doing more important than taking the Great Commandment literally?