Foreword — Living in Community
The people who live next to you have a big impact on the quality of your life. Relationships matter much more than bricks and mortar, and a neighborhood is much more than a collection of houses.
One of the authors learned this on his own street. When his family started reaching out to their neighbors, they ended up being cared for as much as they cared for others, if not more. They had a strong support system right outside their front door. The house became their “dream home” because of the relationships they built there. Their street was filled with people who knew and cared for one another.
Everyone needs real community, and nothing beats connecting deeply with people who live nearby. He also found that the story of Jesus shows up whenever you connect with the people closest to you. Jesus said, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).
The command to love your neighbor lies at the core of God’s plan for your life, and when you follow it, it changes everything. It starts when you choose a life of conversation and community over a life of busyness and accumulation. It’s about making room for life and choosing to befriend the people God has placed around you.
Chapter 1 — Who Is My Neighbor?
What if the answer to society’s biggest problems has been right under your nose for two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to boil the whole Bible down to one command, he said: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. What if he meant your actual neighbors? The people who live right next door?
The trouble is that this simple idea has turned into a nice saying. It goes on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and nobody puts it into practice. Most Christians don’t even know the names of most of their neighbors.
So 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. Should you call code enforcement? Next door, the smell of pot seeps out of the teenagers’ windows every night. Should you call the police? A couple of doors down lives a family whose kids don’t speak much English, and you wonder if they’re even in school. Should you call the school district? Surely they can handle it. Can’t they?
It’s easy to hope somebody else will deal with these things. It’s also easy to judge neighbors you’ve only glimpsed. An unkempt yard, a slew of tattoos, or loud music can lead you to assume things, and those assumptions keep you from befriending them. But what if you could be part of the answer? What if it starts with getting to know the invisible neighbors around you?
That question came to the authors in an unexpected place. A roomful of local pastors, the authors among them, met with their city’s mayor and asked how their churches could best serve the city. The talk turned up a familiar list: at-risk kids, child hunger, drug and alcohol abuse, loneliness, and elderly shut-ins with no one to look in on them. Then the mayor said something that sparked a whole movement of churches working together: “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.”
In other words, the mayor asked a roomful of pastors to get their people to actually obey Jesus. In his view, relationships work better than government programs because they’re organic and ongoing. The Great Commandment, in Matthew 22, says to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus was asked to pick the one commandment that mattered most, and he picked something that would change the world if everyone who believes in him actually did it.
So the churches took up the challenge. People started learning their neighbors’ names and working together to throw block parties. The results came fast. Strangers became acquaintances, and acquaintances started moving toward real friendships. Soon city leaders were talking about the value it was creating in their communities.
The answers to the problems in your neighborhood aren’t finally found in the government, the police, the schools, or even in getting more people to church. They lie with you. It’s in your power to care for the people around you and be cared for by them. There really is a better way to live. Love God and love others. Everything else is secondary.
Chapter 2 — Taking the Great Commandment Seriously
When you don’t know your neighbors, two things go wrong. The first is misunderstanding. A friend of the authors had a neighbor whose house was falling apart. The garage door hung off its hinges, and two dead cars sat out front. So he called code enforcement, and the house got a ticket. A few days later, another neighbor filled him in. “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.”
The second is fear. You’ll be wary of your neighbors, and they’ll be wary of you. Whatever is unknown is scary, so it’s easy to imagine the worst. But God invites you to love the way he loves.
So who counts as your neighbor? An expert in the law once asked Jesus that exact question. Jesus answered with the story of the good Samaritan. A man traveling to Jericho was attacked by robbers, beaten, and left for dead. Two religious leaders came down the road and passed him by. They were good religious folks who should have known better. But they had schedules to keep and plans they couldn’t bend, so they kept going.
Then a Samaritan stopped. Samaritans and Israelites hated each other, so to Jesus’s listeners this was like a terrorist stopping to help. Even so, the Samaritan bandaged the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey, took him to an inn, and paid his bills. That’s what it looks like to change your schedule for someone. The Samaritan was the true neighbor, and Jesus told the lawyer to “go and do likewise.”
It’s tempting to answer the lawyer’s question by saying, “Everyone is my neighbor.” But that can become an excuse to dodge what the command asks. Your “neighbors” turn into the people across town, or the people helped by the groups you give to. After all, nobody can be expected to love everybody. The problem is that when you aim at everything, you hit nothing. When you insist you’re neighbors with everybody, you often end up being neighbors with nobody. You become like the lawyer looking for a loophole.
So the authors suggest a simple test. Draw a tic-tac-toe grid, three boxes by three. Your home is the box in the middle, and the eight boxes around it stand for the eight homes closest to yours. In each box, write the names of the people who live there. First names are fine.
Next, write something about each person that you couldn’t see from your driveway. Not “drives a red car,” but the kind of thing you’d learn from talking once or twice: grew up in Idaho, is a lawyer, plays golf, is from Ethiopia. Last, write something deeper that you’d only know after really connecting. Their dreams for their career or family. What they’d say about God. What they fear most.
For most people, the grid shows how far there is to go. But it also shows where to start. Start by learning your neighbors’ names. It’s hard to love someone when you don’t know their name. That’s all the authors did at first. They simply started getting to know the people God had placed around them.
Chapter 3 — The Time Barrier
The first thing that gets in the way is usually time. No matter how many time-saving gadgets get invented, calendars stay full. Three lies keep that cycle going.
The first lie is that things will settle down someday. The truth is, they’ll only settle down when you die, or when you get intentional about changing your schedule. The second lie is that more will be enough. You tell yourself you’re one more purchase or achievement away from being content. The third lie is that everybody lives like this. Since everyone else moves at a frantic pace, you figure you should too.
The healthiest person who ever lived was Jesus. He got a lot done, but when you read about his life, the word “hurried” never comes to mind. He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). He didn’t mean full like a packed schedule. He meant full like abundance: a good, meaningful life. So how do you live like Jesus? You learn to keep the main thing the main thing.
Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Everyone has limited time and energy, and if you don’t choose on purpose how to spend them, those choices get made for you. Rest is good for you. But reruns and scrolling can swallow up the margin in your life if you aren’t careful. As the pastor John Ortberg put it, “Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.”
So if you don’t have time to know the person next door, the fix is clear. Find the things that don’t matter and cut them. Three principles help.
First, make the main thing the main thing. Picture three buckets that are almost full: one of sand, one of water, and one of rocks the size of baseballs. The challenge is to fit all three into one bucket. The secret is to start with the rocks. Then pour in the sand so it fills the gaps. Last, pour in the water so it soaks through the sand. Everything fits, as long as the big things go in first. That means putting God first, your family second, and then the thing Jesus said is most important: your neighbors. Mix up the order, and it won’t all fit. And if you don’t set your priorities, other people will set them for you.
Second, cut out the time stealers. Stop spending time on things that add nothing good to your life.
Third, be interruptible. That means being willing to be inconvenienced. It might not feel natural at first, but it’s part of living at a healthy pace. Ask yourself one honest question: Do I live at a pace that lets me be available to the people around me?
Chapter 4 — The Fear Factor
Time isn’t the only thing that keeps you inside. Fear does too. If you’re going to neighbor well, you need the courage to wrestle with your fears. Much of what gets called fear is really just timidity.
It’s worth pushing through, because isolation costs more than it seems. A friend of the authors named Wes runs a homeless shelter. He told them that most of the people there ended up there because of isolation. They drifted away from friends, family, and neighbors. Then it took only one bad break to land them on the streets.
Getting past timidity can start with something very small. A couple the authors know, Tom and Angela, switched yards. Their kids had always played in the backyard, and it was the family’s social hub. So they moved to the front yard. They hung a swing from a tree out front and set out a few lawn chairs. That was about it. Soon neighbors were stopping by, and all Tom and Angela had done to draw them was hang out where they could be seen.
Chapter 5 — Moving Down the Line
Once you start meeting people, the next step is moving down the line: from stranger to acquaintance, and from acquaintance to friend. One simple tool helps with the first step. One of the authors and his family wrote the names they were learning on a block map and taped it to the side of the fridge. It may not sound like much, but it was. Seeing it every day, they thought more about the neighbors they knew, and the ones they still needed to meet.
His wife, Lauren, took the idea a step further. She made a block directory with everyone’s name, phone numbers, and email address, and she gave a copy to everyone on the block.
But names are only the start. Jesus didn’t tell you to become acquaintances with your neighbors. He called you to love them, and that means having an actual relationship. One of the best ways to get there is a party.
A block party is thrown by and for the people who live on one block or a few blocks. It’s a natural place for neighbors to go from acquaintances to friends. You get to talk with people you already know and meet people you don’t. Maybe that’s why Jesus spent so much time at parties. He knew the power of a party.
When Jesus was criticized for spending time with “sinners,” he had every chance to apologize. He did the opposite. He defended his right to be there, because the party let him spend time with people he might not have met any other way. Not everyone in your neighborhood is cleaned up and easy to be around. You can’t always expect people to come onto your turf. Sometimes you have to enter their world.
So what would happen if you threw at least one good block party every year, and then sat back to see how God used it on your street?
Chapter 6 — Baby Steps
Picture a man who has made neighboring part of his normal life. A few times a month, he has neighbors over for a meal. Instead of watching football alone, he watches with the people who live around him. He lends his tools and helps neighbors work on their cars. When a neighbor is going through a hard time, he’s there. When a neighbor needs someone to watch her kids on short notice, he’s always willing. None of it is dramatic. It’s a string of small steps.
That can still feel out of reach if you think you don’t have much to offer. But Scripture tells about a small boy who becomes a hero. No one even recorded his name. He stands in a crowd of adults and gives what he has, a lunch of five small loaves and two fish. His little effort meets God’s power, and a miracle happens.
When you give what you have, even if it’s tiny, God can make a miracle. And when you give away what you have, Jesus gives you more to give. Even if what you have won’t solve the whole problem, give it anyway. Trust that God will give you enough for the need in front of you, and that he’ll do it again for the next one. If you don’t give, you don’t get a chance to see God do a miracle.
You don’t have to become someone else to do this. You were built to connect with people, so be who you are, and friendship will grow out of that naturally instead of being forced. The easiest way to connect is through shared activities. Cook, play sports, or watch the game together. Just choose to do something with others that you were going to do alone. One of the easiest is to eat together.
The idea is simple. Do what you’re already doing, invite others to the table, and watch what God does. Take small steps. Give the little you have, and watch God do a miracle.
Chapter 7 — Motives Matter
As you step out toward your neighbors, it’s worth asking why you’re doing it. If evangelism is your only motive, you won’t be a very good neighbor. But if you neighbor with the right posture, people who don’t know God will come to know him.
Some Christians share their faith a lot like a salesman makes a pitch. In a well-meaning attempt to “sell” something good, pastors have asked things like, “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 desire behind that question is honorable. But nobody wants to sound like a telemarketer when talking about the most important message there is.
Here’s the difference that matters. Sharing the gospel must never be the hidden motive for being a good neighbor. But it is the ultimate motive: to share the story of Jesus and what he’s done in your life. What has to go is the habit of making friends only to convert them. You don’t love your neighbors to convert them. You love your neighbors because you’ve been converted. Jesus never called anyone to a bait-and-switch. The Great Commandment says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and it stops there. So good neighboring is an end in itself.
One of the authors felt this firsthand while walking his street to invite people to a block party. When a man asked why they were having it, the author said, “We want the neighborhood to be more connected. We know that most people feel isolated and really want to get to know each other.” But as he went door to door, he started to wonder if he looked like one more pushy religious salesman. On the walk home, he suddenly saw how threatening the ways people share their faith can seem.
Most people who don’t believe in God have had at least one bad experience with religion. When it comes up, they shut down, and that’s the last thing you want in a growing friendship.
But people in relationships naturally talk about what they love. Jay, for instance, loves golf. Spend much time around him, and you’ll end up talking about golf. That’s true for everyone. So if you love Jesus, he’ll come up naturally.
Conversations tend to deepen in a pattern over time. First you talk about things you can both see: the weather, the crazy paint color on a neighbor’s house, the extra traffic on your street. Next comes basic personal information: where you grew up, what you do, whether you have kids. Later come dreams and desires. And after some time, you get to regrets, losses, and pain: the death of someone they love, a hard relationship, a tough situation at work.
If you have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus, he’ll be a big part of your story at those deeper levels, because your dreams and your pain are tangled up with your life with God. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. … Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14–16). When people see a life of love, they’re seeing God in you. They may not know who God is yet, but they’ll get curious.
One man they know shared with a couple on his street how God had worked in his own marriage. There was no polished speech, no canned program, no brochures. He just got involved, told his story, and gave them hope when they felt hopeless.
That’s the beauty of the art of neighboring. It’s simple and genuine. You don’t need a memorized pitch or a master plan to evangelize your block. Don’t make your neighbors your pet project. Make them your friends. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. When those things happen, everything else falls into place.
Chapter 8 — The Art of Receiving
Good neighborhoods are built on two-way streets. Nobody wants to feel like a project. Everyone wants to feel they bring something to the table. Yet one of the biggest temptations in neighboring is to turn neighbors into projects. You put on the “superneighbor cape” and rush out to serve. That isn’t a bad thing. But if it’s all you ever do, your relationships will be empty. If you never let people meet any of your needs, you limit what God wants to do in your neighborhood and in your life.
It’s natural to want to be the capable one with all the answers. But the art of neighboring means giving your time and energy, and, just as important, receiving from others.
When giving only goes one way, it robs the “needy” person of their dignity, because it makes them dependent. When giving goes both ways, everyone feels a sense of worth. Everyone on your block has something to bring. So let them bring it.
Chapter 9 — The Art of Setting Boundaries
Giving well also takes boundaries. When a neighbor is struggling, the goal is to help them get back in charge of their own life, not to rescue them. You can’t just hand people answers with a smile and a handshake. Good neighboring isn’t about blindly handing things out. It means walking alongside people in need and helping them find their way.
It helps to know that Jesus set boundaries too. He often didn’t help people the way they wanted to be helped. He healed some people but not others. Sometimes when crowds were looking for him, he left on purpose and walked the other way, alone. He wasn’t afraid to draw a line and put responsibility back on others, and that helped them in ways that lasted.
Still, the questions nag at you. Have I done enough? Am I doing too much? The hardest part of loving people is that you can always do more. But you can’t be everything to everyone, so stop making yourself feel bad for not doing more.
In the end, good neighboring means asking God what to do in each situation and praying for the wisdom to know how to help. God doesn’t ask you to do everything, but he does ask you to do something, and something is much better than nothing.
Chapter 10 — The Art of Focusing
As you get to know your neighbors, you’ll see you can’t be everyone’s best friend. To be honest, you don’t want to be. You don’t have the time or energy to invest in every neighbor equally. So how do you decide who to spend your time with?
You narrow your focus. You can be friendly to everybody, but you’ll likely be good friends with only a few. That’s a good thing. Done well, it lets you make a real difference where you live. And when some neighbors don’t respond, remember that behind every door is a story. People may be too busy, or wary of you, or already full of relationships. They may be in a different stage of life, or afraid of being exposed. There’s always more going on than meets the eye.
Jesus was intentional about how he spent his time. From the crowds, he set apart seventy-two disciples and sent them out with a task (Luke 10). From those, he had a core group of twelve, where he spent most of his time. And from the twelve, he spent the most time with three. He didn’t invest in everyone equally.
When he sent out the seventy-two, Jesus told them to look for a certain kind of person in every town: a person of peace. That’s someone hospitable and open to becoming a friend. Once the disciples found one, Jesus told them to stay in that house and not move around. Moving around might seem to reach more people. But staying put let them build deep friendships with people who were gifted at relationships. And they surely met the host’s whole network of friends, because someone that hospitable knows a lot of people. By sending his disciples to look for the person of peace, Jesus pointed them to the best neighbors in each town.
Can you think of someone on your block who’s very hospitable? One family found theirs on move-in day. “The day we moved in, we noticed a party going on across the street,” they said. “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 on my street that I really connect with, and who really connect with me? That doesn’t mean the relationship is always easy. It means you’re open to each other. Find those people and invest in their lives. Be friendly with everyone, and be close to a few.
Chapter 11 — The Art of Forgiving
The closer you get to people, the more chances there are for things to go wrong. So it’s important to look at the neighbor relationships that are strained and look for ways to heal them. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
The Bible has a lot to say about getting along with neighbors, even the hard ones. 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.” The same passage says not to repay evil for evil, and to feed your enemy if he’s hungry. Living at peace means trying to bless people even when they’ve cursed you. In Matthew 5:44, Jesus goes further: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That’s radical. Pray for the neighbors you don’t get along with.
If you choose not to forgive, you’re forgetting how much you’ve been forgiven. Jesus told a story about a servant whose master forgave him a huge debt. Then that servant refused to forgive a fellow servant who owed him a little. When the master found out, he handed the first servant over to the jailers. “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you,” Jesus said, “unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Forgiveness isn’t optional.
But forgiveness and reconciliation aren’t the same thing. Forgiveness is an attitude of the heart. Reconciliation is the hard work of moving forward together. You should offer everyone forgiveness, but you won’t be reconciled with everyone. As a friend named Pete told the authors, “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.”
So when things go wrong with a neighbor, name the issue and weigh how serious it is. Then start from humility. Pray for your neighbor’s well-being. Pray that God will make a way to reconcile and show you what you could have done differently. If you were wrong, look for a chance to apologize for your part. A real apology can be incredibly disarming. Go the extra mile.
Sometimes a face-to-face talk will only make things tenser. When that happens, find an indirect way to bless them. And don’t run because things got hard. Maybe God wants to use the hard thing to make you more like Jesus.
Chapter 12 — Better Together
When Jesus was asked to name the most important commandment, he boiled everything down to “Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.” In doing that, he gave a simple plan that would change the world if every believer took it at face value. And you don’t have to carry it out alone.
Find a neighbor you think would make a good partner, and ask them to join you. They don’t have to be Christians. Someone on your street may have a completely different spiritual outlook than you and still know way more about neighboring.
Partners make bigger things possible. One man described what happened on his street: “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.” Now the families who come are hoping to plan a whole summer of them, with grilling before the movies.
Your church matters here too, but each local church is just one part of God’s kingdom. Jesus used the word church only 3 times in the Gospels. He used the word kingdom 121 times.
If you feel like you don’t have time for any of this, take out your calendar and ask yourself one question: Is everything I’m doing right now more important than taking the Great Commandment literally?
Then look again at the eight homes closest to yours. That’s where it starts. Not with a program or a master plan, but with a name, a wave from the front yard, a shared meal, a party, a little given and a little received. Love God, and love the people he has placed right outside your door. When you do, everything else falls into place.