Category: Neighbor Love

This essay is a new contribution to a weekly series by Christianity Today.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign.

Now, all these years later, this particular lesson in neighborliness is something I’ve come to apply in my own life in a slightly different way.

Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.

I inherited my father’s keen interest in politics. Over the course of my life, I have attended campaign rallies, canvassed door-to-door for a candidate, slapped bumper stickers on my car, worn buttons, and even run for office myself. And as soon as I became a homeowner, I also put up campaign signs on my property.

When my husband and I moved to our current home 25 years ago, each fall still found me putting up those signs on our front lawn. It took me a long time to notice that our immediate neighbors did not.

Almost all of our half dozen or more immediate neighbors were already living here when we moved in. They are all still here. That’s a lot of history, a lot of tradition, a lot of heritage.

And our neighborhood is anything but homogenous. Our house is the oldest in the neighborhood. Other houses of various sizes and styles have popped up here and there over the past century, some built decades ago, others still being built. Our neighborhood has large new homes, small doublewides, and lots of modest brick ranches. Like their homes, the people who live in them represent just about every demographic box one might be asked to check. Indeed, the diversity of our little rural corner of the country could rival the hippest of urban neighborhoods.

This essay is a new contribution to a weekly series by Christianity Today.

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My neighborhood, just outside of Washington, DC, has a strong sense of local community. I know the people on our block, and I love bumping into folks—at PTA meetings, sports outings, or the grocery store. My neighborhood has quaint traditions: We celebrate holidays with cookie exchanges. Local groups play music on front lawns in the summer. On these lovely nights when people are walking the block, I don’t see the divisions and divides that worry me when I read the news.

So I was surprised a couple of months ago to find out that I didn’t actually know many of my neighbors. One of my kids was collecting items for a service project. On a Saturday morning, we slowly walked the block, placing a flyer at each door. With half a stack of flyers left, we continued to the next block—a block I walk or drive often.

But the slowness of the task caused me to pause, to stop at each door, to see each place where people live. I noticed the numbers on the walls, the color of the doors. And I was surprised at how many homes I had never “seen” before. I was surprised, just one block away, how few of the people I knew.

Throughout the Gospels, we see the exhortation to “love your neighbor as yourself” and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37–40; Mark 12:29–31). But who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)? And what does being a neighbor look like in a time of such polarization?

When I try to make sense of what it means to love my neighbor, I think of Acts 1:8. In this passage, Jesus exhorts his followers to bear witness to the power of his resurrection in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Jerusalem was essentially the disciples’ city. Judea was the larger region that contained their local city. Samaria was a region just next to Judea—a place that was adjacent and had a different ethnic group. And the ends of the earth were, well, everywhere else.

I use these categories of Jerusalem (the city where I am), Judea and Samaria (the region I’m in and the one next to it), and “the ends of the earth” (everyone else) to help me think about whom I consider my neighbor. I try to make sure I have neighbors in each of these groups.

This essay is a new contribution to a weekly series by Christianity Today.

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As the president of a campus ministry, I might be a little biased in that assessment. But imagine the reality that a brand-new college student faces when they come to campus for the first time. Thousands are already there from every walk of life: athletes, musicians, activists, artists, people of different cultures and ethnicities, introverts and extroverts, people who like to party and stay out late, people who like to stay in and get up early.

All of them chose this school, but none of them chose each other. All at once, they’re thrust into a community, stuck together in dorms and classes and social clubs.

First, neighborliness requires creativity of witness.

Each day, Christian students at secular universities interact with countless complicated people and circumstances in which God calls them to be Christlike, seeking not “their own good, but the good of others” (1 Cor. 10:24). And, in the power of the Spirit, I see time and again how students respond with creative acts of gospel witness—fresh outreach ideas, innovative responses to injustice, bold prayers for physical healing, exciting calls to faith, authentic acts of relational generosity, and on and on.

One example comes from the College of William & Mary. For many years, the college had a problem with excessive drinking and partying on the last day of classes. To serve their classmates, InterVarsity students set up griddles in the center of campus and made pancakes for students who wanted a free meal and a safe alternative place to hang out. Today, “Pancake House” is a bi-annual event that creatively blesses over 2,000 people every semester, easily making it the largest student event on campus.

Much of the polarization we experience in today’s culture comes down to a lack of creative witness—a dull defaulting to the same staid talking points, stale arguments, and predictable reactions. But Christian students, like those at William & Mary, are learning something different. In their dynamic and diverse campus environment, they’re learning to follow the Spirit into fresh forms of neighborliness that the rest of the American church can learn from.

This essay is a new contribution to a weekly series by Christianity Today.

I was first drawn to the Christian faith as a child in London. Both the city and the school I attended there were marked by profound religious, ethnic, and cultural pluralism. A few years later, while a freshman in high school, I began to follow Christ more intentionally after a conversion experience in a church youth group in the Washington, DC, area. I spent the rest of high school and college navigating how to inhabit my faith in settings where few shared my convictions.

When I got to grad school and discovered the life and writings of Augustine of Hippo from the fourth and fifth centuries, I felt like I’d finally found the resources I needed to begin imagining a faithful, generous Christian witness in our own time and place.

We live in a diverse and quickly changing democracy, surrounded by people with many divergent beliefs and ways of life, and this comes with both opportunities and challenges. We’re able to know and love neighbors very different from ourselves as we share and embody the gospel. But navigating deep difference and rapid social shifts can also be difficult and scary, and we may end up hurting our neighbors rather than loving them well.