Category: Neighbor Love

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.

Our current political moment in the United States is characterized by division and polarization. What is the calling of faithful disciples of Christ to engage our culture and politics with justice and love during this time? Join us as Dr. Kristen Deede Johnson (Professor of Theology and Christian Formation, Western Theological Seminary) speaks to big questions of justice, God’s vision for the world, and our calling as God’s people within the world. A conversation will follow with Dr. Kristen Deede Johnson, Dr. Amy Black (Political Science), and Dr. Gregory Lee (Theology).

Reposted from the Wheaton College YouTube channel.

Shirley V. Hoogstra delivered the T.B. Maston Foundation Lecture in Christian Ethics at the Dallas Baptist University back in 2018. She left students with a powerful message that emphasizes:

• Building bridges, not résumés;
• Respecting the dignity of each person; and
• Seeking the common good.

Hoogstra also named the four ingredients to create confident pluralism: (1) respect, (2) humility, (3) trustworthiness, and (4) love.

Matthew Kaemingk didn’t have Muslim friends growing up. Raised in a Christian school in a small, rural town in the Pacific Northwest, his chances of befriending a Muslim didn’t improve when he attended a small Christian college. This “Muslim-free” life continued until the fall of his junior year when, one early morning, he and his roommates awoke to a barrage of phone calls from anxious parents urging them to turn on CNN. It was September 11th. 

In the months following the attacks, Matthew and his roommates were introduced to Islam through the lenses of CNN and Fox News, which portrayed radical Islam as a global villain in opposition to the West. Images of Muslims celebrating the attacks and shouting “Allahu Akbar!” dominated the airwaves, and America, whipped into a frenzy, sought revenge. This portrayal of Islam was two-dimensional, casting Muslims as either distant terrorists or desperate refugees. Matthew graduated in May 2003 with a plan to see the world, spending that summer in a UN refugee camp in Eastern Europe. Serving refugees fleeing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he offered English classes and tutoring, while informally spending time listening to their stories. These interactions revealed a different side of Islam, one that wasn’t depicted in the news. 

After his time in the camps, Matthew went on to graduate school to study theology, political ethics, and Muslim-Christian relations. He wrote his first book about Muslim immigration in the West and the Christian case for hospitality toward them. It was during this time that he met Shadi Hamid, a respected scholar on political Islam and international relations. Shadi endorsed Matthew’s book and offered a speech at its launch event, marking the beginning of their friendship. As they traveled together, speaking at various universities, Matthew saw Shadi not as the clichéd image of a Muslim post-9/11 but as a native-born American with deep insight and complexity. Their conversations about faith, justice, and salvation revealed that Shadi embodied many virtues Matthew had sought his entire life. Despite their theological differences, Shadi’s character and wisdom often surpassed Matthew’s, leading him to a profound sense of “holy envy.” This friendship taught Matthew that God could be active in their relationship, bridging the deep religious differences between them in unexpected ways. 

You can read Mathew’s full story on Neighborly Faith.