The Neighboring Church: Getting Better at What Jesus Says Matters Most

Foreword

What is neighboring?

If you are like me, you didn’t know the word neighbor could even be used that way. I thought the word neighbor was a noun—that is, until I met a few friends who took it more seriously than most Christians I’ve ever known.

I’ve come to learn what should have been obvious, that neighboring is one of the most important and practical priorities for a Christian. It kind of makes sense, right? After all, Jesus did list it as one of the top two commands his followers should engage.

But even without Jesus’ command, it would simply make pragmatic sense for the church to lead the way in being better neighbors. Our society is growing tired of religion. Americans even use words like extreme and irrelevant to describe Christians, with almost half (42 percent) convinced people of faith are part of the problem in our world, not the solution.

This is unacceptable. But how will it ever change?

We tend to overcomplicate the strategy of Jesus about the kingdom of God going forward. We overthink our mission and then make our own creative plans and incisive tactics for how we can best serve God’s mission, all the while forgetting his very basic plan.

We need to recover the simplicity. The Neighboring Church will bring you back to square one. You’ll be reminded of the amazing idea Jesus had for reaching the world and just how rudimentary he meant for it to be. Forget your grand plans to make a difference for the kingdom or to find your life purpose somewhere out there. The message of this book will convict you to the core that the kingdom of God comes when we simply walk across the street.

Jesus’ plan was simple.

But even if it should be more accessible two thousand years later, it’s still not easy being a good neighbor today. With garage doors closing and social media letting us follow, like, and share from the comfort of our homes, our need for real relationship is being filled with an empty counterfeit. What used to be common neighborly practice now must be relearned.

Who better to be the teacher than a humble and serving church?

Of course in a globalized world our neighbors reach far beyond those we can see through our front windows. But what if, instead of being overwhelmed, we started there. It’s in the small steps of obedience we take for God that we will discover the brilliance of his plan to spread his love around the world.

The Neighboring Church isn’t just another to do or church program. You are the program. Let’s get about it and turn that noun into a verb that spreads his love far and wide.

Gabe Lyons

Founder of Q and Author of Good Faith

Acknowledgments

We owe a huge thank you to Krista Petty, who not only conducted all the interviews in the book, but also managed to take all of our stuff and combine it into something readable, which left on our own may not have happened until we were being moved into a nursing home! Along the way she blessed us with her work, and she managed to provoke (read irritate) us to be clearer, more articulate, and tell a better story. Krista continues to bless us as the editor in chief of theneighboringchurch.com, a valuable resource for sharing the neighboring journey.

To LeeEric Fesko and all the folks at HarperCollins (Thomas Nelson) whose positivity and professionalism were a breath of fresh air.

Thanks also to Greg Ligon and all the staff at Leadership Network, who love the church and have great kingdom hearts.

The heart for this book would not have happened without the friends and staff at LifeBridge, especially Kevin Colon, Dan Scates, Ramin Razavi, and Kevin King, who live out neighboring.

And finally to the LifeBridge family, who continue to get better at the two things Jesus said matter most.

Introduction

Organic Is Hard (Rick Rusaw)

Brian and I have the good fortune to live in Colorado, and even more, we live and work in Boulder County. This means we spend a good deal of time in Boulder. Some describe Boulder as twenty square miles surrounded by reality, and at times that is true. I don’t know any better place to be doing ministry than in a part of the world that embraces spirituality but rejects Christianity. Last year Boulder tied for first as the least religious place in America; that would be, of course, if you don’t consider navel gazing, smoking pot, hiking, biking, and running to religious activities.

Boulder is ranked as one of the healthiest and fittest places to live in America. As a result of the area’s health consciousness, some of the best farm-to-table (organic) restaurants in the country are in Colorado. If you have been doing ministry in any fashion for at least ten days, then you have heard, been tweeted, read a blog, or attended a conference that tells you how the church needs to be more organic. We are told we need to quit structuring things, quit planning, and let things happen. The list is long of all the things wrong in the church. Organic! is one of the rallying cries for change.

People often mistakenly think that organic farming is easy. You don’t have to do anything but scatter seeds, right? No weeding, no hoeing, no pesticide sprays—just let it go and grow. I’ve heard some church leaders talk about that type of organic. It’s where you quit organizing, don’t do anything, and let the church take its course. I think we assume not working at all and just being is the way. Let’s just hang out at Starbucks and be organic. If you do that in any type of farming, you end up with an overgrown, falling-down farm. Truth is, when I eat a great organic meal in Boulder, I eat the fruit of hard work, intentional effort, and much sacrifice. The truly successful organic farmers in our area have to work hard. Nothing on the farm just happens. With no effort or intentionality, you end up with an overrun farm.

If my friends who insist the church needs to be more organic mean that we should get the pesticides out and be healthier and more like Jesus, then I am in complete agreement. But usually we mean that we don’t like what we have, we aren’t sure what to do next, and so let’s do something different.

Leaders have resorted to a lot of things so congregations can grow. As a pastor, I want our church to grow. Jesus said the church should grow. I am measured by that, and I measure myself by that as well. In our effort to grow, it’s possible we have used some pesticides, gotten complicated, or used shortcuts to add to our numbers. It’s been said that there is a big difference between the church getting fat and the church growing.

Don’t get me wrong: numbers are important. They are certainly one of the useful ways for leaders to measure growth. For many (me included), we stop with butts, bucks, and baptisms. What if we were to measure the number of changed lives and the cumulative effect of those changed lives over time? What if we weren’t just measuring weekend attendance but the resulting change in our communities? What would happen if we not only counted how we gathered but also how we scattered?

In this book we aren’t going to focus so much on what might be wrong in the church today. We are guilty of doing many of those things, and right and wrong are debatable, aren’t they? (Which may have something to do with there being around forty-three thousand denominations and at least as many freelancers.) Besides, there is a plethora of stuff out there telling us what isn’t right. What we want to do here is talk about what happens if we get better at the two things Jesus said matter most.

Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. (Matt. 22:37–40)

In Jesus’ words, everything God had said up to this point (the Prophets) and every command God had ever given (the Law) hung on these two things: love God and love your neighbor.

Nearly every morning for the last three years I have asked God, How can I love you better today than I did yesterday, and how can I love my neighbors better today than I did yesterday? Those are the two questions we have invited the people at LifeBridge to ask as well. Those are the two questions by which we measure ministry.

But it’s been hard work. Those two questions have given rise to more angst, more wrestling, more failure, and more challenge than anything we have ever done. It’s also very hard to measure success compared to anything we have done before. Yet those two questions have also brought clarity, joy, and satisfaction beyond what we have experienced in the past. Brian said it best at a staff meeting: For the first time in twenty years of ministry I feel like I’m doing what God called me to do.

A Better Expression (Brian Mavis)

When I felt called to ministry as a twenty-year-old, what I was signing up for was following Jesus, loving people, and leading others to follow Jesus and love people. Over the past couple of decades, it seems my major role as a pastor has been program management. I haven’t been a minister; I’ve been an administrator. I know that’s one of the equipping gifts, but the way we do it in twenty-first-century America is not what I signed up for. I have no passion for it, and I’m not good at it. But focusing on the Great Commandment is changing things, and it started for me some time back.

Fifteen years ago I moved our family to San Diego County to help create and manage a website called SermonCentral.com. I had been on staff at a large church the prior seven years. Now we were looking to be part of a church, not as paid staff, but as regular folk. After trying to plug into a half dozen different churches over the next year, it became clear that we did not like what we were experiencing. In fact, we far preferred the Sundays when we didn’t attend a church service. To be honest, I came to resent the church as it was commonly expressed. It got to the point that after we attended an event, I turned to my wife and said, I don’t want to come back for at least a month—or ever.

A few years earlier I had read former US Senate chaplain Richard Halverson’s assessment of church history and America’s place in it, and it gnawed at me: The church began as a fellowship of men and women centered on Jesus Christ. It went to Greece and became a philosophy. It went to Rome and became an institution. It went to Europe and became a culture. It came to America and became an enterprise.¹ I was deeply bothered by the Americanization of the church. My wife and I concluded our faith was better off without the church than with it. The term had not yet been coined, but we had become dones. We were done with church but not with our faith.

After a year of being done with church, my wife asked, How are we any different than our neighbors now that we don’t go to church? Outwardly, we all looked the same. Sure, we returned their trash containers when they were out of town, but they did the same for us. We gave them cookies at Christmas, but they made even better cookies for us. We picked up our dog’s poop when he went in their yards, but they did the same when their dogs pooped in our yard (except for one mysterious neighbor). How were we any different?

After I got over being annoyed with my wife’s question, we decided to focus on being the best neighbors we could be. A couple of years later, God helped me get over some of my issues with the church (not that they weren’t legitimate). I had gotten to a place where I believed that not being part of a local church wasn’t a solution to the problem. So we started attending a new church a few blocks from where we lived. We chose it because it was the nearest church, but it was also the cool church—and the fastest-growing church in town. After attending for a few months, we asked some of our neighbors if they would ever want to attend the church with us. We explained it had contemporary music, relevant messages, and was geared toward people who didn’t normally feel comfortable with church. Our neighbors said: Thanks but no thanks. We don’t care how current the music is or how applicable the message is; we don’t want to be a part of an institutional church. But we do want to know more about God, and we’d be happy to meet with you to learn more. A few weeks later some neighbors started coming to our home on Sunday mornings to learn about God. It was incredible to see the simple power of loving our neighbors; it had more power than the best professionally produced Sunday show in town.

It just so happened, though, we had listed our house to sell because we were moving back to Colorado. (I still wonder what would have happened if we had stayed.) When we moved to Colorado, I tried to make a living by my wits. After a year, I learned I needed either more wits or a job. A job was easier, so I joined the staff at LifeBridge because of their emphasis on being an externally focused church, and I became pastor of community transformation. We created programs that made a real difference. It was a pretty good fit, but I somehow started losing the lessons of loving my neighbors. Fortunately, God was ready to remind me of those lessons, and it all came back into focus after a key event, which you’ll read about in chapter 1.

It’s not just that I’m coming closer to what God called me to do when I said yes to vocational ministry; it’s that I’m coming closer to the way God wants me to do it. Recently a friend and coworker asked me what I was excited about. I said, Honestly, I’m excited about learning to live a better expression of my faith. I hope loving my neighbors is good for them; I know it’s good for me.

New Wineskins

Rick’s right when he pointed out that organic farming is more intensive and not a free-for-all. In other words, a new substance also needs a new structure. After all, Jesus said we need new wineskins, not no wineskins (Mark 2:22). What does this new wineskin look like? We, like several other churches and leaders you will meet in this book, simply call this neighboring.

Neighboring is about teaching, encouraging, equipping, and releasing people to love their neighbors: the guy, gal, or family next door or across the street. We believe neighboring is a value to be taught and caught rather than a new program to start. Programs have a start date and an end. But there is no time frame for this directive from Jesus.

Lest we think this is easy or unstructured, consider the wineskin again. The new wineskin is a vessel providing structure. Structure can lead to results. Structure is not a creator, but it can be an accelerant. I like how our teaching pastor, Ramin Razavi, articulated this recently: It is a false dichotomy to see organizational leadership and relational leadership as two opposing ways to build the church. We believe that by creating thoughtful and enabling structures, we will foster environments where natural relationships grow and flourish.

So we will talk about the values, structures, and practices that we and others have learned, experienced, and experimented with as we have loved our own neighbors and attempted to lead our churches to do the same.

I am compelled to be part of this movement because it is life giving. It’s the most creative way I know to follow Jesus (and he commanded us to do it; that’s sort of motivational too).

Neighboring is . . .

. . . more about engagement than organization (but engagement will help us get organized).

. . . comprehensive. Everyone has a neighbor—the rich, poor, old, and young.

. . . a humanizing movement.

. . . a big deal to God. He loves your neighbors.

. . . a privilege.

. . . knowing your neighbors’ names, hopes, hurts, and histories.

. . . an application of the power of the gospel.

. . . discipleship because it grows your heart and sometimes your neighbor’s heart.

. . . essential and elementary.

. . . being flexible, available, and present.

. . . as important as internal and external ministries.

. . . about choosing to see.

. . . allowing God to interrupt your day.