A QUICK SUMMARY

Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it’s hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We have hundreds of “friends” through online social networking, but we often don’t even know the full name of the person who lives right next door.

The Art of Neighboring asks the question: What is the most loving thing I can do for the people who live on my street or in my apartment building? Through compelling true stories of lives impacted, the authors show readers how to create genuine friendships with the people who live in closest proximity to them. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter make this book perfect for small groups or individual study.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION 

If we take the Great Commandment literally, we must open our eyes and our hearts to love the people on the street where we live. The act of loving our actual neighbors is one of the simplest and yet most powerful things that we can do to make an impact in our world. 

The solutions to the problems in our neighborhoods can’t be found in governmental programs or getting more people to come to your church. The solutions are with people just like you in your neighborhood.

The solution is to get back to the basics of what Jesus commanded: love God and love your neighbors.

What if we took the time to get to know the people next to us and discovered that they aren’t so menacing after all? Perhaps we would find that the people on our block are normal people just like us. At the end of the day, they long for a place to belong, a place to be accepted and cared for.

The people you don’t know by name are strangers. You might occasionally see them, and they have hopefully seen you, but the level of your interaction with them is minimal; perhaps it’s only a wave from the car on the way to work in the morning. You may even know something about them, but the bottom line is if you don’t know their name, you really don’t know them.

The first step to taking the Great Commandment literally is to move from stranger to acquaintance in your relationships with those who live nearest you. Learning a person’s name is the first and easiest step you can take to become a better neighbor. 

Once you have learned and remembered someone’s name, your relationship has moved from stranger to acquaintance. That’s a crucial first step. 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.

Moving from acquaintance to relationship is not as clean or as easily defined as the first step. There isn’t a simple tool that can move you into relationship, because it is impossible to program relationships. All of us can, however, create environments where relationship might develop and grow into something significant.

It may sound weird to categorize levels of friendship, but we have found it’s crucial to define where we really stand with our neighbors so we can know what to do next. And understanding the neighboring framework of stranger-acquaintance-relationship can help us accomplish just that. It prompts practical steps that we can take to make real progress.

Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon, The Art of Neighboring

A NEXT STEP

Sketch the image below on a chart tablet.

Imagine that the middle box in the image is your house and the other boxes are the eight houses situated nearest to you – the eight households that God has placed closed to where you live.

You probably don’t live in a community that looks so neat and precise as the image; that’s okay! Whether you live in or on a neighborhood street, a cul-de-sac, a rural lot with five-acre parcels, or in a corner apartment, try to picture the locations of your eight nearest neighbors, however they might be situated.

In the box representing your home, write your address. In the other boxes, fill in the three sub points within each box – A, B, and C – as follows:

1. 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.
2. Write down some relevant information about each person, some data or facts that you couldn’t see just by standing in your driveway – things you might know if you’ve spoken to the person only once or twice.
3. Write down some in-depth information you would know after connecting with people. This might include their career plans or family dreams or anything to do with the purpose of their lives. Write down anything meaningful that you’ve learned after interacting with them.

How did you do?

According to the experiences of authors Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon, after leading this exercise with thousands of people, the results are strikingly consistent.

• Only 10 percent of people can fill out the names of all eight of their neighbors on line A.
• About 3 percent can fill out line B for every home.
• Less than 1 percent can fill out line C for every home.

Are we fulfilling the Great Commandment with our actual neighbors?

 – adapted from The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon

Make a plan, include your family, to get to know more about your neighbors this summer. Ask God to open the door for natural and meaningful interaction. Bottom line: take the time to invest in their lives; who knows, eternity may depend on it.