Spirituality & Mission in the Neighborhood

Look again at your neighborhood, not just as the place you happen to live but as an important context for spirituality and mission.

Simon Carey Holt

What if God lived next door? Would you recognize him? Would you talk to him at the fence or avoid catching his eye? Would you love him as you love yourself?

Simon Carey Holt listened to the experiences of numerous men and women of faith – people who live in neighborhoods of all shapes and sizes – and concluded that though they are a largely forgotten resource when it comes to matters of faith, neighborhoods are places rich with the most inspiring stories and exciting possibilities for mission.

According to author Simon Carey Holt, we all live in neighborhoods. Yours may be as different to mine as the proverbial chalk is to cheese. Your closest neighbor may be far away, hidden behind a high wooden fence, or close enough to hear as she walks overhead. Every neighborhood is unique. Yours will have a look and feel of its own; they all do. No matter where it’s located or how old it is, each neighborhood has its own history, atmosphere and personality; each one its distinctive blend of housing types, commercial and community facilities, and public places. Yet every neighborhood – from the trendy city highrise to the ever expanding housing developments on the urban fringe and anything else in between – is a variation on the same basic principle: people living in close proximity to other people.

And yet increasingly, some of us struggle to simply name those who live next door, let alone know the details of their lives.

At the heart of the Christian story lie the two commands Jesus identified as the essence of living, the heart of spirituality: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength;’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ As I struggle with these two directives and how to make them alive in my everyday experience, there are some questions that beg for answers, questions like these:

• What does it mean to love God where I live?
• What does the command, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ mean for the people who live next door?
• How do the realities of contemporary urban and suburban life impact upon my experience of faith and community?
• What has my spirituality got to do with the neighbors?

The desire to close the door on the world and create a haven of self-sufficiency, identity and security is strong.

But Holt believes the neighborhood remains a fundamentally important context of life and deserves to be taken more seriously by those who live in one. He believes that in ignoring the health and wellbeing of our local neighborhood, we’re ignoring the glue that binds the wider city together and makes it a genuinely human environment. And perhaps most importantly, he believes a spirituality that does not nurture our connections with the daily places of life fails to reflect the life-transforming nature of the Christian faith.

Inspired and adapted from God Next Door: Spirituality & Mission in the Neighborhood by Simon Carey Holt

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