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Apr
2014
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The least missional thing people can do—know the names of our neighbors

Neighbors4Most every pastor wants to help people grow and multiply their missional effectiveness as much as they possibly can but what if we flipped the script and tried to help them the least amount possible in order to maximize their chances of living missionally? So what might we do?

In Chip and Dan Heath’s best-seller, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, they talk about “scripting the critical move.” The critical move is the one smallest thing we can do that if done consistently leads to big changes. BJ Fogg might call these “tiny habits” (See BJ’s TEDx talk here).  So what is the smallest thing we could do to help followers of Jesus live missionally? What if it was a simple as knowing the names of your neighbors?

In Better Together: Restoring American Community, Robert Putnam writes,

The more neighbors who know one another by name, the fewer crimes a neighborhood as a whole will suffer. A child born in a state whose residents volunteer, vote, and spend time with friends is less likely to be born underweight, less likely to drop out of school, and less likely to kill or be killed than the same child—no richer or poorer—born in another state whose residents do not. Society as a whole benefits enormously from the social ties forged by those who choose connective strategies in pursuit of their particular goals (p. 269).

Art of NeighboringMy friends Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon have written a wonderful book called The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door. The book began when the mayor of their Colorado city told a group of pastors, “All problems in our community could be eliminated if we could be a community of great neighbors. If you pastors could teach people how to love their neighbors as themselves, all of our problems in this city would be solved.” The pastors of the greater Arvada area took the challenge and asked their congregants to get to know the 8 people around them and sometime in the next 5 months to host a block party. And they did! Jay and Dave came up with a simple illustration—a diagram (and refrigerator magnet) that serves to identify the names of the people around them.  Pastors who do a preaching series will tell stories of meeting people across the street from them for the first time and ask congregants whose name they can put on the grid diagram that they didn’t have on the grid last week. If you want to look at a map of people who have identified themselves as wanting to be a good neighbor, click here. We cannot love who we do not know.

My friend Brian Mavis from LifeBridge Christian Church in Longmont, Colorado puts it this way: “Just taking that small step to know our neighbors names is like taking a small step on a moving sidewalk…and the magic begins.” Evangelistic campaigns fail because believers have no one to invite. Church planting efforts fail because believers are not in relationship with non-believers.

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