James T. Lima
The most significant part of evangelism is not a fancy technique but the simple preaching of the gospel in public worship and the faithful heralding of the simple gospel message by God’s people in their everyday lives. Yet, there are some vitally important things which accompany and even enable our proclamation of the gospel. One of the most significant of these is “neighboring.”
We live in an era where the prevailing views in our culture about what it means to be human are changing rapidly. This has ripple effects into how people view things like gender and sexuality, but it also drastically changes community landscapes. It changes not just individuals, but how individuals relate to other individuals. Carl Trueman has observed this in an extremely helpful way. If you haven’t yet read The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self or his shorter book Strange New World, I can’t recommend them strongly enough.
One of the many helpful things that Trueman observes is how technology has changed human community. Just think for a moment how access to the internet has changed human community. Before the internet, your community was literally your community—your physical neighbors, your church, your school, your family, and in a larger way your city, state, and nation. Your community was based primarily on actual proximity to people and actual face-to-face interaction with them, whether they were like you or not. But with the internet, you can have 2,000 “friends” without having any real friends. Many people have an easier time interacting with a person on the internet who lives on a different continent than they do talking to the person who lives next door. You can do the same thought experiment with things like how suburbs have changed American community or even how cars have changed American community. Now, I’m not saying all those things are bad, but even good things can have harmful unexpected consequences.
G.K. Chesterton observed this same basic idea even in his day: “The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world… The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.” As your world becomes “larger” it actually becomes “smaller.” As our world has become “larger” through things like transportation and the internet think about how our world has actually become smaller in significant ways. A person with the internet and a car can choose to almost exclusively interact with people who are like them. When you have a pool of millions of people to choose from, you can find the people with the same interests, same beliefs, same background, and literally forget the person sitting on their couch 25 yards from you in the next house. When your community is smaller, you are forced to interact with more people and a wider variety of people. You can imagine someone growing up 100 years ago in a town of 1,000 people or even in a specific neighborhood of a large city. In that town or neighborhood, you couldn’t ignore people in the way you can now. For better or worse, you knew and were known.
While leading a training session on evangelism a number of years ago, the class realized partway through the session that one of the biggest things getting in the way of doing evangelism wasn’t a lack of knowledge about how to share the gospel, but a lack of connections with non-Christians to share it with! Perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks to faithful evangelism in our day and age is that people don’t have meaningful face-to-face interactions with flesh-and-blood humans!
Perhaps what we need in our day for us to be effective in evangelism is not to make our world “larger” but to make our world “smaller.” In essence, neighboring is to make your world smaller. It means to value and pursue meaningful relationships with actual people who are in actual proximity to you (your actual neighbors, your coworkers, the cashier you see every day at Kwik Trip). Have you considered that God put your neighbors where they are for a reason? To quote Chesterton again, “We make our friends; we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor.”
Neighboring Exercise:
Here is a simple exercise, adapted from The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon, which can help you to get to know your neighbors. This exercise isn’t meant to guilt you into neighboring, but to help you to see the opportunity for hospitality, service, and evangelism that exists within 50 yards of your house. I’m convinced that much of our struggle with “reaching the world” is that we often don’t “reach our city block.”
Directions: Draw the following chart. Make it large enough to take up most of the space of an ordinary 8.5”x11” sheet of paper. Each square represents a house on an ordinary city block. The three squares at the top are the three houses across the street from you. The two on the sides are your next-door neighbors. The three on the bottom are the three houses behind you. If you do not live on an ordinary city block (you live in an apartment, dorm room, or in the country), you can modify the chart to represent the people who live nearest you. Write as much of the following information in each square as you are able:
Write down the names of the people who live in each house.
Write down some general relevant information about the people in each house (ex: Grew up in Wisconsin, likes walleye fishing, etc.).
Write down more in-depth information if you know any (ex: What are their religious beliefs? What are their fears or struggles?)
Application:
Try to fill out the chart above over the coming months with as much relevant information as you can. This will take stepping out to get to know your neighbors.
Ask good questions. Questions are like onions. Good questions may begin simple and shallow, but over time as you try to get to know someone, ask questions that take the conversation deeper.
Practice hospitality. Have a neighbor over for a barbeque in the summer. Invite them into your home. This is one of the most countercultural things you can do in a world where people keep to themselves.
Serve your neighbors. This can be as simple as shoveling snow. Pay attention to the needs of your neighbors.
Pray persistently. We believe that it is God who saves by his sovereign grace. Try praying consistently for even two non-Christians in your life, even your neighbors, on a consistent basis.
Speak the gospel. This means being prepared. Sit down and try writing out how you would share the basics of the gospel. The goal isn’t to be the most persuasive and polished evangelist of all time. The goal is to be able to simply and faithfully speak of Jesus and what he has done.
