You are not my enemy. You are my neighbour.

While there are plenty of people who have no active relationship with their local church, and many who are actively opposed to their local church, churches don’t have the luxury of seeing people as either strangers or enemies.

Jesus challenged his followers to love their enemies, and to love their neighbours as much as they love themselves. When one person tried to get him to draw a line around the definition of a neighbour, he responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan… which had the effect of making it clear that our neighbours were every person we come into contact with.

Over the last 100 years, the way we have done church has had the effect of moving our focus from our neighbours to our congregations. We have even started to measure success by bums on seats at our particular weekly event.  We hire pastors to care for the people who turn up regularly to our events.

It is time to re-discover an idea from the fourth century: the cure (or care) of souls.  From the 300’s onwards a church leader was entrusted with the responsibility for a whole geographic region, accepting the burden not only for those who turned up at church but also for every single “soul” in their region. They accepted responsibility for their neighbours and ther enemies alike. This is where the English notion of “parish” comes from.

While we started to lose this understanding as multiple denominations began to appear, I think it’s time to re-appropriate it. Imagine what would happen if every church started to see their suburb as their responsibility rather than their congregation. Sure there are lots of places where there would be more than one church in a region taking responsibility for the people in that area, but people receiving too much love will never be a problem.

In the book The Art of Neighboring  Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak tell a story that I have relayed a number of times to illustrate the real work we have ahead of us as local churches:

In 2009 I (Dave) gathered a group of twenty lead pastors in the Denver area so we could think, dream, and pray about how our churches might join forces to serve our community.

We invited our local mayor, Bob Frie, to join us, and we asked him a simple question: How can we as churches best work together to serve our city?

The ensuing discussion revealed a laundry list of social problems similar to what many cities face: at-risk kids, areas with dilapidated housing, child hunger, drug and alcohol abuse, loneliness, elderly shut-ins with no one to look in on them. The list went on and on.

Then the mayor said something that inspired our joint-church movement: “The majority of the issues that our community is facing would be eliminated or drastically reduced if we could just figure out a way to become a community of great neighbors.”

Later he explained that often when people identify a problem, they come to civic officials and say something like, “This is becoming a serious issue, and you should start a program to address it.” Frie shared candidly with us that, in his opinion, government programs aren’t always the most effective way to address social issues. He went on to say that relationships are more effective than programs because they are organic and ongoing.

The idea is that when neighbors are in relationship with one another, the elderly shut-in gets cared for by the person next door, the at-risk kid gets mentored by a dad who lives on the block, and so on.

After the mayor left the meeting that day, our group of pastors was left to reflect on what he had shared. I (Jay) can remember sitting there, and before I could think, I just blurted out, “Am I the only one here who is a little bit embarrassed? I mean, here we were asking the mayor how we can best serve the city, and he basically tells us that it would be great if we could just get our people to obey the second half of the Great Commandment.”

In a word, the mayor invited a roomful of pastors to get their people to actually obey Jesus.

From “The Art of Neighboring” page 18.

What does it mean to love our neighbours? It means, as the book indicates, that we need to let go of our neat and tidy programs and encourage the complexity and messiness of relationship instead.   

I highly recommend taking the time to read this paper by Community Development pioneer John McKnight which spells out the difference between organisations and associations. 

There is a strong case to suggest that the church has wrongly adopted an institutional/organisational framework rather than understanding itself as an association. As McKnight points out, organisations are very good at producing products but only associations can care.

My intent was to write about each of the different relationships a person can have with their local church, however just tackling the first one has taken so long that I will spread this reflection out over a few weeks.

I believe thinking at these seven levels gives us some new ways to describe the kind of church we need to be as we head into the future.