thought exercise on Caring for your Neighbors

Whether we’re protecting the unborn, supporting fair prison sentences, or making sure the elderly are taken care of, politics provides a forum for advocating for our neighbor’s well-being and pursuing...

When we think about our health and safety, we tend to think first and foremost about our bodies. We may also consider our mental health. But have you ever considered how your relational health impacts...

In 2017 Rebekah Morris was teaching English and journalism at Cross Keys High School, a public high school in Atlanta. Noticing that her students had really important, insightful things to say about t...

Tom and Angela had lived in their neighborhood for about twelve years without really getting to know many people. They lived in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses and had limited communication and interact...

In the intro sequence of the beloved children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , the first interior shot does not show the host. Instead, in the beat before Fred Rogers appears on the screen si...

If you have ever watched the President of the United States deliver the State of the Union Address in recent years, you know that at some point in his speech, he will point to the balcony and introduc...

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command he said: Lo...

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 may...

There is a paradigm shift going on in the realm of forestry. For years there had been a consensus among ecologists that all trees were independent operators, each tree an island unto itself, the fores...

Even if people reject the gospel, we still must love them. A good example of this was reported by Ralph Neighbour, pastor of Houston’s West Memorial Baptist Church (in Death And The Caring Community ...

Isaiah 58 tells us that the Lord wants us to share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our homes, share our clothing with those who need some and not hide ourselves from the rest o...

Greg and some of his friends from church were zealous to pursue the common good of their community, Ventura, California. Instead of coming up with their own ideas of how to do this, they started by li...

Leonard Sweet shares an interesting story in the introduction to Neil Cole’s book, Organic Church , about a parish pastor who lived in a Scottish village near Edinburgh called Davidson’s Mains. ...

The advantage that cities and traditional neighborhoods have over sprawling suburbs with respect to interdependence is that they allow people of a greater variety of ages to participate meaningfully i...

Many years ago, I was on my way home from work and a friend came to mind. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him for a few days, and I knew he had been having a tough time. (This was before th...

Scripture calls us to offer a radical welcome to strangers, but we are not able to give what we do not have. Before we can love our neighbor, we must love and care for ourselves so we can have somethi...

As neighbors were texting my turned-off phone about danger at Hank’s house, I was sitting at my desk, praying for Hank. I was praying for Hank’s salvation. And then I noticed it: burly men ducking aro...

I recently met with Heather, a woman who attends my church in New York City. After graduating from Harvard Law School she landed a lucrative job with a major law firm in Manhattan. It was a dream come...

On the fifteenth of each month, Alicia has thirty dollars withdrawn from her checking account to sponsor Belyse, a beautiful, brown-eyed girl from Kenya, who then gets school and a hot meal each day. ...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

In this beautiful illustration from Tom Long’s well-known preaching guide, The Witness of Preaching , a pastor shares a true story of what valuing human life can look like when God’s Kingdom takes ro...

As a stranger walked down a quiet residential street, he noticed a man struggling with a washing machine at the doorway of his house. The homeowner was clearly having a hard time, so the passerby, wan...

There’s a story (probably apocryphal) about a small dog that had been hit by a car and left injured by the side of the road. A passing nurse noticed the wounded animal, saw it was still alive, and sto...

A friend of mine once remarked that how we care for the land often mirrors how we care for those dependent on it, especially women and children. Is our attitude one of entitlement and privilege? Do we...

In his extremely helpful book, The Economics of Neighborly Love , Tom Nelson argues that the church has an important part to play in helping Christians understand the value and place of economics i...

Tracy Autler’s life changed in a very unexpected way on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. Tracy was a single mother, living in an apartment in a rough neighborhood, she was doing her best to raise a three-year ...

Kevin Blue has spent much of his ministry career serving the poor in inner-city Los Angeles. In this excerpt he describes working with a war vet named Clarence: Richard, Tim, Caroline and Ellen move...

There has been a paradigm shift going on in neighborhoods in the United States since the end of WWII. For decades before the 1940s, neighborhoods were places where people were known and were active. W...

When we moved up here to this neck of the woods and settled in on our farm, there was an old farmer who lived to the west of us and his older brother who lived to the east, and this is what we were to...