Meeting God in Your Neighborhood

God is at work in my neighborhood.

I haven’t yet put my finger on the where or the how. Regardless, I’m convinced.

Not long ago I attended a monthly gathering of people in my community concerned about sustainability issues, largely a non-religious audience. The speaker that month was sharing about advances in resiliency for homebuilding. I live in northeastern Oklahoma where tornados are an annual springtime threat.

The question was asked, “If I’m on a budget, what’s the first thing I can do to my home to start?”

“That’s the wrong question,” the speaker answered. “Because the first thing you need to do is to know your neighbors.”

Well, that sounds a little bit like Jesus, I thought to myself.

He went on to explain, in a disaster, you want to know who lives on your block, which household has a generator, which household has small children or a single elderly person that might need assistance.

Love your neighbor.

It’s the very center of the books of Moses. When Jesus gets quizzed about the greatest commandment, it’s his go-to answer

What if we’re meant to take this literally? What if our worship as Christians involves tending to, paying attention to, loving our neighbors in our neighborhoods seven days a week?

Here’s what we can’t do: We can’t objectify our neighborhoods. It’s a living organism of people, made in the image of the Almighty, a collective of which you are a part.

At a civic meeting discussing community resiliency, the biggest takeaway is know your neighbors. For the church, who’s charge is to love neighbor, shouldn’t we be thinking along the same lines?

It’s become trendy in some Christian circles to talk about “exegeting your neighborhood.” I can understand the sentiment it comes from–taking a principle of biblical interpretation and using it understand a social construct of neighborhood. But I think it’s misguided.

Exegesis, a methodology for bible study that certainly has its place, is a terrible thing to do it people. It’s driven by mastery and control. It dissects piece-by-piece in the hopes that in understanding the pieces you can make sense of the whole. I don’t want anybody doing that to me or my family or the community. I want to be loved by my neighbors, to be seen, to be noticed, to be taken care of.

Perhaps instead there is an alternative for humbly learning how to love neighbors and tend to God’s presence among them. I’m considering the ancient practice of lectio divina.

Lectio divina means “divine reading” and is a way of approaching Scripture in a posture of patiently listening in order to encounter God. In its classic form, lectio involves a sequence of four stages: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. Spiritual author Robert Mulholland helpfully offers two additional stages: silencio and incarnatio.

Silencio: Get quiet

We begin in preparation to engage the text, or in this case, the neighborhood. We acknowledge and relinquish our agendas, whether that’s planting a church, starting a missional community, or even, hosting a dinner.

We enter a place of an inner shift from control to receptivity, from information to formation, and from observation to obedience. We open ourselves to be shaped by God rather than our preconceived expectations, hopes, and dreams.

Sit on the front porch. Breathe. Wait. Eyes wide open.

Lectio: Be attentive

The first part of lectio divina involves reading. Literally, what do we see? We take in the actual words on the page. In the neighborhood, we “read” the street. We take in the houses, the cars, the yards, the dogs, the neighbors, the interactions.

In lectio, we notice. We take in everything. We take in the sights. We take in the smells. We take in the sounds. We engage all our senses.

In their book The Art of Neighboring, Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak introduce the idea of drawing on a piece of paper a tic-tac-toe board. Go ahead and grab a piece of paper and do it.

The middle square is your house. The eight surrounding squares represent the eight houses that encircle your house, across the street, next door, behind you (assuming you live in a grid-shaped neighborhood). Now write the names of everybody who lives in the homes around you. These are your neighbors. You may even have to walk outside, cross the street, introduce yourself, and ask their name.

Meditatio: Be mindful

The next step in lectio is meditatio, or meditation. We begin to ask, what does all this mean? Where lectio involves our eyes and ears, meditatio involves our minds. Data collection can be fascinating, but if it doesn’t lead to discerning a meaningful and true narrative and engagement with actual people, it’s a waste of time.

On our tic-tac-toe square, what we want to know once we’ve learned our neighbors’ names, we want to learn something about them deeper than just a simple observation from a distance. What can we learn from a casual, safe conversation? Maybe they have two kids in college. Maybe they just moved here from Idaho. Maybe they’ve lived in this home for 30 years. Maybe they play soccer on the weekend. Maybe they’re looking out for God in the neighborhood, too.

Oratio: Be helpful

Once we begin to discern some meaning, we move to oratio, or response. The whole point here is loving cooperation with God. Until we’re moved to action, this has all been a selfish, mental exercise. We make ourselves open, even vulnerable sometimes, to do something we may not want to do. We humbly say yes when God invites us out of our comfort zone.

In oratio we dialogue with God about all we’ve learned, and we listen for how God might invite us to respond. In lectio divina, a common question is, what rises? In other words, what stands out to you? In all you’ve experienced, what’s tugging at your attention? Sometimes we find our first impressions were wrong. Sometimes we find that the most helpful thing is to do nothing or say nothing, to be simply present (think of Job’s friends).

When we know the names of our neighbors and some details about their lives, then we begin to go deeper. What do they hope for? What challenges them? What brings anxiety?

As a side note, these are not conversations the first time you meet. It might take months, even years, to come to this place of being present with one another and with God. But once we do, that’s when we begin to understand just what exactly “good news” looks like in this place.

And we can proclaim peace in the anxious places. We can proclaim reconciliation in the fractured places. We can proclaim light in darkness.

Contemplatio: Be still

In contemplatio, or rest, we surrender ourselves to God. We place ourselves and our agendas before God. We watch for what God will do. We are content to watch what the Holy Spirit will do around us. We sit open-handed. Sometimes this is the hardest part.

Incarnatio: Be transformed

We end where we began. We come full circle, back to the front porch, in quiet trust. The whole point of this exercise has been to encounter God in our neighborhood. There is no character in the Bible who walked away from an encounter with God unchanged—Moses at the burning bush, Isaiah in the temple, Peter in his fishing boat.

Walking out our front doors into the mission fields of our communities costs something of us. We don’t return the same. When Jesus promises, “I am making all things new,” “all things” includes me, too. And loving my neighbors well is one of the means by which God is transforming me.

As the people of God, we love our neighbors. It’s just what we do. That word “love,” as it appears in Leviticus, is a thick and heavy word. It’s an action word, not an emotion word. It means pay attention to, tend to, be present with, take care of. No wonder I fumble so badly at loving my neighbors when the siren call of Netflix lulls me to my personal bubble as I pull into my garage and close the door each evening.

The opening of words of the Bible capture my imagination:

The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters (Genesis 1:2).

My regular prayer as I walk the streets, go for a run, or take my kids to the park: Lord, give me eyes to see and ears to hear your Spirit as it hovers over the neighborhood.

God is at work in our neighborhoods.

The ideas here have been inspired by conversations with Alan Roxburgh. His books Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time and Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood spark my imagination. Also check out The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon.