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Who is my neighbor?
When a man asked Jesus this question in Luke 10:29, Jesus responded with the parable of the good Samaritan. It’s a familiar story. In clarifying that our neighbor is anyone in need that we encounter, Jesus demonstrated how we’re to mirror God’s mercy. We have the privilege of meeting our neighbors’ needs with the hope of the Gospel, modeling to our kids that God’s heart for all people begins where we live. If we desire our children to grow into Christians who care about the lost, a powerful place to begin is by teaching them to love our neighbors.
Be Present in Your Neighborhood
When our growing family lived on Pleasant Street in Utica, New York, our closest neighbor was a middle-aged gay man. Our conversations across the driveway touched on daily life topics while we searched for some commonality on which to build a relationship. We didn’t come up with much. What we lacked in common ground, we made up for by asking about his life and later inviting him into the warmth of our home and shared meals. This built a relationship. Presence, it turns out, matters. Pastor Tim Keller wrote, “It is only through his (God) being fully present with us that we could be saved by grace. In the same way, we must learn to be fully present in community with our neighbors.” We live in a time when we can enter our parked car in our garage, leave for work or school, later come home to that same garage, and go months or even years without encountering our neighbors. Even if our homes don’t have garages, we can similarly isolate ourselves within Christian community and miss every opportunity to know our neighbors with the kind of intention that the Gospel demands.
My friends Chris and Julia are a great example of this kind of intentionality. Presented with their own bubble-life reality, Chris and Julia looked at their three kids and realized they needed to make some changes. They’d been hearing about God’s missional heart in a Sunday school class and began talking about how they could best share this growing understanding with their children. They wisely realized they could not tell their children to value something they did not model valuing themselves. Julia began noting what time she saw neighbors out walking in the morning and evening. After a few days, she began taking her kids for evening walks and was surprised at how quickly she began meeting the neighbors she had lived next to for more than a year.
Meanwhile, in his job as a worship leader, Chris didn’t often encounter people during his workdays who didn’t know Jesus, so after talking with Julia, he joined a community pickleball club. Suddenly, with minimal effort, Chris and Julia began forming friendships with a wide variety of people, many of whom had little meaningful exposure to the Gospel. Opportunities to pray for someone’s sick spouse, bring a meal to a neighbor, talk with them in the street or invite a single mom’s kids over to play to give her a break began to abound. Chris and Julia didn’t need to make dramatic changes; they simply cast their net into different waters by changing a few weekly rhythms.
Let Your Children See You Be Intentional
My friend Carrie began chatting with the cashier at the Aldi in her small town, building rapport with each visit. Soon, they knew about each other’s children and a little about each other’s lives. So much was shared in these weekly encounters that the cashier began asking Carrie about church and baptism. Carrie was able to invite her into her home for a Bible study. “Our pastor says that if you have no one in your life that you’re discipling, you need to pray that God sends you someone, then look for that person,” Carrie told me. Her children had a front-row seat to these conversations as their mom demonstrated how to reach out to their neighbors.
Through their intentionality, Carrie, Julia and Chris are demonstrating to their children that the Gospel is not stagnant but dynamic. This cultivation of faith in the home is the beginning of missions. Each year, tens of thousands of young people attend missions conferences in the United States, learning more about the world beyond their front door that needs Jesus. While this is encouraging and the conferences serve a need, how much more effective might it be to cast this vision to kids at a very young age?
The biblical foundation for this is clear. After God told His people in Deuteronomy 6 to follow His commands — the greatest being to love God with all our hearts, soul and might — he followed with a charge for parents: to teach these things diligently to our children (v. 7). In Matthew 22:37-39, Jesus expounds on Deuteronomy 6: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
We love Christ well by obeying His command to love our neighbors well. We engage our kids in lifelong discipleship by walking this out with them while they are still in our homes.
Let Your Children See You Uncomfortable for the Sake of the Gospel
My friend Amanda met a family in her community who had immigrated from Syria. As this family struggled with employment, language and learning their new culture, Amanda became their lifeline. A self-proclaimed introvert, she didn’t stop there. When she met a second family in need, she got her church involved. Now, on Thursday nights, church volunteers trained in ESL teach English and share the hope of the Gospel with more than 30 of their neighbors from more than a dozen nations.
When Amanda realized their children were failing in school because there was no one at home who could help them with homework, she organized volunteers as homework helpers while parents attended the ESL classes. Amanda’s children have witnessed God mobilize her beyond her natural comfort and capabilities for His glory. Rarely does Christ call us to do what is comfortable. He always calls us to do what needs to be done through the empowering of His Spirit.
Let Your Children Engage in Prayer with You
Friday nights are usually our family’s in-depth prayer night. We pull out a giant sheet of white paper where we have written out many requests as a family and we pray. With seven kids at home, ages 5 to 19, there are wiggles and giggles and the most sincere, beautiful prayers rolling off their lips. I often think, I wish I had thought to pray that! We live on a small cul-de-sac, and we pray for our neighbors by name. I love that our kids have reference points in their heads about each of them — the neighbor who doesn’t mind when the ball goes into his yard but enjoys teasing them about it; the neighbor who is elderly and mostly immobile but will roll to her driveway just to say hi to the kids and ask how the fish have been biting at the dock; and the one we worry about because they are in a hard place mentally. Prayer anchors our thoughts for our neighbors in something more than good intentions. It reminds us, and our children, that we depend on God to do what we cannot.
Fred Rogers, perhaps one of the most widely known neighbors, knew the impact of prayer on Gospel witness to those around us. He began his day in prayer and continued prayer into his work: “When I walk in that studio door each day, I say, ‘Dear God, let some word that is heard be yours.’” We can pray simple prayers like this with our kids as we raise them with missional hearts. Our mission field does not magically appear when we cross cultures or time zones. The Gospel is for the neighbor next door, and our children are watching how we carry it there.
