Increasing numbers of North Americans are neighbour-less. They are, in reality, little more than residents occupying a house in an anonymous place. They often admit that they really donʼt know the people who live around them – except to say hello. It is a regretful admission, but in their view, of no more consequence than failing to wash the windows of their house. (J McKnight)

I hope you have the time of your life!

The practice of neighbourliness

Everyone is welcome.

Everyone is valued.

Everyone is cared for.

Salt of the neighbourhood

Let me tell you why you are here. You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You've lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage. (Jesus of Nazareth)

Loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength & loving your neighbour as yourself...

.... is an invitation to a radical choice for life!

How are you going to become more visible in your neighbourhood?

You can have a Block Party almost anywhere...

Just do it!

The Kingdom of God is growing...

Let it grow.

Love God & love your neighbour.

When you engage your neighbourhood ...

... others will follow.

Make a difference

 ... in someone else's life today.

Let your life speak ...

... and make space for others to tell their story.

Listen with your ears, eyes and heart.

Let the little things go.
Treat others with kindness and appreciation.
Offer hospitality.

Help create a church in your neighbourhood...

Like a symphony, God's love creates great music in the midst of life.

Invite others to come & play.

Are you working on an 'ode to joy' in your neighbourhood?

Bread for myself is a material question.

Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one. (N Berdyaev)

Matthew 28:19

Go out & train everyone you meet, in your neighbourhood & beyond, in this Way of Life.

Neighbourhood Life

You were made for this!

Bring joy to your neighbourhood.

We might define true community as that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. (P Palmer)

Be careful about desiring community....

True community exists when the person you dislike the most dies or moves away & someone worse takes his place. (Quaker proverb)

Matthew 5
"You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.

"In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you."

Neighbourhood life will be troubling for some.

We don't like to put hands and feet on love. When love is a theory, it s safe, it s free of risk. But love in the brain changes nothing. God believes that love is too beautiful a concept to keep locked up behind a forehead like a prisoner. God usually chooses ordinary people like us to get things done. (B Goff)

Have you realized...

...the importance in God’s economy of simply being with people?

Neighbourhood Shalom

We participate when we are an unanxious presence in an anxious situation.

Neighbourhood friends

All aspects of our lives are deeply affected by the presence or absence of real friendships.

Hospitality multiplies...

Most of us now live in subdivisions, a mathematical term, rather than neighbourhoods, a term that suggests personal connection. (E Newman)

Wondering where to begin?

Just help people talk to each other. People who are different from each other.

On pilgrimages.

Though pilgrimages are good for the spirit, if you can't find Jesus in your hometown (or neighbourhood!), you probably aren't going to find him in Jerusalem. (R Rohr)

Open up to each other.

It takes a neighbourhood to hold the pain of one of its own - not only does it lighten the burden of painful experiences that we face, but it also helps people to seek significance together, not answers - but meaning in life.

2 Corinthians 1
All praise to the God and Father of our Master, Jesus the Messiah! Father of all mercy! God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. We have plenty of hard times that come from following the Messiah, but no more so than the good times of his healing comfort—we get a full measure of that, too.

Enough is enough...

Are you part of the soul of your community?

In the neighbourhood...

In 1998 I experienced a sort of bone-rattling epiphany about the nature of community at an end-of-the-year sport's banquet at my then ten-year-old son's Catholic elementary school.  (I should note here that I was raised a Baptist in suburban southern California, but am an adult convert to Catholicism and now live in Chicago.)

It was a classic scene: a school gymnasium filled with perhaps 500 people, mostly white European ethnics and different varieties of Hispanics, of all ages (kids, parents, teachers, a few grandparents); a typical greasy-chicken-and-pasta buffet supper; a bar (at a school function!) discreetly located in a small room just off the main gymnasium floor, from which adults could get our draft beer to take back to drink at tables full of kids; a low buzz of conversation throughout the evening punctuated by rounds of applause as boys and girls from grades 4-8 would come up to receive recognition for their participation in basketball and/or volleyball; two of the parish priests milling around the room and having a good time; my son and I and some good friends (his and mine) sharing a table.

At some point, looking around the room, I realized that I knew about sixty of these people well, and another couple hundred by face or by name either from the school, or from the parish church, or from the neighborhood, or from the park district where I'd coached baseball the previous five years, or from various professional associations; and that there were others present who I didn't know well that perhaps my son did.

And it hit me, with a startling existential immediacy, that this is what it means to live in a good community: a fair amount of chaos naturally proper to free beings, but also a network of relationships from intimate to casual to anonymous, grounded in a variety of common activities and/or beliefs as well as (and not least) place. (Phil Bess)