To Love Your Neighbor, You Must Know Your Neighbor

I found a great article over at the Gospel Coalition about befriending and spending time with non-Christians. Here is an excerpt:  

Having recently moved into an anonymous apartment complex so common around the country, my wife and I decided to invite all the people in our building over for Sunday lunch. They didn’t know each other, we didn’t know them, and we had no idea how it would be received. But most of them came. In fact, they stayed for four hours. And before long we were making up a list of our birthdays to exchange with one another, at their suggestion.



When we moved into the complex, we thought a lot about “how hard it is to meet your neighbors.” And when we discussed the idea of a get-together with the few people we knew in our building, they also commented that it is “tough to have community in the suburbs.” But we were all wrong. It is not difficult to get to know your neighbors—it is simply not something most of us value.


The result is a culture of seclusion, and that culture strains our society in a surprising number of ways. Christians stand a better chance of changing the social landscape than anyone else. In fact, this societal problem presents us with the opportunity to confront that most elusive of all evangelical goals: to serve Christ and our neighbors in the surrounding culture at the same time.

When I read the headline I said to myself, "Duh!" The concept seems so obvious but how many of us really do what is required to get to know our neighbors - spend time with them?  We've tried to do this wherever we've lived and over the years have hosted all sorts of people.

Click on the link to read more of this encouraging article:  To Love Your Neighbor, You Must Know Your Neighbor – The Gospel Coalition Blog