Dave Runyon - Neighboring

Luke 10, 25 through 29.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said to him, What is written in the law?

How do you read it?

And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

And he said to him, You have answered correctly.

Do this and you will live.

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thank you.

Thanks, John.

It's always strange to encounter these people that you've met at different points in your life and like see that they're real life grown-ups.

And so I had the privilege of walking with John back during his formative years and also Whitney Rhimes and I don't know, maybe a few others in this room.

After I was teaching, I kind of got sucked through the back door into ministry.

And I ended up pastoring at two great churches in the Denver metro area.

And I loved my time working at both of those churches, but a series of crises happened to me that changed the trajectory of the life of my life and how I spend most of my time.

One of which is that I got obsessed with this one piece of scripture, and it's found in John 17.

I still remember like reading through it.

I was working as a full-time pastor.

I'm reading through John 17, and it's this beautiful prayer of Jesus, right before he's it's the last recorded prayer that we have of him, right before he's arrested.

And in this prayer, he prays for himself and for what he's getting ready to go through.

He prays for the disciples, and then he prays for all of us.

He prays for every believer alive at that time and every believer to come.

And so in this crucial moment of his life, where he's standing at this crossroads, he prays one thing for us.

Anybody know what it is?

What he prays for in that moment?

There you go.

Somebody back there.

Yes, gold star back there in the corner.

That usually doesn't happen for the back of the bus people.

Um he prays that we would be one.

He prays for unity of all the things that he could pray for in that moment.

He prays for unity among the people that already follow him.

And he doesn't just pray for unity for the sake of unity, he prays for unity, he says, because when when there's unity among his people, people that don't know God will be sucked towards him.

There's some beautiful, mystical, sacred way they they lean towards God.

And I sat there as a pastor reading that and thinking to myself, what if this is true?

What if one of the best things that we can do to help people who don't know God come to know him is simply build up the unity in the body.

And I just got, I like I would go to bed at night thinking about that.

I would wake up thinking about it.

I started to like have lunches with other faith leaders around town and sort of share this with them.

And what I learned is that there was a lot of other people who had this in their heart as well.

And so some of my friends and I, the other pastors in my part of the city, this was up in Arvada, started to gather together and we started to dream and to pray and to think about what it would be like if churches in a very specific part of the city started to act like we were on the same team.

Like, what would it be like if we could mobilize the body and we started to think about ways that we could serve in our city to serve people in need?

And we had a bad moment as a bunch of pastors.

We realized we didn't know our city as well as we should have, which that's an indictment on you, by the way, if you're a pastor.

So that was we were sitting there going, oh no, we can't even answer this question.

Like if you're gonna mobilize all the people in our community towards one thing, what's the smartest thing that we could go after?

And because we didn't know the answer to that question, we just started to reach out to the people that God had put in authority in our community.

And so we would have these little gatherings and we bring in the police chief or the city manager, and about nine years ago, I was sitting in the room with our mayor and 20-something pastors and priests from our community.

And we would always ask these two questions in this in these little gatherings.

We'd say, Hey, what's your dream for our city?

And then we would say, What if you could wave a magic wand and change something, what would you change?

And whenever we asked that second question, we get out like our little pen and paper, and we're like, all right, we're gonna find out our thing that like we're supposed to go after.

And so we asked our mayor, his name's Bob, and we said, Hey, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you change in our city?

And he had come prepared, so he had like this list of things.

You have to to get leaders like that to come to a meeting with a bunch of like weird pastors, you have to tell them what you're gonna do to them in the room.

And so we had told him, like, these are the two questions we're gonna ask.

So he came prepared and he pulls out this little list and he just starts reading it down, and he's like, I want to live in a city where there's no elderly shut-ins, where there's no at-risk kids, where there's no single moms living below the poverty line, where there's no financial debt.

And there was like 11 things on there.

And most of them were really good.

There's a couple that were weird.

He's like, We need a better newspaper.

And we're like, uh, we cannot help you with that.

Um you're that's the you're in the wrong room.

But most of them were really, really good.

And so we're just taking notes.

And then he takes this piece of paper, he puts it in his back pocket, and then very much in passing, he just says, You know, if you guys wanted to have the biggest impact in our city, you should start a neighboring movement.

And then he was just gonna go on and move on to something else.

We're like, no, no, go back to that.

He's like, Yeah, what we're learning is that the closer that people know each other in their apartments on their blocks, the less weight there is on all the programs that we're trying to provide for people in need.

That we can start and raise the money for another program for elderly shut-ins, or that person who's growing older and more isolated could actually be known by the people who live right around them.

And then he said this beautiful line.

He said, What we're learning at the city is that relationships always trump programs.

Yeah, wow, is right.

And we're all now I want you to imagine, imagine, like you're me or that group, that imagine like you make your living by helping people orient their lives around this.

Okay?

Now imagine what it feels like when God uses your mayor to tell you that the smartest thing you could do in your city is the Bible.

Like when Jesus boils the entire text down to one thing, he says, Love God with that, we just read it, love God with everything you have, heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbors yourself.

And we're sitting there listening to our mayor say, Hey, like I've got this thought of what you guys could do with all those people in all of your churches.

It's the thing that Jesus said to do.

You should actually like start a neighboring movie.

Like, what if they actually like cared for the people who lived right around them?

And it was this like sacred, painful moment to sit there in that room because we were all going, oh, this is this is convicting.

And I'll never forget, I'm driving home back into my little cul-de-sac that I still live in today.

I'm driving back home after all this, and there's like a hundred thoughts going through my head.

The first thought, the one that I can remember two of them right now.

The first thought I had was Jesus is smart.

You think as a pastor, you'd know that.

Um, but I it just dawned on me.

I'm like, the like the genius, I'm like, he gets asked to boil the entire text onto one thing.

Is it possible that what Jesus said, how he responds, is it possible that he's given us a very simple strategic plan that if every believer did it, it would actually change the world?

So that was my first thought.

My second thought was this.

I I realized I wasn't doing it.

I'm driving back in.

I'm thinking about all the different things I'm up to, and I'm having this moment where I realize I'm putting almost zero intentionality into relationships with my actual neighbors.

And I was doing a lot of good stuff at that time.

As a pastor, I was trying to help people figure out life with their kids and life and their marriages.

I was serving on three different boards.

I'd filled up my life with a lot of decent things that I had chosen to do, but somehow one of them wasn't actually taking seriously or literally this idea of loving your neighbor.

And so I went in, my wife Lauren was home, and I told her about the meeting.

My wife has been ahead of me on like most things in life, and including this idea of like neighboring.

And so I told her what had happened, and she said, What are you gonna do about it?

And I didn't want to have a lot of accountability, and so I told her, I said, I'm gonna spend more time in the front yard.

And I just added on like for a year.

And I want to tell you that one little act, my one my one-year experiment, I'm now almost nine years in, and it has totally screwed up my life, and and I don't want to go back.

And it's been it's been really hard and messy and powerful and significant.

And I have a world of friends that are really, really different than me.

And God keeps using them to like polish off my rough edges and the rough edges of my kids and my wife, and then he uses us to pour into them.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about that journey at the end.

Let me tell you really quickly what happened to my pastor, buddies, and I.

So we have this moment with the mayor, we pray after he leaves.

We say, Hey, let's come back in two months.

Let's like pray about what we just heard.

Let's come back in two months.

So we come back two months later, and we invited in our assistant city manager, her name's Vicky.

And Vicki, I had been going around with that magic wand question to people in our city for a couple of years, and everybody would say, go talk to Vicki, go talk to Vicki.

And so the assistant city manager in our city is like the bridge between what actually happens in real life and then all like the bureaucracy of like city government.

And so she is in a very strategic position.

And I would go and ask Vicky that question over and over again, and she would always say the same thing.

She would go, hey Dave, next time it snows, why don't you get all those people and all those churches to shovel their neighbor's driveway?

And this is before the mayor thing.

When she would tell me that, I would just think, no.

Like I wanted something, I had envisioned like this like headline about like the church of Arvada eradicates homelessness in the entire metro area, or something like I could see like a headline.

I didn't shoveling your neighbor's driveway wasn't sexy enough for me.

And so, but when the mayor starts to say it, I start to realize, oh my goodness, Vicki's been trying to tell me this.

So we bring Vicki into this room with this group of pastors, she comes in and she's just talking about why literal neighboring matters.

The fact that like people live longer when they know their actual neighbors, that the crime rates are 80% less in neighborhoods where people know the first names of their neighbors.

That when there's a crisis, your neighbor's almost always your first responder because the systems are overwhelmed.

All this like really good pragmatic stuff.

And we're just sitting there the whole time going, and Jesus said we should do this.

Like in the back of our mind.

And at the very end, she like cements that we're gonna do something because there's a pastor who's in the room and we're doing this little QA thing.

And she didn't mean this in a mean way, but she's answering the pastor's question.

She just said, Hey, like, just so you know, from where we sit at the city level, we can't see a difference in the way Christians and non-Christians treat their actual neighbors.

And when she said it, it felt so bad to hear somebody say it.

We started to argue with her about her perception.

And then we stopped and we we realized she's right, that there isn't a drastic, noticeable difference in the way Christians and non-Christians treat their literal neighbors.

It's not a big enough difference where the people who are in authority in our cities can see it.

And that should mess us up.

Like that messed me up.

Like that should that should be a problem.

That should be something we should like try to like if Jesus says if you only do one thing, love God with everything you have, love your neighbors yourself, and yet the people who are in authority, who got us placed in positions serving our cities, can't see a noticeable difference in the way Christians and non-Christians engage with their actual neighbors.

Like, how how do we make sense of that?

How did we drift into a place where that's actually true?

And I started to think about that, and I started to get really irritated.

Um, this probably has not happened to you at all.

You've never seen anything on the news and you start to get mad.

No, that has happened recently.

Um, so I I started like these feelings of getting irritated, and then I changed the question that I was asking, and uh, my feelings started to change.

I started to ask this question I wonder, I wonder how you end up as a pastor who's not engaged in his own neighborhood.

And as I started asking that question, I went from being like irritated and mad to convicted and reflective.

And I started to read through parts of the Bible that I had taught multiple sermons on that I had read hundreds of times, and they just sort of take on this new light.

So one of them is what our reading was today.

I just want to walk through with it through with it uh through it with you really quickly.

Um and I just ask you to kind of maybe look at this with new lenses.

Sometimes I think we get inoculated to the most important and the most popular teachings of Jesus.

We get around them so much.

Dallas Wood says that familiarity can breed unfamiliarity, and for me, that's what had happened with this.

That's how I ended up as a pastor who wasn't engaged in his own neighborhood.

Again, the text says this.

On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.

Teacher asked, What must I do to inherit eternal life?

What is written in the law?

He replied, How do you read it?

This happens a couple of times throughout the text.

Somebody comes to Jesus with a question.

Jesus knows that's not what's really happening here.

And so he flips it on the person and he says, Why don't you tell me the answer?

And this guy gives the perfect textbook answer.

He says, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

You have answered correctly, Jesus replied, Do this and you will live.

Do this and you will live.

Think about just how powerful that.

Do this and you will really live.

But this next part is what came screaming off the page at me.

After I had gone through all this stuff with the mayor, as I was listening to Vicky, I'm reading this shortly after, and this one little line just came screaming off the page at me.

It says, But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

This guy goes, gives a perfect answer to his question, which is the most important question.

And then Jesus looks at him and says, That's exactly right.

Just do that.

And his first thought is, how do I get out of this?

Where is the loophole?

Let me repeat.

But he wanted to justify himself.

So he asks Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

And how he does it as fast.

Jesus, neighbor, like what does that really mean?

His first thought is, I wonder if I can define that word neighbor so that it most easily fits into what I'm already up to.

By the way, this is if you want to know how to be a pastor who's not engaged in his own neighborhood, just do exactly what this just define that word neighbor so that it most easily fits into what you're already up to.

Do you want to know how we can become a group of people who aren't distinguished by the way we treat our actual neighbor?

Like our city leaders can't tell a difference between the way Christians and non-Christians treat that.

All you have to do is just do what this guy does.

Just play the neighbor.

What does that really mean, game?

And then you can end up living in a way in which you just turn this idea of loving your neighbor into a metaphor.

So what happened to me is I ended up with a really powerful metaphoric love for my metaphoric neighbor.

And metaphorically, I was killing it.

And in real life, I am sleeping 50 feet away from people, and I don't even know their names.

And I'm just gonna tell you, if you're willing, if you're if you're willing to just kind of draw a circle around the place that God has put you and work out from there, you'll be shocked at what happens.

So what happens in this story is Jesus looks at this guy and goes, Oh, we're gonna play the Who's My Neighbor game, and he just blows up the definition of neighbor on this guy.

Now, it's important to note, he's assuming that the guy is loving the people of his same culture and custom, and so he's gonna he's gonna expand the idea of loving your neighbor.

And he tells the story of the Good Samaritan.

And we all know the story of the Good Samaritan, the story of the Good Samaritan.

The big idea is that everybody is our neighbor, right?

Like everyone is our neighbor.

That's actually not the big idea of the story of the Good Samaritan.

That's for most of my life, even as a pastor, I thought the big idea of the story of the Good Samaritan was everybody is my neighbor, even the wounded terrorist.

What the story of the Good Samaritan says is when you care for the person in front of you, no matter who it is, you're loving your neighbor.

And there's a big difference between when you care for the person in front of you, you're loving your neighbor, and everybody's my neighbor.

When everybody's your neighbor, often nobody is, right?

We make it all nice, vague, there's no real bullseye.

And we take this powerful teaching of Jesus and we make it so big and so vague that it loses its potency.

What Jesus does there to this guy, he gives him, he's giving him the AP graduate level version of neighboring.

And I would suggest this, and what I found in my own life is this is that I I didn't need AP neighboring nine years ago.

What I needed was to go back to kindergarten.

Because and I would argue this like where we are as a group of Christians and how we're engaging with the people who live right around us, maybe we don't need AP neighboring right now.

Maybe, just maybe, what if we could go back and like take the main thing that Jesus said and actually take it seriously and literally?

Like, actually put like real people's faces and stories to it, and to do that with the people that he's placed around us and then to work out from there.

And what I've learned in my own life is that if you'll do this, the kingdom starts to break out on the other side.

And so my friends and I, my like these pastors, we started to do this in our own lives.

Very few of us were taking the idea of loving your neighbor literally, and we started to do that, and then we started to meet and have coffee and to share stories.

And one of my friends um came up with this like really simple exercise that had a huge impact in the churches that we were leading in.

And I'm gonna do this little thing with you here today, okay?

So, like this um this little thing is like the secret to what happened in my life and in the lives of a lot of my friends.

It was this little simple exercise, just like this is a little tic-tac-toe board.

I'm gonna give you one of these on the way out today.

Okay, so I just want you to imagine right now, this and if you have a pen or a pencil, it's great.

You can just draw a tic-tac-toe board in front of you.

If you don't, that's fine.

I want you to just kind of imagine the tic-tac-toe board.

Now imagine you walk outside your front door of your house, and I just want you to think about the eight closest neighbors to you.

Okay, it doesn't it they probably won't look like a tic-tac-toe board.

Just think about I don't care if you live in a condo, I don't care if you live in a ranch, an apartment, a house, whatever it is, you have neighbors.

Okay, now of those eight units, just like start to think, how many of their names can you list off?

Just start to like think like in those eight of the people, the eight closest people are you, how many names right now can you write down?

Or can you rattle off?

Go ahead and take a second to think about it.

And I'd encourage you, like, so try to use don't annoying lady is not a person's name.

Okay, dude who drives a red car is not a person's name, like actual people's names.

How many do you think you can rattle off?

Now, when I first did this, I had this horrifying moment where I realized I've met almost all of these people, and I could only list off both adults' names in two of the eight boxes.

How many of you in this room right now think you can do all eight?

Throw your hand up.

Yep.

Now, and I might ask you to come and share.

How many of you think you can do five or more?

Raise your hand.

Raise your hand up.

Okay, this is probably I'm gonna go generous.

This is probably 30% of the room has their hand up.

I have like a horrifying thought for you.

You ready?

I my buddy and I have handed out over 340,000 of these little magnets doing this, sharing our story.

I've never been in a room of Christians where more than half of the room can list off more than half of their neighbors' names.

Just think about that.

Like I've never been like I've never been in a room of Christians where more than half of the room goes, I can write down right now five or more, both adults' names in five or more of those boxes.

And let me tell you why I think this is matters and why this is a little bit horrifying is that in order to love someone, I think it's helpful to know their first name.

And I'm gonna just tell you something.

Here's what happened to me.

Just this little act of like learning and retaining and using somebody's name, for some of the people over me set me on this little journey.

Some of my neighbors actually don't want to be my friend.

Some of my neighbors, I learn their name and they're super busy, and like every day they come home and then they get back from work and they grab all their kids and they get in the van and they go off to all these different activities.

And then they grab some fast food on the way home and it's dark, and their car comes home, and the garage door goes up, and their car goes in and it goes down, and then they detox from that, and then they wake up and do that the next day.

And they don't have time and they don't really want to be friends with me or to even really know me.

And I have a lot of grace for that because I think that's how my neighbors experience me for a long time.

But some of my neighbors are dying for real relationship.

Some of my neighbors, all they have is the dysfunctional stuff we all have with our family of origin, and then the surfacey stuff at work.

And they and I was assuming for a long time, surely they have somebody in their world that they talk about meaningful things about.

And what I've learned is they don't and they want it.

But I couldn't I couldn't see that because I kept on calling them bro.

And man.

And waving awkwardly to them when we both knew, oh, we should probably know each other's names, but we don't.

And so we're in some weird twilight zone where we're stuck, and that's where everything stalemated.

And so what happened to me is this I had this thing on my fridge, it was just a napkin, and I had two of the things filled in, and my wife could do more of them, but she's not nice to me, and so she left them all blank and made me start learning all these people's names.

And so I went, I had this series of mildly awkward moments with a bunch of my neighbors.

And it would always it was always kind of the same thing.

I I've ended up encountering them in a way and going, hey man, um, this is super embarrassing.

But I know I've lived next to you now for almost two years.

I've met you three times, and I forgot your name.

And we would have this moment where we would exchange names and even our wives' names, and then I would go home and I would just I did something really important.

I would write them down.

And after about six weeks, this whole thing was filled in, and God did something to me.

All of a sudden, these people went from people who drove a certain type of car to have like a certain number of kids to like real people with real names and with real stories.

And it went from, hey man, to hey Matt, did you catch the end of that Broncos game?

To, hey Matt, I've got this thing in my garage.

I just need to move it like 10 feet.

Could you help me?

To, hey Matt, like you guys are gonna be watching the game and we're gonna be watching the game.

Let's just like throw some stuff on the grill and watch it together.

To hey, your son's car is back a lot now.

Did did he move back in?

I mean, how's that going?

To sitting across my dining room table talking about the things that I love and him sharing the things that he loves.

Like this thing that I had like dreamed about as a pastor, as I was like setting up chairs for like the outreach event, which by there's nothing wrong with those.

This thing that I was like hoping for was sitting right outside my front door.

And all I had to do was stop making up excuses and figuring out a loophole to get out of this idea of taking the great commandment literally and seriously.

And I want to be really clear about something.

There's a lot of like smart, bibbled up people in this room, and some of you are probably thinking to yourself right now, you know, Dave, I spend more time at work than I do at home.

And I'm building relationships there, and that's loving my neighbor.

Or I'm really trying to invest in the parents on my kids' soccer team, or I'm really passionate about what happens at the rescue mission, or something in Uganda, whatever it is, and I want to be really clear about something clearly in Jesus' economy, all of that is loving your neighbor.

I don't want to dismiss that or diminish that in any way, shape, or form.

But here's the deal all of that doesn't somehow sprinkle magic fairy dust over our actual neighbors, and all of a sudden Jesus wasn't talking about them.

And I figured out a way to live like that was the case.

And if we're willing to confront that, if we're willing to lean in, I think what God has in store for us on the other side is really exciting.

And I've seen it over and over and over again.

This idea of like, what if we took like the thing that Jesus said matters most and made sure that we actually do it?

It's so easy to get like to just start thinking about all the different things that we could be doing when it comes to our walk with God and our faith life.

What if like this, what if what if wouldn't it make sense?

Okay, we can only do a few things really, really well.

Wouldn't it make sense if like one of those was the thing that Jesus said matters most?

And I I found that that it does make sense.

I've actually found that like the way that Jesus talks about living, it's actually the best way to live.

And so often it's easy to get caught up in all the minutiae and all the other things and to just like get into these rhythms where you lose sight of that.

We lose sight.

Oh, like what if I actually orient my life around the way that Jesus talks about living, that actually is the best way to live.

And the the scriptures talk about that over and over and over again.

But this little this little practice of like taking the most basic thing Jesus said and like actually doing it has has just breathed life into me and it's reminded me of that.

I'll share, I'll share one text with you here that's um really been helpful for me, kind of understanding a theology of place as we close.

It says, uh, it's in Acts 17, Paul's standing on this little place in Athens called Mars Hill.

He's speaking to all these men and women in the marketplace, and he's he's telling them about God and the character.

It's one of the great sermons in the Bible.

And inside of this sermon, he says, From one man he, so God made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth.

And he determined the times set for them in the exact places where they should live.

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

He determined the times set for them in the exact places where they should live.

This like rediscovery of a theology of place has helped me.

It's changed the way I drive in and out of my neighborhood.

I just started to believe that like there's something sacred about where I live.

I thought I lived where I lived because we always wanted to have four bedrooms up because we're bad at family planning and we have four kids.

And so I thought I was like, oh, I thought that's where I no, I don't, that's not why I live there.

And it's not because of the schools, it's not because like I can't afford the place I really want to live in.

I live exactly where I live because God has placed me there and He's placed the people around me there as well.

And I'm gonna tell you, if like you get this, if you if you believe this, if you have a shift towards this theology of place, it'll change the way that you drive in and out of your neighborhood as well.

You'll start to realize like what we do out in our front yard is real ministry.

It's just like being on the elder board or taking care of uh doing kid stuff or every other thing, like what we do in our front yard counts.

And I'll tell you this too, it's the antidote to like being around people who think like you do.

One of the downsides of like being on a church staff for 10 years is uh I got into ministry because like I have this deep love to see people come to know God that don't know him.

And after 10 years, I drifted into this place where almost all of the people that I spent the majority of my time with thought about the world the same way that I did.

Part of the genius of taking the idea of loving your neighbor literally is that it's guaranteeing you that you're gonna be hanging out with people who don't think about the world like you do.

And I think this is this is a huge part of what we see in the early church.

This is right in the heart of God.

We're not supposed to be like hanging out with people who think about the world the way that we do all the time.

Jesus models this over and over again.

Jesus is always making the religious people uncomfortable because the people that he's hanging out with are too sketchy for them.

And it makes the religious people nervous.

By the way, this is a spiritual discipline that nobody ever talks about.

Everybody wants the spiritual disciplines are we Jesus prayed a lot, I'm gonna learn how to pray.

He does solitude, I'm gonna do that fellowship.

I do that.

How about the discipline of like making the religious people nervous because of who you hang out with?

It happens over and over again, but we don't actually think it's a discipline.

Now, that's not a license to go like throw yourself into like bad environments if like you are struggling with an addiction or something along those lines.

I'm just saying it is something that Jesus continues to do over and over and over again.

Um, but somehow we don't like put it up on the poster board for the things, the practices or disciplines that we're supposed to model.

Um I I didn't have to start throwing block parties when I started to like get engaged with my neighborhood.

I just had to start showing up to the ones that were already going on.

And there was this whole uh embedded world of like relationships, and they were happy to bring my wife and I into the middle of it.

And as I said before, it's been hard and messy and powerful all at the same time.

So, what it look like for redemption to do this?

Well, like you guys are at a really crucial point in the history of this church.

My gut is part of what it looks like for this church to flourish forward, is to continue to grow and to understand the word of God.

I think that's certainly a part of it.

But my gut is probably most of the people in this room, like the next step for you isn't one great Bible thought.

I maybe write a line here, but that's just my that's my hunch.

We've had a lot of great Bible teaching over the years.

There's a lot, like really sound doctrine in place.

Like maybe, maybe what the next step looks like as this church begins to go forward into this next season is to take some of the most basic things that Jesus said to do and to make them really, really concrete and to do it.

And so I'm gonna encourage you, I'm gonna leave you out on the welcome table.

There's a refrigerator magnet for every one of your families.

And I'd I'd like to invite you to put this up on your fridge and to let it mess up your life like it did mine.

And it and all it all it is is this it's just taking the next small step.

So much of momentum is just getting started.

And so I'm not asking you to like love your neighbor.

That's like crazy Jesus stuff.

Um, I what I'm suggesting is this would you be willing to, could you like make a commitment today?

Have a moment with God here.

Maybe it's as we're doing communion, like, would you make a commitment?

Could you make a commitment just to learn and retain and use the names of the people that God has put right around you?

Would you just use this little thing to do this?

Now, and I want to tell you this it's a Trojan horse to get you to do all kinds of other stuff.

Um, but sometimes we get so caught up in like this big idea of what it looks like.

What if we can just make it really, really concrete?

This is a little parish.

You can each walk out of here with your own little parish today, and then just start taking in the next small step.

The biggest leadership lesson I learned throughout this whole deal, and we've been doing this now for eight or so years, is that my my whole life people said, Dave, good leaders set the bar high.

And I think that's true.

When you have a small team and you're you're walking with people, whatever that might look like for you, because people will come close to the bar, they'll get over it.

Um here's what I learned though.

If you want to start a movement, you want to get a bunch of people going down the same lane, the key isn't to set the bar high, the key is to set the bar so low that they can't crawl underneath it.

And by the way, that's what we're doing here this morning.

The bar is like really, really low.

Uh it's it's just around beginning to think the people who live around you are worth remembering their names.

And I know that if you if you do that, you'll begin to see the kingdom break out.

I know that if you do that, this place will start to fill up.

And the questions that you'll be asking in the lobby around what do you do when you learn that your neighbor has an addiction?

What do you do when your neighbor's life is falling apart because of something that's going on with one other family member?

What do you like?

Those are the questions that I think God wants us to be asking as we're running around in our lobbies.

He wants us to be like thrown into ministry way over our head, and then to be leaning on him, to be surrendering and saying, God, what what do you want me to do?

Let's pray.

God, thank you so much for your word, for how we can look at things that we've seen numerous times and then see them in a in a new light, in a light that's convicting and encouraging and challenging somehow all at the same time.

So God, I pray for this church as they continue to seek out you, as they continue to engage in the life of this city and the places where they live.

And God, would you give each one of us here in this room, would you give us the strength to lean into some mildly awkward moments?

Would you give us the margin?

Help us to think it's important enough to make margin, to maybe just linger a little bit.

To maybe close up our laptop and walk outside the front door and we see that person across the street, and to say, hey, and to be willing to follow wherever you lead in that conversation.

I pray for this church, Lord, and I know, I know that there are great things ahead.

I pray that you'll give the leaders your wisdom, discernment as they lead this body.

Over this next year and the years to come, I pray that their impact in our city will be noticeable and tangible.

In your name.

Amen.