Neighbour Evangelism – 1

I’d like to begin with a quick quiz.

It’s called the “neighbour quiz.” Take the piece of paper and write down the names of a few of the non-churchgoing people who live on your street. Or write down the names of a few non-church people that you have things to do with on a regular basis—through work, or through community involvement, your hairdresser, whoever…

So you have a name or two. Now write down a bit of information or some facts about one of the people on your list. I don’t mean the sort of facts that you could observe just by standing on the road and looking at their house (e.g., “he drives a black pick-up”). But tell me something that you have gathered from speaking to them from once in while (e.g., “she works at the grocery store” or “he grew up in Saskatchewan”).

The third part of the quiz is the hardest. Write down any in-depth information that you know about this person. This could include details like their religious beliefs, or some personal or family struggles. It’s the kind of knowledge that comes from real conversation, when you stopped your lawnmower and you chatted on your front lawn for fifteen minutes. You asked questions, you listened, you talked. You got to know your neighbour as a neighbour.

In Your Neighbourhood

We’re thinking of about our neighbours because we’d like to move towards sharing the gospel with them. Do you remember the question that the legal expert asked Jesus in Luke 10: “Who is my neighbour?”

Remember how Jesus answered him: He told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Afterwards He pressed the legal expert, “Who was a neighbour to the one who fell into the hands of robbers?” And it was the Samaritan, the man who responded with mercy to the needs of the man he met along the way. To the man whom he didn’t know, the man to whom he owed nothing, the Samaritan showed love.

We sometimes meet people “along the way” of our life: a person in the airport lounge, a customer you’ve never seen before today, someone we pass on the sidewalk. Jesus says that we have to be ready to show Christian love to people like this.

Well, if that’s the case, then we should be even more ready (and more willing) to show Christian love to the people that we meet regularly: to the old guy who’s lived across the road from us for 35 years, to the customer who comes in almost every Thursday around lunchtime, or to the lady who often helps us at the bank—the people regularly coming in and out of our life. 

For God puts us in neighborhoods: a place made up of neighbours.

A neighborhood is the kind of place where you can eventually meet everyone, even if you have to make a little extra effort, even if you have to be a little persistent with those who are anti-social. A neighbourhood is a place where people are consistently running into each other and where they are somewhat aware of each other’s lives.

And here’s an important truth. Your neighbour lives down your street because God put them there. Your colleague sits at the desk next to you because God seated them there. Listen to what Paul says in Acts 17:26, “God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”

Did you catch that? God made everyone who has ever lived on earth. God also determined our times of life, it says—for instance, He decided that you and I would live in the 21^st century, while other people would live during the Iron Age, 1200 years before Christ. And, Paul says, God even determined where we would live: He “allotted the boundaries of our dwelling places.” He put you where you are, and He put your neighbour just where she is.

Now this is why, says Paul in Acts 17:27, “that [people] should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” People are where they are, not because of happenstance or because of some obscure purpose in God’s providence. People are where they are so that they can fulfill the one calling shared by every human being: to seek God and live in right relationship with him through Jesus Christ. For, says Paul, “God is actually not far from each one of us.” 

Lots of people in our towns and cities right now are not living out their true purpose, the reason God made them.

But God has put them beside us, and God made them our neighbours, so that they might seek him. Now we want to reach them with the gospel by being good neighbours.

 A Simpler Approach

I’ve been to more than a few evangelism conferences over the years. They’re always great, a shot in the arm, a kick in the pants—an encouragement to get out and share Christ. But in many churches, the usual approach to evangelism is to form a committee who will then add some activity to our lives, set up another program.

There’s a place for that, but I’m suggesting a simpler approach. We shouldn’t look at our lives and try to find a small place in it where we can add some moments of evangelism activity—which are hard to organize, even harder to get people to participate. Rather, we should lead our regular life, but we should do so with a general outlook and attitude that are more evangelistic, more ready to share Christ.

In the words of one author, “The good news is that making disciples [of Christ] is fairly easy. You simply bring people along in your spiritual journey. If you have Christian habits in your life worth imitating, you can be a disciple-maker. It doesn’t require years of training. You just teach others to follow Christ as you follow him.”

The point is, when we are around people for any amount of time, we should begin to share the things that we love. If you love God, then He’ll more naturally come up in your conversations. This happens as we learn to share the core of who we are.

Someone compared it to being a sponge. When you let a sponge sit in some liquid—water, oil, paint—and then you take it out and give it a good squeeze, what comes out is what the sponge has been soaking in. So for the child of God. You’re soaking up truth every day, every Sunday, year by year—it gets into your very bones.

Then when you do life with your neighbor, and you spend a bit of time with him or her, and you see them on a regular basis, that gospel truth should get squeezed out. They hear it in your words. They see it in your actions.

Next time, we’ll share some ideas of how to do this.