Neighborliness: Love Like Jesus. Cross Dividing Lines. Transform Your Community.

By David Docusen

Do you want to love your neighbor as yourself but don’t know where to start? This practical, accessible guide to bridging the dividing lines of politics, race, and economics, both individually and as the church, will help you amplify Jesus in your community and build God’s kingdom.  

When asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus gave a two-part answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and also “Love your neighbor as yourself.”   

Love God. Love others.   

Jesus’ simple command to love your neighbor can feel overwhelming when your neighbor looks, lives, and votes differently than you do. Racial and economic tensions across the country have resulted in deep dividing lines that seem really intimidating to cross.   

Docusen breaks down these lines in approachable chapters, including topics like these: 

• how to actively seek out people you can benefit and encourage,
• what it means to find a diverse and supportive community that fulfills needs, 
• examples of real-life experiences, including highlights and missteps of Docusen’s ongoing journey, and
• how churches can teach on difficult topics with grace and truth.

Neighborliness is a practical guide to bridging those dividing lines and learning to recognize and amplify the beauty of God in our communities. Backed by David’s speaking and training through the Neighborliness Center, this book will help individuals and churches reach out to their neighbors, love them through Christ, and build God’s kingdom. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780785289333

David Docusen

David Docusen has spent twenty years investing into communities as a pastor, speaker, teacher, advocate, and author. After pastoring in the local church for twenty years, David and his wife, Dara, launched Docusen Ministries. Now, through the Neighborliness Center, David invests in churches, nonprofits, and businesses across the world through speaking, teaching, and writing. After completing his doctoral degree studying the cyclical patterns of generational poverty, he worked with a group of businesspeople as a founding board member of Freedom Communities, an organization that focuses on equitable access to education, employment, healthcare, and housing. He travels and speaks extensively to churches, community groups, and universities in spreading the Neighborliness message, and he also serves as a member of the executive board of Relevant magazine. David and Dara live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with their four kids: Max, Mary, Jack, and Ben.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Neighborliness. What a strange word.

I came across this mouthful of letters as I was tucked away in a quiet corner of my house reading one evening. Neighbor-lines? That can’t be right. I sounded it out in my head as I read it over and over. Neighbor-ly-ness. There we go. That’s the one.

The Christian bookstores my mom shopped at when I was a kid had countless coffee mugs and inspirational hand-drawn art on the clearance rack that encouraged me to love my neighbor.

However, I felt like this odd word captured something altogether different that resonated deeply in my spirit.

I never imagined that such a unique word would genuinely change my life. My prayer is that it might do the same for you.

Google will tell you neighborliness means friendliness, which, I guess, is part of it. But the depth of its meaning comes from the words and actions of Jesus. He preached love for all while sitting next to outcasts and misfits, He spoke of justice as He advocated for and defended the marginalized, and He expressed forgiveness as He was being killed by His enemies.

When asked what the most important principle was to shape your life around, Jesus said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength . . . and love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27, author paraphrase). Jesus told us that neighborliness is foundational to our understanding and expression of faith.

Neighborliness is the embodiment of Jesus to those around us; it means taking on His characteristics of love, grace, and genuine interest in others; it is pursuing love and justice while simultaneously taking action to bring more of both into the world.

When I was working on my first draft of the book you are holding in your hands, I had my wife, Dara, read through it and give me feedback. Dara is five foot one with shoes on but a giant in her love for Jesus and the people who fill our world. Her insight and perspective have made me a better man.

She was reading a chapter I wrote that had a line in it that I was proud of: You cannot love your neighbor if you do not understand your neighbor. The idea was to inspire people to learn about their neighbors from different backgrounds.

I actually completely disagree with that line, she said with clear resolve visible in her beautiful hazel eyes.

She continued without pause, I love you more than anyone in the world loves you. I’ve been married to you for eighteen years, and let’s be honest, I still don’t understand you. My love for you is shown when I seek to understand you. She doesn’t use many words, but the ones she does use are incredibly effective.

Even while writing this book, my definition of neighborliness has evolved. My world has expanded, my preconceived ideas have been questioned, my desire for love and justice has increased. It isn’t that I fully understand people now; it’s that I’ve learned a posture of seeking.

Courage and curiosity go hand in hand when seeking to understand the people who fill my world. I have longstanding relationships with people—some are family members—who love Jesus passionately and arrive at very different conclusions than I do about complex issues related to faith and culture. Lately, however, I have been trying to take Dara’s advice and seek to understand them better. Learning to cultivate relationships with people who see the world differently has helped me learn and feel new things and, at times, change my perspective.

Our neighbors, the people around us, aren’t puzzles for us to figure out; they are people with evolving stories, experiences, quirks, and flaws. We won’t perfectly understand anyone ever, but that’s not the goal. Relationship is the goal, and that happens in the seeking.

We are invited to participate in the unfolding story of the kingdom of God being established in our neighborhoods as it is in heaven. If that’s the case, we are going to need a healthy dose of courage and curiosity to help us settle into conversations that help us love like Jesus, cross dividing lines, and transform our communities.

My prayer is that this book will be a conversation starter. Our relationship with Jesus begins as an inward journey that naturally leads to exploring how our faith is expressed in the context of community. I encourage you to share this journey with a group of friends.

Each chapter concludes with a discussion guide, including suggestions on how to organize your conversations. I have provided conversation prompts, but feel free to let your discussions flow freely and naturally. Depending on each person’s upbringing, the way they process this book will be very different. As you listen and learn, you’ll see that each person can help the group explore the spirit of neighborliness from various perspectives. The Bible describes the posture and character of folks who are learning to express the spirit of neighborliness. We should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry (James 1:19). Let curiosity lead the way as you hear the thoughts and experiences of your friends. Extend and receive grace freely. God is honored when His children pursue unity.

I am hopeful that this book will give you the tools to have meaningful conversations that lead to new friendships as you find the beauty of God across dividing lines.

Just as I fumbled over the word neighborliness when I first saw it, I faltered over a lot of the concepts, questions, and ideas mentioned in this book. My journey of seeking to embody the spirit of neighborliness has been imperfect yet honest.

Eventually I stopped fumbling over the word. As it rolled around in my head and finally rolled off my tongue, I added a new word to my vocabulary, a word that resonated so deeply that it eventually became a way of life. I still don’t have a perfect definition for the word; I probably never will. But I will keep seeking to understand it, just as I do with my neighbors.

Neighbor-ly-ness. Now that we know how to say it, let’s try to figure out how to live it.

ONE 1

THE DAY I OPENED MY EYES

The gospel of Jesus Christ and the pursuit of justice are not mutually exclusive but fundamentally interconnected.

MARK DEYMAZ, DISRUPTION¹

We all look alike, I thought to myself. My heart raced as I looked around the room.

Standing behind a simple metal podium in an elementary school auditorium, I was about to preach as I had done each Sunday for the previous five years. Looking at my congregation who had become family to me, I was not prepared for my heart to be broken.

I was rendered speechless as tears filled my eyes.

I am not sure why it happened on this day, but I finally saw that our beautiful expression of faith at Center City Church mostly included people who looked just like me. I didn’t know how we got to this point.

Center City Church started in my home on August 19, 2009, with seventeen people who were committed to a simple expression of faith. I looked at my living room congregation that night and said, If this is real, it will spread.

We embarked on a raw and beautiful journey. We spread the news of a new church in the community through word-of-mouth invitations to our home for dinner. We started meeting around our dining room table and then spilled into our living room as the numbers slowly grew each week. My earliest memories of starting this church are closely tied to store-brand pasta and Dara’s homemade marinara sauce.

Over the next few years, our church family grew from seventeen people gathered in my living room to around two hundred people meeting at Elizabeth Traditional Elementary School’s auditorium. It was simple and beautiful. Natural light flooded the room from the windows along the left side of the auditorium, and we could see the Uptown Charlotte skyline out of those windows while we worshiped.

Located one mile southeast of the center of the city, Elizabeth is a walkable neighborhood filled with boutique stores, local coffee shops, and bakeries. Mature trees form canopies over the streets of century-old homes that have been renovated while keeping their historic charm.

The group of friends God brought to us changed my family; they taught us to express our faith in a way that I had only ever hoped could be true. We experienced unreasonable generosity, care, joy, and compassion. Center City Church became a tangible reality of my long-held belief that people long to be known and know others.

We had finally found a place where we could experience a sense of belonging and community.

I stared at the podium for several moments with tears in my eyes.

Our word-of-mouth approach was genuine and seemed to be working. We were growing because people were inviting their friends. Church growth experts say that word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising, and we were constantly growing by a few people each week.

Our team had a running joke that we were experiencing the slowest explosion of growth in the history of the church. We didn’t care about any of that though. We simply enjoyed one another and the new friends that consistently expanded our circles of friendship.

In my speechlessness that Sunday morning, the congregation looked back at me and probably figured I was just having a moment with the Holy Spirit. They patiently waited as I tried to formulate my thoughts. But as I looked back at them, I was finally feeling the reality that most of our friends were young and white.

Everyone looks alike.

The walls of our beautiful church crashed around me on the Sunday that God opened my eyes. We were a tight-knit community of twenty- and thirtysomethings living and working in Uptown Charlotte. Our church was 95 percent middle-class and white.

And the plaid. There was so much plaid.

I have no idea how long I stared at our church family that morning. I finally looked down through my blurry, tear-filled eyes and proceeded to preach the most scatterbrained and incoherent message of my ministry career. I laughed it off with our associate pastor, Joseph, after the service. Can’t win ’em all, right?

After service, I remember writing down a phrase in my journal: Like people invite like people. My confessions continued as I cried over my journal: Our beautiful church looks nothing like our beautiful city. The day I opened my eyes, I started a journey that would deeply impact my relationship with God and with others.

I never thought of myself as a pastor who shied away from hard topics. However, I was becoming increasingly aware that my silence on the topic of racial and economic inequality was directly related to my lack of knowledge, understanding, and curiosity. I was silent on these topics because I did not have words readily available to articulate or contribute anything substantive to the conversation.

In his TED Talk The Danger of Silence, author, professor, and poet Clint Smith talks about engaging people across dividing lines. In the video, he encourages people to speak up against ignorance and injustice: Explore the silence of your own life. Fill those spaces. Name them and share them.²

In hindsight, my silence spoke louder than I realized.

My circle of friends didn’t include people of color because my entire worldview from birth was white, middle-class, and blind to the realities of my fellow classmates and peers. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I spent no extra effort exploring how race and economics in our country impacts my neighbors.

In high school, I could sense the way Black and Brown students at Lake Brantley High School were treated with less respect by white students. I heard the inappropriate jokes from my white friends about students of color. I didn’t like the jokes, but I still chuckled to make sure I properly fit into social circles. I was not telling the jokes, but my silence spoke louder than I realized.

I saw this perspective reflected at me after a talk I gave recently. A man approached me and said, David, I have to admit, I was pretty mad at you when you came to our church a few years ago.

He smiled sheepishly as if to let me know some better moments were coming.

I grew up in a community where we never, ever talked about anything related to racial matters—especially at church. I didn’t think there was any room for these topics to be preached about and I left church pretty upset.

He continued, A few years later, George Floyd was killed and so many people started talking about God’s heart for unity. My pastor invited you to speak again at our church, and I found myself more open to learning about what the Bible has to say about breaking down barriers in relationships.

I stared back at him with a smile and could feel the warmth of the Spirit in this moment.

I am learning that my long-held view of ‘just stay silent and let my character be shown’ is simply not enough, he said. As white people, we have to use our voices to help others see how important it is to genuinely explore these topics. My wife and I decided to start a small group and used your materials as a guide for our conversations. I just wanted to say thank you.

I was reminded of when my default response was silence and how sometimes I still slip into that response and how much hurt is caused by inaction. I was so glad to see a heart and life changed by a decision to speak up. Not only was my broken perspective on staying silent reflected back at me, so was my journey toward real heart change.

We spoke for twenty minutes and my heart was bursting with gratitude to God for the visible joy and sincerity I could see in his eyes. He concluded the conversation by saying, As I am learning to use my voice, I have realized two things. First, this is a long conversation, and it is going to take time. Second, we need to be more curious about why we feel the way that we feel about the people who fill our world.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.³ Understanding the danger of silence leads to using our voices to love our neighbors.

Imagine the heartbreak I experienced after realizing that we had spent five years of our lives cultivating a beautiful community, only to realize that our version of beauty did not include the diversity that drew Dara and me to Charlotte in the first place.

I found myself in moments of brokenness and repentance asking God to open my eyes to my own blindness that kept me from seeing such a lack of cultural diversity. I reached out to several pastors across Charlotte who had a beautiful expression of diversity in their congregations. I spent countless hours listening, learning, and asking questions.

Pastor Kelvin was one of