Love your neighbour

The great thing about the Web is that you're constantly bumping into things you didn't know existed. I was looking for a bit of material for a workshop I took on the weekend, and came across the Love Your Neighbour site. It's hosted in New Zealand, and focuses on NZ stories. They're well written ones, too.

One of the main intentions of the site is to encourage local churches to get involved in their local community, to uncover needs that are peculiar to their local area, and to find ways to help.

Their basic strategy is simple: they're calling churches to

• to adopt the streets in their community,
• to prayerwalk those streets,
• to build community through fun events and acts of kindness,
• to capitalize on the goodwill that has been created by following up with an invitation to hear the gospel.

Churches invovled with the Love Your Neighbour project begin by choosing to be outward, rather than inward-focused. They ask, as a church, how far do the cords of your tent extend? How big is the ‘parish’ that God has called you to serve?

Their strategy is as simple as ABC: Adopt, Befriend, Co-operate. You can see more detail about the strategy on their site.