Loving Our Close-by Neighbors
by Rob O’Neal, Director of Church Multiplication
Jesus gave his followers a shocking command when he told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. While he was really only repeating a very old command, he gave it a new level of force. On at least one occasion, Jesus was challenged on this idea by an expert in the law. He asked in Luke 10:20, “And who is my neighbor?” In response Jesus told the story we refer to as the parable of the Good Samaritan and turned the idea of neighbors upside down. While we think of our neighbors as the people who live near us, Jesus was defining them as people who are different and require some effort to love.
It’s not easy to love our neighbors. We must go out of our way, cross dividing lines, and do uncomfortable things like serving food to homeless people or teaching English to immigrants. Loving those kinds of neighbors takes effort.
That effort pales in comparison to the work it takes to love people closer to us, like the people we live with and bump into daily. Jesus knew that. So in John 13:34–35 he told us to love one another. He was talking about the people in our church or small group and on those teams where we serve. He even said that the quality of our love would demonstrate that we are his disciples. In other words, loving each other well makes God look good, and failing to love other followers of Jesus makes God look powerless and irrelevant. Jesus had a crucial insight.
It isn’t easy to love the people closest to us. We are around them consistently and over time, which gives us plenty of chances to build quality memories and to do selfless things. It also gives us plenty of time to pile up hurts and bruise one another.
Experience demonstrates that loving one another over time is not easy. In churches we hurt each other. We fight over decisions, engage in power struggles, use careless words, and wound one another. Unfortunately, the hurts we dole out as we do life together seem to be part of being a family of faith.
What we do with those hurts, however, can demonstrate the power of God. As a Conference, we believe in peacemaking and reconciliation. In other words, we believe that when we hurt one another, it is a Gospel imperative that we heal those hurts and make the relationships right. Rather than continuing to hurt and in place of walking away, we make peace and reconcile.
Peacemaking and reconciliation are critical to the life of the Church itself going forward. Congregations frequently implode and close in the wake of dysfunctional conflict. Churches suffer under the weight of their own reputations for years. It’s natural. What we are advocating is something supernatural, and the Conference stands ready to help.
