I’ve been getting to know Eric Lerew over the past year or so as our worlds overlaps in many ways professionally. Eric is a kind, engaging guy that loves the local Church, loves people, and really has a heart for being a good neighbor that is an outflow of his personal and spiritual journey. It’s a passion he shares with his wife and family as well.

I don’t meet too many leaders like Eric who communicate and lead from a deep place of experience when it comes to this idea of neighboring as a Christian who can effortlessly weave in their pastoral experience as a former church leader. Eric shares in this episode just how important experience is to leadership, and how one develops a passion for the neighborhood and neighboring over time and in relation to ones personal investment in the process. Eric reminds me of this lesson that you cannot lead others to place that you’ve not been before and aren’t regularly spending time there. Leadership is as much about an invitation to come with as it is a declaration of where we’re going, and that is certainly true for the concept of neighboring.

Neighboring can be an extension of one’s understanding of church missiology and often a physical or tangible expression of faith. For many church-going individuals, this is most often expressed as short-term global mission trips, regular local volunteerism efforts, and neighborhood based evangelism crusades. For those participating, it’s a way to have a practical experience to explore the call to love our neighbors through scripture. The more personal the missional experience, the more transformative, and the more often, the more likely it begins to affect ones lifestyle and future time investments along with economic choices. If you stay with it long enough, it begins to change your worldview and hopefully broaden and sharpen your theological understanding of what being a Christ-follower really looks like. This is as true for corporate church mission efforts as well. The more you invest, the more you experience, and the more the Lord invites you to transform. And, the less it looks like “doing things” and more like an integration of everyday life.

This is not a simple process, especially for the corporate expression of church. There are deep and energizing feelings associated with ideas around “churches on mission.” Some believe that the Church is the only hope to community transformation. Some have left the church and are so frustrated with the lack of action and ability to bring transformative hope that they understand to be the central core to who God is asking the Church to be for the vulnerable. Some believe so strongly that Church is about relationship with the poor that their corporate expressions involve as much community engagement as meeting together in a building. Some believe that prayer and salvation is the answer to all social ills and if we had deeper faith, we’d be in stable positions. We could list a hundred different statements that align with the feelings of what the “Church” should, is, and could be.

The hope lies in the reality that we don’t need a “Church” to help us be good neighbors and learn what the Lord has to teach us about His love for us and others. Eric shares that we are a “sent” people and that we’ve all be called to this mandate of loving one’s neighbor independent of a corporate expression. So, be sent. Use transactional service to learn, engage, and help. Then take the lessons you learned and simply begin getting to know your neighbors personally. Invite them to help you before you offer to help them. Eric share that he believes being a good neighbor involves ensuring you know the names of your neighbors and beyond that, know what their life wishes, frustrations, fears, and anything that weights on them in life. Get to know your neighbors in personal, friendship like ways and then increase your boldness to ask simple faith-related questions if your desire is for them to know Jesus as some point. If not, just figure out ways to love them in a personal way. Then, be ready to be transformed and loved by others more than you ever feel like you’ve loved them.

I respect Eric’s ability to navigate this tension as both a Christian leader/pastor and as an individual that is passionate about being the best neighbor he can be. We have a great conversation about these tensions and bring hope that tangible expressions facilitated through church-based mission can lead to a greater awareness that one can neighbor and be on mission every day on their own, in their own neighborhood, and that it’s easier than one thinks. As long as you have a bit of courage. Eric shares some great stories from his experiences and has great encouragements of how this can look no matter the context in which you live. You don’t have to move into a low-income neighborhood to have an impact.

I appreciate the tension that conversations like these can create because it gives us all opportunities to grow and have our faith more integrated in our daily lives. Those that I know that would say they embrace neighboring as a part of their faith journey would share that it’s no longer a thing to do like when they first began trying to incorporate it in their lives, it’s now just part of them. It’s just a journey to be the best neighbor and human they can be.