Bringing God to Live in the Neighborhood

Two weeks ago, my wife and I were the only two believers at a birthday party in our neighborhood here in Borsang. About 15 people filled the house. Over the years, these neighbors had heard the teachings of Jesus through us and had begun applying them. None of them had yet made an open declaration of faith, but the kingdom was already at work among them. As the evening wound down, one of the women looked around the room and said, “Our neighborhood is so safe. It is the only safe neighborhood in this area. We are safe because we all love each other and look out for each other. We can walk home tonight unafraid. Thank you for bringing God to live in our neighborhood, showing us how to love one another.”

She was not thanking a program or a project. She was thanking neighbors who had been received as her own. That is the heart of what I want to describe in these pages: An Alongsider is an outsider who is adopted by a community and enabled to function, with growing influence, as an insider.

Every Alongsider has to begin with two questions: Who am I coming alongside? And what value am I bringing to them? How we answer shapes everything that follows.

Two Kinds of Alongsiders

There are at least two ways people use the word “Alongsider.” The first is the visiting specialist. Someone comes from outside—sometimes from another community within the same culture, sometimes, as in pioneering work, from another culture entirely—to share knowledge or skills the community can use. This kind of Alongsider is usually transient by design. They offer what they have to people ready to receive it, and when the skill or knowledge has been passed on, they return home. Their gifts are real and worth honoring, but their reach is naturally limited. Without a deep grasp of the language and culture, they tend to connect with only a subset of the community, most often those already in the faith.

A couple we know illustrates this well. They are considering a move to Thailand, and later this month they will make an exploratory trip. They asked whether they could serve our communities and offered three or four topics they felt equipped to teach. Their willingness is a genuine gift. Yet because they do not yet know the culture or the language, the wider community would find it hard to receive what they bring. For now, their influence would most likely reach only a subset of the greater community: most likely those who are already in the faith.

The second kind of Alongsider is the one I want to spend the rest of this article on, because it has been my own experience. This is the outsider who is adopted by the community itself and trusted to bring value to the whole of it, not merely to a believing subset. I am thinking especially of pioneering settings, where there may be no one yet following Christ. There, the Alongsider does not arrive as a teacher with a platform. He is welcomed in, and over time the community gives him an insider’s voice.

A week after that birthday party, we visited another neighbor. They asked how it was that we seemed to know God so well. Had we learned about him from our Christian religion? My wife answered first: “We know God because he lives in our hearts.” We explained that religion can teach us right from wrong, good from evil, kindness from malice, but people in every religion are taught those things. We emphasized that we lack a helper, and Jesus has sent us that Helper (John 14).

In both moments, we were not running a ministry. We were simply loving our neighbors as people who had been welcomed among them. That welcome is what makes everything else possible.

Beyond the Neighborhood

But the influence of an Alongsider does not need to stop at the edge of his own neighborhood. When a community receives you as one of its own, it can carry you into places you could never have entered on your own.

A young man called Boy lived with us for two of his college years. He is in his thirties now and recently married. He comes from a village in Sukhothai. His bride is from a village in Lampang, where they will make their home. Because of the years we had invested in him, Boy asked me to speak at his wedding.

The wedding was held in Lampang and attended by 1,400 residents. I know the people of Sukhothai well—Boy’s friends and family—but I did not know the people of Lampang at all. The decision rested with the bride’s father, who was paying for the wedding, and Boy advocated for me. I spoke, and it went well. I received warm responses during and after the event.

But the real value of that day was not my speaking. It was coming alongside Boy and his bride to affirm their worth before the community in Lampang. The kingdom is advancing there now. And back in Sukhothai, my standing deepened too: Those who had advocated for me had taken a risk, and they were honored when it went well. In both places, the fragrance of Christ (2 Cor 2:14–16) was recognized and welcomed.

Something similar happened closer to home. Gate, who joined our community through marriage, recently lost her mother. Because Gate’s mother was from a different community, the funeral was held there, in her own home community. We went to support Gate, and two things followed.

First, Gate asked me to speak at the funeral. This lifted the standing of Gate and her family among their own people, and it gave me a meaningful way to engage in a community I would otherwise never have met.

Second, the funeral lasted for several days. In the early days, no one else from our community had joined the processions. But once they saw and heard that we were there, over 18 people from our community came to stand with Gate and her family. Present as trusted insiders, we were able to show the wider community what it looks like to love a neighbor, and the community responded.

What Makes an Alongsider Effective

What can we draw from these stories? Some of the most important lessons are not in the events themselves but in how we set the stage for them. Through the stories, though, you can begin to see what it means to be an effective Alongsider.

First, an effective Alongsider has initially been an insider at home. Many of us, when we came to Christ, drifted out of our birth communities and into the Christian community, where our deepest relationships formed—and we then found it hard to reach the people we came from: siblings, parents, coworkers, schoolmates. Yet our birth community—our family, our neighborhood, our ethnicity—was given to us by the providence of God. It is the first field he asks us to labor in. I could come alongside Boy and Gate only because I had first learned to live as an insider in my own neighborhood in Borsang.

Second, we must live transparently. Living in community is both a blessing and a challenge: People can see our lives up close. The hardest part of reaching those nearest to us is that they truly know us—and they will ask, as our neighbor did, whether the God we speak of really lives in us. A friend once challenged me with words I have never forgotten: “Let your natural life be spiritual, and your spiritual life be natural.”

Third, we bring value by serving as a priest within the community. We are blessed to be a blessing (Gen 12), a blessing to the entire community. As priests we stand between God and the community: representing God to the people through a Christ-centered life and representing the people before God through intercession. As God’s priests to the community, we embody and share the values of the kingdom. Kingdom values are universal and beneficial for every community. The problem is rarely the values themselves; it is the wrapping. Too often we communicate them in the language of Western Christianity, using terms and cultural assumptions that are foreign to the people we are living among. The message gets lost inside a package wrapped in layers of Western culture that is incompatible with the culture of the people we try to reach. An effective Alongsider learns to express kingdom truth in the idioms, stories, and relational patterns of the community itself, so that the message can grow in the local soil of the hearts.

Fourth, we are not in charge. We are not the directors of a ministry; we are participants the community has invited to contribute. Invitation is the key. I spoke at Boy’s wedding only because he advocated for me, and the bride’s father agreed. I spoke at the funeral only because Gate asked. The community opens the door, and we walk through it as guests who have become family.

Fifth, we work with what the community already has. If I am teaching others what it means to be an insider, I cannot lean on financial, educational, or vocational resources imported from outside. We work with what is available, so that they can work with what they have—and so that what grows can be carried forward in a reproducible way without people needing to depend on me or resources that they can get exclusively from me.

Our goal is not to control the advance of the gospel but to see it grow organically, generation after generation—affirming insiders who will go further into new communities than we ever could.

I think of the woman at the birthday party, walking home unafraid through the one safe neighborhood she knows, thanking us for bringing God to live among them. I think of the kingdom now taking root in Lampang among people I could never have reached on my own. None of it came from a program I ran. It came from being welcomed in, loved as a neighbor, and trusted to bless—and then watching the community carry that blessing to places I could never go.

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