Who is my neighbor?

Volunteers organizing food for local families.

Volunteers frying 70 turkeys to give away to local families.

Christians have been asking ourselves "Who is our neighbor?" for centuries.  It was a question posed to Jesus.  He followed the question with the story of the Good Samaritan.  Often, churches have used this question as motivation to reach the world.  Everyone is our neighbor, no matter where they are.  This is true.  And the Church has done a world of good across the world fighting hunger, starting orphanages, curing disease, and reaching people with God's love in tangible ways.  The Church has also spread the Gospel to places that have never heard of God's amazing grace.

I've often struggled with how to put the global and local together in ministry.  This past Sunday, our church hosted our 7th Annual Turkey Fry.  In 2007, we moved into a warehouse across the street from one of the poorest streets in our county.  It is a street that has been heavy on crime, drugs, and prostitution.  We decided to love on the community.  We did a number of things to love our literal neighbors, the biggest of which was fry turkeys around Thanksgiving and give them away.  We actually went into the neighborhood, camped out in one of the front yards of a duplex, fried turkeys right there and handed them out door to door.  Over the years, the outreach has morphed and grown.  We now fry them at Archer High School, where we meet.  We still provide a fried turkey to those 50 families in our old neighborhood.  The last couple of years we've also given nearly a week's worth of food along with the turkey to about 20 families whose names the Archer cluster schools have given us.  Most of the families are those that have foster kids.  Some are just families that could use a helping hand this time of year.

I'm not against foreign mission trips.  Please don't hear me say that.  My wife went on a dental mission trip this past summer to Costa Rica.  It was needed ministry and opened doors for the church down there with which her group was working.  Nevertheless, I just think that the question of our neighbor isn't that hard to figure out, and it seems like it's something the Church has often gotten wrong.  We Christians have $5 barbecue plates fund-raisers to help fund our mission trip to a foreign country.  Shouldn't we just be paying for the barbecue ourselves and giving it away to the folks in our own community?  Isn't the work of the Church in our local communities the actual mission?

For me, this has always been my heart.  I think it's a both/and.  I hope our church can send people to other countries one day to be in mission and ministry.  Even now, we work to financially support missionaries sharing God's love in foreign lands.  But there is so much to be done here.  There are so many people to love in the Archer community.  There is so much work to be done up and down New Hope Road.  Then, there are so many people to serve and minister to in neighboring communities in Dacula, Grayson, Snellville, Loganville, Bethlehem, and the rest of Lawrenceville.  And I'm not sure we'll ever be done loving our neighbors right in our own backyard.  This week 70 families know that God loves them, but there are 70,000 more that need to hear that same message.  I am not sure that each church has the potential to change the world.  However, I am certain that each Follower of Christ can change his or her neighborhood, and each church in the world can change its community.  We can all love the people we are around every day with the love of Christ.  And if we would all do that, together, we'd change the world for Jesus.  Dear Lord, let it be for your Church.