Neighborliness is loving like Jesus by crossing the dividing lines where you live.
When the second half goes unpracticed, a church can love God inside a circle where everyone looks alike. Docusen watched that happen at Center City Church in Elizabeth. He writes that a homogeneous circle of friends means a key component in the life of faith is missing. The people across the street stay outside the word neighbor.
On this page
Reading path
Where it lives in the work
Start with the introduction, where he defines the word and lets Dara correct him. Read chapter 2 next for Mark 12 and the two parts. Then chapter 1, so the definition has a church attached to it, and chapter 3, so it has a street. Chapter 4 is the work he says comes before advocacy. Chapter 13 is the hope picture, after the practice is clear.
1
Start here
Neighborliness, Introduction
2022 · introduction
Defines the word from Jesus' two loves, and records Dara's correction that love is shown in the seeking.
2
Neighborliness, The Other Half of the Greatest Commandment
2022 · core
Walks Mark 12:28–34, refuses a zip-code definition of neighbor, and lists how love looks in practice.
3
Neighborliness, The Day I Opened My Eyes
2022 · introduction
Tells the Elizabeth years of Center City Church and the Sunday the room looked alike.
4
Neighborliness, A Tale of Two Cities
2022 · core
Sets Berryhill Avenue between Bryant Park and Camp Greene, and follows Andrea across the street.
5
Neighborliness, A Look Inward
2022 · core
Names inattentional blindness, implicit bias, and discomfort as what blocks love of neighbor.
6
Neighborliness, Already and Not Yet
2022 · advanced
Puts the practice inside Revelation's picture of every nation, and shows Gerald and Timothy worshiping together.
7
Projimidad
Spanish edition · introduction
Spanish text of the same book. This pass did not mine it for arguments beyond the English chapters.
8
Tomorrow and the Days to Come
supporting · introduction
The locked map points these days at daily peacemaking and community presence. Those chapters were not opened in this pass.
Neighborliness
Docusen presents neighborliness through the two loves Jesus named in Mark 12, and he refuses to add a third. The locked framework keeps his names and his order: Loving God, then Loving neighbors. He says the church has attended to the first and still has to give proper attention to the second. Nancy Duff, whom he cites, holds the pair together: the two commandments cannot be understood as interchangeable, and neither are they severed. Love toward God is not intended to occur in isolation. It naturally results in love for neighbors.
01
Loving God
Love the Lord with heart, soul, mind, and strength.
As the body of Christ, we have given quite a bit of attention to the first half of the greatest commandment.
In chapter 2 Docusen sets the scene as a public debate. A lawyer asks which commandment is most important, with more than six hundred commands in view. Jesus answers without pause: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Docusen treats that sentence as the first half of the greatest commandment, the half the church has already given quite a bit of attention.He does not leave the first half as a private piety. The response used to bother him, because Jesus gave two answers to one question. The brilliance, as he comes to see it, is that a person cannot truly love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength without also expressing love to neighbors. The actions are distinct. They are fully expressed in tandem. He asks the Spirit to examine anything in him that does not match the spirit of neighborliness, and he prays Psalm 139:23–24 as the posture of that examination: search me, know my heart, point out what offends, lead me in the way of everlasting life.Loving God, in this chapter, shows up as humility. He tells readers to question motives and to let God search the heart for lingering prejudice or pride. The first half is already familiar. His pressure is that familiarity should make the second half more serious, not less.
02
Loving neighbors
Love your neighbor as yourself, past the zip code and across the street.
Our neighbors aren't dependent on our zip code; our neighbors are all around us.
Jesus continues, unprovoked: the second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Docusen calls that the other half. Neighborliness is the behavior of Christians who seek to embody the love, understanding, curiosity, kindness, and care of Jesus, and who cross the street to begin conversations with people who do not look or live like them.He answers "Who is my neighbor?" against a zip-code definition. In a Mark 12 study in Detroit, Scott says his neighbor is the person next door in a gated suburb, and that people from high-poverty communities can be friends and still not be neighbors. Kendra, who lives in one of those communities, asks what she is doing in the room if she is not his neighbor. Docusen’s reply is direct: neighbors are not dependent on a zip code. Neighbors are all around us. Welcoming them as friends or turning them away is a choice.Practical love, in the same chapter, is seeing her as God sees her, getting to know him and his experiences, and educating yourself on what matters to brothers and sisters in Christ. Shared humanity is the ground he names: made in the image of God, worthy of love and belonging, made for a purpose God established. He tells his son Max that a conversation can always begin with a question about the other person’s life. He also says friends from different backgrounds must not be treated as the sole educators. Readers do as much of the work as they can on their own, so a friend is not asked to relive pain every time someone is ready to learn. Patience belongs here. He holds his tongue when offended and asks better questions about where the pain is coming from.Chapter 4 says the crossing will fail if the inward look is skipped. Inattentional blindness, implicit bias, and an aversion to discomfort get in the way. Once eyes are opened, he says, a person can ignore or engage. Communities flourish when people engage discomfort with vulnerability and courage.
Charlotte, from the living room in 2009 to Elizabeth Traditional Elementary · mixed
The Sunday the room looked alike
Five years in, Docusen stood up to preach and saw that a church he loved was about 95 percent middle-class and white. The journal line that followed sent him to pastors, then to a Wednesday prayer circle in West Charlotte.
Center City Church began in the Docusen living room on August 19, 2009, with seventeen people. He told them that if it was real, it would spread. They invited the neighborhood to dinner. Store-brand pasta and Dara’s marinara sat at the center of his earliest memories. The circle moved from the dining room into the living room as it grew.
Stories he tells
Berryhill Avenue, Charlotte, Bryant Park facing Camp Greeneflourished
Andrea crosses Berryhill
After NextDoor alerts and a history she had not been told, Andrea took her family across Berryhill Avenue to walk Camp Greene instead of staying inside the new neighborhood.
Uptown Charlotte, after a day of affordable-housing advocacyfailed
Four steps toward the street
Fresh from advocating for affordable housing, he smiled at a well-dressed couple and then moved toward the curb to avoid a man with two backpacks. The Spirit stopped him. The man was already gone.
A neighborliness seminar in the auditorium at Center City Churchflourished
Gerald and Timothy, hands raised
At the capstone seminar of his doctoral work, Docusen saw a Camp Greene resident and a Bryant Park resident worshiping side by side after learning together across the seminar.
Questions people ask · asked along the way
Questions to sit with · 1 / 8
When you say the word neighbor, whom do you actually picture, and whom does that picture leave out?
On your own
Try it
01This week
Cross your Berryhill
This week, walk a block you usually leave out and greet one person there by name.
02This week
Learn before you ask
Read one chapter or talk on racial or economic division before you ask a friend to explain their life.
03This week
Psalm 139 on paper
Pray David’s search-me prayer, then write the one area the Spirit puts in front of you.
Ask the work
Ask how neighborliness would look on your street, in your friendships, and in the church you actually attend.
Go further
Questions people ask
Questions and misreadings
He first met the word as a strange mouthful of letters and then found it naming something the coffee-mug version of "love your neighbor" had not reached. Friendliness is part of what a dictionary will offer. The meaning he keeps comes from Jesus’ words and actions: love preached beside outcasts, justice spoken while defending the marginalized, forgiveness expressed toward enemies. In the introduction he prays the book will be a conversation starter. The inward journey with Jesus leads outward into the community. He still says he does not have a perfect definition, and that he will keep seeking to understand the word the way he seeks to understand his neighbors.
Contrasts
The locked binary is his. Chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 4 keep putting a stayed circle next to a crossed street, and they describe the stayed circle from inside it.
Staying in comfortable silos
Crossing dividing lines
Who counts
The house next door, or the gate
The people around us
Friendships
A circle that matches us
Friendships that reflect the city
First move
Silence, or a program at a distance
Look inward, then cross
Love’s order
Wait until you understand
Seek, and let love show up there
The street
Walk the familiar block
Cross Berryhill on purpose
Faith’s outflow
Love of God pools with our own
Love of God reaches a different neighbor
He does not describe the stayed side as cartoon malice. Elizabeth was generous, joyful, and full of people who had become family. The confession is that like people invited like people until the church no longer looked like the city. Bryant Park can want safety and still post alerts that treat Black neighbors as threats. Andrea’s crossing does not erase Jasmine’s fear of being priced out. The right-hand column is a practice: eye contact, a question, a walk, a friendship that can survive different conclusions. He sometimes speaks as if only two options remain once you see the inequality, ignore or engage. That is a decision, not a spectrum of partial credit. The rows stay with contrasts he actually draws.
When it is missing
When it is missing
Friendships that all resemble the leaderLoving neighbors
Neighbor defined by the next drivewayLoving neighbors
Silence when race or money comes upLoving neighbors
Eyes down when someone looks unlike usLoving neighbors
The other side of the street left unwalkedLoving neighbors
Crossing the street to fix peopleLoving God
Neighbors treated as puzzles or projectsLoving God
Friends recruited as the only teachersLoving God
Action with no search of the heartLoving God
Mark 12:28–34
The two loves that define the theme
Chapter 2 is his exposition. A lawyer asks which commandment is the most important, against a backdrop of more than six hundred commands. Docusen stresses that the asker is an expert in religious law, favored economically, politically, and socially, and that the leaders are trying to trap Jesus. Jesus answers with love of God from the whole person and then, without being prompted, adds love of neighbor as oneself. Docusen’s line is that this pair sums up the six hundred and outranks everything else. He refuses to let the second sentence collapse into the house next door. The Detroit study is his contemporary reading of the same text: if Kendra is in the room, the definition of neighbor has to include her. He also refuses to make the two loves interchangeable. They are distinct actions that are fully expressed together. The questions he then asks himself are the application: patient listening, friendships that reflect the city, friends who will speak honestly, and a response to challenge that is willing to learn. Andrea, in chapter 3, opens the same passage when Bryant Park stops feeling like a closed loop. The commentary here follows his reading and does not reproduce the NIV text.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
neighborliness
Embodying Jesus’ love to the people around us, in action.
His definition in the introduction: the embodiment of Jesus to those around us, taking on his love, grace, and genuine interest, pursuing love and justice while acting to bring more of both into the world. Chapter 2 adds that it is the behavior of Christians who seek to embody the love, understanding, curiosity, kindness, and care of Jesus. Friendliness is only the dictionary edge of the word.
the other half of the greatest commandmentalso "love your neighbor as yourself"
Jesus’ second sentence in Mark 12, love of neighbor.
He treats “love your neighbor as yourself” as the half the church has under-attended. It belongs with love of God, distinct and inseparable. Giving it proper attention is the pastoral aim of chapter 2.
dividing linesalso "crossing the street"
Racial, economic, and cultural boundaries he says Jesus crosses.
The lines that sort cities and churches by race, money, and culture. Berryhill Avenue is the picture: two lanes between Bryant Park and Camp Greene. Crossing them is the practice. He also uses Dr. Brian Blount’s line, as an epigraph, that cultural boundaries need kingdom trespass.
inattentional blindness
Missing what is in front of you because you have not needed to see it.
He calls it a psychological phenomenon and illustrates it with Big Earl’s tool shop, unseen until Hurricane Florence made him need a chainsaw. Applied to race and economics, it is how a middle-class white man can not know unequal treatment because he has not needed to know. Friends’ stories expose it.
implicit bias
Stereotypes that shape actions without a conscious decision.
His sentence: stereotypes that affect understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. The Tryon Street steps are the example. He traces them to what trusted adults modeled, including the phrase “those people,” not to a plan formed in the moment.
already and not yet
The kingdom tasted now, and still awaited, practiced across dividing lines.
He uses the theological pair for life on earth. The already is behaving now as heaven behaves, seeing each other and loving well. The not yet is the hatred, sickness, and division still shouted by the news. Gerald and Timothy worshiping side by side are his glimpse of the already.
like people invite like people
His journal line for a church that grew by resemblance.
Written after the Sunday in Elizabeth. Word of mouth was working, and it was reproducing one kind of person. He pairs it with the confession that the beautiful church looked nothing like the beautiful city.
