Engaging our neighborhood: Part 1

So this is our neighborhood...from the air. You can see the Gowanus expressway (thanks Mr. Moses!) that cuts us off from Sunset Park and Dyker Heights. In the bottom right corner of the expressway, just to the right of the long strip of green that is Lief Erickson Park, is our church.

And from my office here, I often sit and wonder how to engage with the whole rest of the neighborhood you see there. From our little corner of the neighborhood, the rest of our neighbors feel miles away sometimes, and it seems as though life in Bay Ridge just happens in front of me and I'm unable to really engage with the neighborhood, its life, systems and rhythms, and most of all its people in any meaningful way.

So I've been asking, how do we engage with our neighbors in meaningful, organic (perhaps normal is a better word here) ways? I meet monthly with some pastors to talk and pray and one of our questions to talk and pray through is; if people had language, how would they be crying out to God?

I like this question because it forces us to pray and ask God to show us the hidden cries of our neighborhood. It forces us to be thoughtful about who we live next to and who we share life with here by the Narrows. It forces us to depend on God to reveal what he is doing here and how we can participate in that.

Engaging the neighborhood has to involve this kind of questioning.

But these questions only get us so far. To rely on these questions sets us up to make some mistakes.  There are other questions we have to ask, other ideas to consider as we think about engaging the neighborhood.

More on that soon...