Neighborliness: 3 ideas for the Church with David Docusen

This transcript is edited for length and clarity. To hear the entire interview, see the video above.

Meet David Docusen of The Neighborliness Center and IMN

Jason: I’m Jason Bowman with ArtSpeak Creative. We exist to help life-changers reach more people. And I get the privilege of connecting with one of those life changers right here. David Docusen is a good friend of mine. He’s a pastor, a speaker and author of the book Neighborliness: Love Like Jesus. Cross Dividing Lines. Transform Your Community. and Tomorrow & the Days to Come.

He’s all about crossing dividing lines, taking next steps, loving like Jesus, and transforming your community. He’s a founder and president of the Neighborliness Center. And, as of last year, the president of IMN, International Ministry Network, a network of friends in ministry. 

What does “Neighborliness” mean for the Church? 

Jason: How do you define neighborliness, and what does it mean for the Church?

David: Neighborliness is embodying the presence of Jesus to the world around us. That’s about as simple as it gets. When Jesus was asked, what is the most important thing that we can focus on in our life of faith, to summarize it, he said loving God and neighbors. 

And it hit me, maybe about ten years ago, that I think that as the church and as the body of Christ, we do a really good job at the front half of the greatest commandment, of putting together things that help us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. And after planting a couple churches and starting some nonprofit organizations, I started to realize, I don’t think that we’re actually very good at the second half of that greatest commandment. 

And so that word neighborliness just started to kind of roll around in my spirit. It started to kind of be that thing that I couldn’t stop addressing in my own life, my own heart, my own spirit. Neighborliness was this word that I didn’t really know what it meant. And so I just decided to define it for myself, and it became a much bigger part of my life than I ever would have anticipated.

The story behind The Neighborliness Center

Jason: What’s your ministry story, and how did it lead to launching The Neighborliness Center?

David: We had planted our second church in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. We grew to a couple hundred people after five years, and I just looked out one Sunday and I was like, oh my goodness, we all look alike. And it hit me that there were a lot of people there who just looked like me. 

And, it really started to bother me because the reason that we went to this city was because of diversity. We wanted to see the expression of Christ in a city that had a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different economic backgrounds, a lot of different religious backgrounds, racial backgrounds, etc. 

And, God just started to really break my heart about these topics. We moved our church to a 40,000 square foot warehouse. And that location changed my life because we were put right on the dividing line between the very wealthy inner city and the overlooked, marginalized, and pushed to the side inner city. The average income on one side of the street was well over $100,000 a year. The other side of the street was around $27,000 a year. 

The place and people are what ended up teaching me the lessons. Sitting with families who are walking to our church from very different backgrounds and seeing the conflict, but then also the beauty that came out of crossing dividing lines of race, economics, and even political perspectives. So that’s where the neighborliness message was born.

And so we started to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in those types of conversations and how to agree and disagree as a part of the body of Christ. That led to the creation of the Neighborliness Center, which now is able to help churches all over the world explore those types of conversations and what we do in community.

How can leaders love their communities like Jesus?

Jason: What’s one thing leaders can do right now to love their community like Jesus would?

David: There are actually two things I would say: courage and curiosity. I think it takes courage to look at the issues in your community long enough to allow it to actually impact you. So courage to focus on what’s actually going on in your community. Not just what’s going on in your church, but the major things that are impacting your community. 

Have the courage to stay in it long enough to learn, and then curiosity to keep digging. One of my favorite stories is a huge health care initiative started through our church because there was a nurse that was in our church who came up to me. She heard me talking like this. It was very early in the process. And she said, “Did you know that our hospital has a community engagement arm?” She said, “What if, what if I helped you with those conversations?” And we just got some conversations going, and then we went together to the community engagement arm and said, “Hey, if you had a really willing church, how could you use us?”

And all of a sudden, we started conversations. If you fast forward two years, a $2 million health care clinic was built in our church for the community that the health care community paid for. It started with a nurse who was in our church that said, hey, this is kind of my world.

And so I would just say, courage to really stick with it. And then, like Revelation 3 talks about, God is the guy that opens doors that no man can close, and He closes doors that no man can open. 

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