Ordinary life in most of the United States today involves an automobile, whether to drive to work or get basic needs like groceries. In an economy so based around the automobile, though, what happens if you can’t afford to repair your car? I’m joined today by two people who saw neighbors struggling when their cars broke down and felt compelled to do something, based on Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors.

Oran Warder and Ben Nielsen talk about the ministry Go In Peace based out of the St. Paul’s Lazarus Ministry and offered through Nielsen Auto Care.

Why did Jesus tell us that loving neighbors is so central to Christian life and witness? We often think Jesus wants us to help neighbors mostly to alleviate suffering. But what if Jesus wanted us to encounter neighbors—to know them in their beauty and complexity, and to be known by them just as Jesus knows us? Sam Wells shares his theology of Being With in connection to Jesus’s commandment to love neighbors and discusses his new book Constructing an Incarnational Theology.

Check out the books discussed – A Nazareth Manifesto and Constructing an Incarnational Theology.

What keeps congregations looking inward rather than also focusing on loving neighbors? There are all sorts of reasons—keeping the congregation going as an organization, keeping community fellowship strong, maintaining the building, the list goes on. Sometimes, though, fear keeps us from engaging our wider community. Not necessarily in the sense that we fear neighbors, but the fear that emerges from changing old habits, facing uncertainty, or entering transitions. How can we overcome fear and begin genuine discernment in how we love neighbors?

Bishop Susan Goff shares inspiring stories and perspectives about how congregations can face the future with creativity rather than fear. This episode is full of grounded, practical advice for congregations in transition.

Check out the episode about Church of the Resurrection’s affordable housing project, which Bishop Goff mentions!

Neighborhoods are not only part of a wider town or city, but also part of an environmental ecosystem. How can we build neighborhoods that care for these ecosystems? How can we build towns and cities where humans care for their environment, nurturing God’s gift of creation, rather than acting destructively toward it?

Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School joins the podcast to discuss how scriptures approach such questions. Check out her books including Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament and Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture.

More information on the sustainable burial practice of aquamation is available here.

As we walk or drive around our neighborhoods, it can be easy to ignore their past, especially when the build environment of the past isn’t there anymore. But the ways neighborhoods have changed over the years profoundly shapes the present – they often haunt the present. How neighborhoods and cities in the United States took shape in the mid-20th century shaped the world we live in today, and churches played a major role in that shift.

Greg Jarrell shows the central role White churches played in shaping neighborhoods during this period, and explores how Christians today can seek healing and repair for our cities and towns.

Check out Greg’s book Our Trespasses and his album How Bright the Path on Apple Music or Spotify.

The podcast episode on reparations that Greg mentioned is here.

Churches love to tell their stories, whether their founding, their accomplishments, or their connections with wider history. How can churches tell their full stories—not just the ones that make us feel good—and how can they be part of wider neighborhood efforts to tell their full histories? Public history has resources to help this process, and in this episode historian Denise Meringolo talks about how to tell such full stories. The way we tell our church’s stories has moral implications, and public history aids this process of morally reflective storytelling.

Check out Dr. Meringolo’s books Museums, Monuments, and National Parks and Radical Roots.

Looking for a public historian? Start by consulting a nearby college or university, or check out the National Council on Public History’s list of consultants.

Access to banking proves vital to participating in our economy, but many people have little or no access to mainstream banking. They sometimes have little choice but to take out predatory loans at extremely high interest rates—sometimes up to 400%. Exodus Lending in Minneapolis gives people an alternative banking tool to get out of predatory cycles.

Ross talks with their co-founder Meghan Olsen Biebighauser about how the organization started, how it listened to neighbors, and how this ministry opened up other vibrant avenues for loving neighbors in their city. Hear a powerful example of congregational discernment about loving neighbors.

Check out the work of Exodus Lending!

Love God and love neighbor are the two great commandments of Christianity given by Jesus. But what happens when Christians don’t love neighbors? What happens when loving neighbors becomes secondary for Christian public life rather than primary? David French explains the Christian right’s support for the MAGA movement, then offers an alternative vision for Christian engagement in public life based in faithful generosity toward neighbors.

Check out his book Divided We Fall and see his columns in the New York Times.

The David Hollinger book Ross mentioned is Christianity’s American Fate.