Dave Runyon is the Executive Director of CityUnite and co-author with Jay Pathak of The Art of Neigboring.
Herb: Dave, how long have you been with CityUnite
Dave: About seven years. And the neighboring initiative got kicked off about six years ago.
Herb: And then when did you and Jay Pathak write The Art of Neighboring.
Dave: That was three years ago. It was nice that we had a couple of years into the movement before we actually wrote anything about it.
Herb: So you were writing from experience.
Dave: Yes.
Herb: So, how has the book been received?
Dave: Way better than we thought. We had pretty low expectations. The book has sold about sixty-five thousand copies, which for two people who have had zero presence in that world is surprising. We we’ve learned over the last five years since we’ve done this is that the churches that actually begin to put neighboring into their DNA do three things: 1) The senior leadership actually does it in their own lives. They begin to have a value for proximity based relationships. 2) The church is a good story teller. It either invites people to tell stories up front of the congregation or they tell it through video. 3) The church is repeatedly telling people that this counts. What you do in your front yard is real ministry. It’s just as important as serving on the elder board or children’s ministry. So it is just constantly raising the value of neighboring with it’s people.
Herb: Can you give me some names of churches in your area that are doing a good job on neighboring?
Dave: Mile High Vineyard for sure. Jay Pathak [the pastor of Mile High] wrote the book with me and they’ve structured a lot of their church around proximity and neighborhood relationships. John Mars and what they’re doing at Arvada Covenant. They’re doing a great job. Tim Roseno at Abundant Life Community has really done a lot of hard work in pushing this into the lives of his people. My church, Foothills Community Church, Faith Bible Chapel, I can just go on.
Herb: How many years have gone by since you began the neighboring initiative in your neighborhood?
Dave: Six years ago my wife and I decided to do a one year experiment. We’re still working on our one year experiment! We can’t go back.
Herb: Describe the changes that have happened on your block.
Dave: The biggest changes have happened for my family and I. We’re more into slowing down so we can be present in our neighborhood. So this practice has really changed our pace of life. I’ve learned to be in relationship with people who are a lot different than me, people I wouldn’t normally choose to be around. I normally choose to be around funny people who love sports. When you have the practice of being in relationship with people in proximity is that, one, it guarantees you’re not going to be in the Christian bubble. Once you start building relationships based on proximity, people think about the world totally differently than you, they have a lot of different values than you do, and God’s used that. I got into this thinking that this would be an amazing evangelism tool. And that’s true. I’ve got some incredible stories. But when I look back, it’s actually the best discipleship method ever. The ways that God has used this to stretch my wife and I and our kids has been pretty incredible.
Herb: Have your kids caught the vision?
Dave: Oh yeah. I think kids are cheating when it comes to neighboring.
Herb: It’s kind of natural, isn’t it?
Dave: It is. They totally get it.
Herb: When I think about neighboring I do think in those terms. I think of when I was a kid and I would spontaneously interact with other kids on the block. So why don’t I do that?
What about nationally? Do you see this movement spreading beyond the Denver area?
Dave: I’m encouraged. There’s a big wave coming. About thirteen or fourteen years ago a guy named Randy Frazee wrote about neighboring.
Herb: He wrote The Connecting Church: Beyond Small Groups to Authentic Community and then he wrote Making Room for Life. And, shockingly, that was one of the first times that an evangelical Christian had talked about literal neighboring. And then, as far as we [Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak, his co-author] can tell, there’s about a twelve year gap between when he wrote The Connecting Church and our call to focus on literal neighboring. There was just a huge void for over a decade. Then we wrote and now there is just all kinds of writing coming out around this. And so I’m really encouraged.
Herb: Who else is writing on community?
Dave: Amy Lively wrote a book called How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird. It’s a great book. And the whole missional conversation. What neighboring is is just missional for dummies. We’re just making missional and incarnational as simple as possible. And so there’s this whole flood of writing, the Hugh Halters [The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational CommunityI], and the Lance Fords [Right Here, Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People], the Michael Frosts [Living Missionally in an Age of Disengagement]. There’s a great wave coming.
Herb: Do you see a parallel development in the secular world?
Dave: The secular world is just way ahead of us–embarrassingly so. All the great research. All the stuff that’s been out there on the value of proximity based relationships. The whole new urbanism movement. When we decided to try to learn about neighboring, all we were reading was secular sociologists. City people–city planners, city managers–they get this. It’s in their DNA. Because they know when people love where they live all the way down to their block, good things happen. So our view is, when Christians love where they live, really good things happen.
Herb: If someone wanted to learn more about your ministry, where would they go on the Internet?
Dave: We give everything away. ArtofNeighboring.com has all the best practices, the best resources that we can find to offer. So that’s a great place. Locally, if you want to know just about how we’re thinking about how faith, government and business leaders work togeter, CityUnite is the umbrella organization that I work for, so CityUnite.org would be a good place to start.
Herb: If you were a pastor and you wanted to implement some of these principles, how would you go about doing it?
Dave: I would not do a sermon about this right away. I would walk outside my front door and I’d take stock of how well I know my neighbors. Are there some who are people of peace–there are open doors to their homes? Are there some who actually don’t want a relationship? Then don’t go chase them. Don’t feel like you need to be best friends with everyone of your neighbors. When I walk outside my front door, I just pray, “God, what’s the next small step I can take here?” And then actually do it.
Herb: Do it so you can be an example for your flock.
Dave: Yes. Once this stuff gets inside of you, you won’t be able to shut up about it. You’ll be jamming it into sermons where it doesn’t belong. Start by learning some names. Learn, retain and use the names of the people on your block. Do those three things: learn, retain and use. That’s the biggest obstacle to take the next step towards organic relationship. So it important to think of people as important enough to learn their name.
Herb: Thanks so much for your time, Dave. I’ve enjoyed getting together with you.
June 26, 2015
Westminster, Colorado