Churches and Faith Based Organizations
National Good Day is a perfect emphasis for your faith community!
August 2017 – Invitation Letter to Pastors and Churches to participate.
Faith groups are always looking for a simple and powerful way to build up their own community and reach out to others. National Good Day is a fun, easy, family-friendly celebration that faith organizations can encourage their members to host in their own neighborhoods. NGND is flexible enough for it to be tailored by and for each community. Some organizations might host a potluck dinner or ice cream social for their neighborhoods, others may invite the neighbors around the church building to join together in a community service project, such as planting trees or cleaning up the neighborhood, and still others may host a simple meet and greet event. NGND was established as an annual day to recognize, reinforce, and celebrate the relationships that are the fabric of our communities.
In addition, NGND:
- builds connections in your community
- increases feelings of safety
- is an opportunity for you to get to know your wider network of neighbors
- can help your organization gain visibility and recognition in your communities
Five Easy and Practical Steps For Churches to Get Involved
- Communicate — Include a brief blurb in your weekly written or e-news announcements leading up to the day (see below)
- Resource — Include the website address www.good-neighbor.org in these communications which has helpful and easy resources for ideas and activities.
- Serve — Encourage your small groups, life groups, Sunday school classes etc.. to use this as a serving and connecting opportunity in September.
- Model — Personally share in a sermon as an illustration the opportunity to be good neighbors and how you are personally going to do this on NGND.
- Celebrate — Collect stories to share with the church following NGND to reinforce our living out the Great Commandment.
Communications Blurb – Print or E-news
National Good Neighbor Day is Sunday, September 17th. What would it look like for you to be a good neighbor? Jesus spoke and modeled the importance of loving our neighbors. Join with other individuals, families and churches in the community as we together live out our faith through simple words and acts of kindness. For resources on how you can be a good neighbor and ways to get involved, check out the website www.good-neighbor.org
Next Door As It Is In Heaven – Neighboring Seminar – September 16, 2017 with Lance Ford
REGISTER HERE
Author and missional practitioner Lance Ford will share insights and best practices of what it mean to live out God’s Kingdom in your neighborhood in this half-day seminar. Every participant will receive the book Next Door As It Is In Heaven and a six-week small group study guide.
There was a time when neighbors knew each other’s names, when small children and the old and infirm alike had more than their families looking out for them. There was a time when our neighborhoods were our closest communities.
No more. Neighborhoods have become the place where nobody knows your name. Into this neighborhood crisis the words of Jesus still ring true: Second only to the command to love God is the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
In Next Door as It Is in Heaven, Lance Ford and Brad Brisco offer first principles and best practices to make our neighborhoods into places where compassion and care are once again part of the culture, where good news is once again more than words, and where the love of God can be once again rooted and established.
