The Hopeful Neighborhood

What Happens When Christians Pursue the Common Good

Don Everts

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780830848034
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830848041
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Are you tired of hearing people dismiss the church as an irrelevant relic? (Do you secretly wonder if they are right?) Don Everts explores an exciting reality that is revealed in Scripture, shown throughout history, and confirmedin the latest research: when Christians pursue the common good of the neighborhood, the world stands up and notices. It turns out this is exactly what we're called to do. When Christians make good things, we bring blessings and hope to our local community.

With original research from the Barna Group and Lutheran Hour Ministries on how Christians relate to our neighborhoods, this book is filled with constructive, practical ways that Christians and churches bless those around us. As Christians join together for the common good, we bring hope to the world, credibility to the church, and glory to God.

Appendix 1

Research Partners

Barna Group

Barna Group (barna.com) is a research firm dedicated to providing actionable insights on faith and culture, with a particular focus on the Christian church. Since 1984, Barna has conducted more than one million interviews in the course of hundreds of studies and has become a go-to source for organizations that want to better understand a complex and changing world from a faith perspective.

Lutheran Hour Ministries

Lutheran Hour Ministries (lhm.org) is a trusted expert in global media that equips and engages a vibrant volunteer base to passionately proclaim the gospel to more than 100 million people worldwide each week. Through its headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, and ministry centers on six continents, LHM reaches into more than fifty countries, often bringing Christ to places where no other Christian evangelistic organizations are present.

LHM and Barna are partnering on a three-year research endeavor to reveal how Americans are expressing their faith. The first year of research looked at how individuals engage in spiritual conversations—for more on these findings you can read The Reluctant Witness: Discovering the Delight of Spiritual Conversations. The second year of research looked at the influence of households on spiritual development—see The Spiritually Vibrant Home: The Power of Messy Prayers, Loud Tables, and Open Doors for more on this study. The third year, which The Hopeful Neighborhood is based on, focuses on the impact of Christians on the broader community.

Appendix 2

Research Methodology

This quantitative study consisted of two online surveys. The first was a survey of 2,500 US adults conducted July 25–August 19, 2019. The sample included 1,505 US practicing Christians (meaning they self-identify as Christian, say their faith is very important in their life, and have attended church within the past month other than for a holiday service or for a special event, such as a wedding or funeral). The margin of error for this sample is + /- 1.7 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.

Researchers set quotas to obtain a minimum readable sample by a variety of demographic factors and weighted the general population data by region, ethnicity, education, age, and gender to reflect their natural presence in the American population (using US Census Bureau data for comparison). Partly by the nature of using an online panel, these respondents are slightly more educated than the average American, but Barna researchers adjusted the representation of college-educated individuals in the weighting scheme accordingly.

The second quantitative online survey was conducted among 508 US Protestant senior pastors on July 25-August 13, 2019. These pastors were recruited from Barna’s pastor panel (a database of pastors recruited via probability sampling on annual phone and email surveys) and are representative of US Protestant churches by region, denomination, and church size. The margin of error for this sample is + /- 4.2 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.

This study also included ethnographic research and qualitative interviews with eighteen individuals who had some kind of experience working with community groups and organizations. These interviews, conducted July–September 2019, used a flexible script to learn how such groups form, how they work, and what makes them effective.1

Appendix 3

Definitions

Practicing Christians are self-identified Christians who say their faith is very important in their lives and have attended a worship service within the past month.

Group participants at some time in their adulthood have had the following experiences in some kind of group, club, or other association:

• Their participation was not required for their education or schooling.
• Their participation was not directly related to their job.
• The group included three or more people.
• The group met three or more times.
• The group provided some external benefits reaching beyond its participants. Though those benefits might have extended widely, they had to have some local impact, meaning in one’s city or town. Additionally, while a church or Christian community could have benefitted, it could not have been the only beneficiary of the group’s actions.1

Notes

Introduction: Living Above Place

1Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 24.

2Don Everts, The Reluctant Witness: Discovering the Delight of Spiritual Conversations (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).

3Don Everts, The Spiritually Vibrant Home: The Power of Messy Prayers, Loud Tables, and Open Doors (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020).

4Barna Group, Better Together: How Christians Can Be a Welcome Influence in Their Neighborhoods (Ventura, CA: Barna Groups, 2020).

5John McKnight and Peter Block, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2010), 5.

1 Pursue the Common Good

1See John E. Hartley, Genesis, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000), 59; and Franz Delitzsch, A New...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Pursue the Common Good
• Use Every Gift
• Love Everyone Always
• Give God Glory
• Join the Revolution
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• Praise for Hopeful Neighborhood
• About the Author
• Other Titles by Don Everts