Simple Church - Jesus + People + Place

Check out what Neighboring looks like in Jackson - YOUTUBE

When we first started talking about loving our neighbors, it sounded simple—almost too simple.

What if God has strategically placed you exactly where you live—not by accident, not because of the housing market, not because of your job—but for the purpose of loving the people who live around you?

Not loving people in general.

Not loving humanity.

But loving your actual neighbors.

The ones across the street.

The ones next door.

The ones behind you.

For a long time, that idea felt idealistic—even naïve. But over the last decade, it has become the center of how we express following Jesus. And we’ll be honest: it’s hard.

A City with Two Tracks

To understand why loving your neighbors is difficult, you have to understand the place we live.

In the early 1900s, Fresno was still becoming a city. The Jackson neighborhood began as farmland—alfalfa fields, to be exact—until a streetcar line routed through the area and transformed it into one of the most desirable neighborhoods in town. Huntington Boulevard became known for its beauty: wide medians, tree-lined streets, and grand homes alongside modest bungalows. Teachers, business owners, and civic leaders moved in.

But another story was unfolding alongside the beauty.

Like many American neighborhoods, Jackson was shaped by racial covenants, redlining, and exclusionary zoning. These policies legally kept people of color out for decades. During World War II, Japanese internment camps were built right at the edge of the neighborhood.

Progress and injustice ran side by side—

like two rails of the streetcar tracks that once ran down Huntington Boulevard.

Those two rails still exist—not just in Jackson, but across Fresno. This is a city full of life and pain, diversity and division, creativity and neglect. Fresno spans 112 square miles and is made up of 92 neighborhoods. It is one of the most diverse cities in the country—and one of the most underserved.

So the question becomes unavoidable:

What is God’s heart for a place like this? And where do we fit in?

Jesus, People, and Place

When we started Neighborhood Church, we didn’t begin with a church model. We began with Jesus.

Jesus didn’t float above the world offering ideas. He entered it. He took on flesh. He moved into a neighborhood. He walked streets, shared meals, healed bodies, confronted injustice, and announced that the kingdom of God had come near.

Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That’s not abstract language—it’s place-based language. Heaven invading earth. God renovating real people in real places.

As we returned to Scripture, a pattern kept emerging:

• God creates the world good.

• Sin fractures people and places.

• God does not abandon what’s broken—He comes to it.

• And then He empowers His people with the Holy Spirit and sends them back into the world as agents of renewal.

In Jeremiah 29, God tells His people to seek the peace and prosperity of the city where they live—to plant gardens, build homes, raise families, and pray for the city’s good. In Luke 4, Jesus declares His mission to bring good news to the poor, freedom to the oppressed, and sight to the blind. In Nehemiah, a man weeps over a broken city and then gathers ordinary people to rebuild it.

This isn’t just spiritual renewal. It’s holistic renewal.

People and places matter to God.

So we began to talk about three values that wouldn’t let us go:

Jesus. People. Place.

Not as a slogan—but as a way of life.

The Crisis We Didn’t Expect

If we’re honest, the hardest part of the last ten years hasn’t been resistance from the outside. It’s been doubt from the inside.

We doubted whether what we were doing was effective.

Like most church leaders, we had been shaped by a particular scorecard:

• How many people are showing up?

• How many salvations this year?

• Is the budget growing?

• Are there more programs, more staff, more infrastructure than the year before?

And the truth is, in a small, neighborhood-based expression of church, those numbers don’t always look impressive. Sometimes they look discouraging.

There were years when three or four people came to faith—not dozens. Seasons when growth felt painfully slow. Moments when we looked around and wondered, Is this actually working?

What we eventually realized was this:

We were measuring the wrong thing.

We were measuring outputs when God was inviting us to measure inputs.

Not, “How big is it?”

But, “Are we being faithful?”

Not, “How visible are we?”

But, “Are we present?”

Not, “Is this impressive?”

But, “Is this obedient?”

That shift didn’t lower the bar.

It raised it.

When the Soil Feels Too Hard

There were deeper doubts too.

Moments when the brokenness around us felt overwhelming—neighbors’ lives tangled in addiction, trauma layered upon trauma, generational poverty that no program could fix.

More than once, we prayed, “Unless the Lord brings Kingdom renewal, nothing will happen.”

And beneath that prayer was a quieter fear:

What if God doesn’t actually change neighbors and neighborhoods like this?

That fear exposed something in us—not a lack of belief in God’s existence, but a lack of trust in His power.

So we had to relearn trust. To believe again that transformation doesn’t come from our effort, intelligence, or strategies—but from God’s Spirit moving through ordinary people in ordinary places.

The Cost of following Jesus

There’s another part of this story that matters: it’s costly.

We moved from a comfortable, affluent neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, into the Jackson neighborhood. Others moved here too. We bought homes. We committed to staying.

And staying means dealing with what’s real.

It means sometimes experiencing theft.

It means being confronted with neighbors battling addiction.

It means hearing domestic violence through thin walls.

It means confronting your own fear, prejudice, and desire for comfort.

Following Jesus in a place like this requires giving something up.

Comfort.

Upward mobility.

The illusion of control.

In many ways, it means trading the American Dream for a Kingdom dream.

Not because comfort is evil—but because Kingdom love is costly.

A Simpler, Deeper Way of Being the Church

Over time, as we watched neighbors meet Jesus, we began asking a simple question:

What is the most simple way to be the church and still be faithful to Scripture?

We landed on three essentials:

• Worship of Jesus

• Shared life together

• A shared mission

Jesus. People. Place.

Instead of growing one thing larger, we chose to grow many smaller sized things. Homes instead of buildings. Meals instead of programs. Shared practices instead of polished events.

We’re not trying to be a small church. We’re trying to be a simple and diversified church—a network of gatherings rooted in neighborhoods, living the same values and sharing the same mission.

As we’ve grown, we’ve begun to imagine a future with dozens of gatherings scattered across neighborhoods—ordinary followers of Jesus loving their neighbors faithfully.

Loving Your Eight

So where does this leave you?

You don’t have to move.

You don’t have to fix your city.

You don’t have to solve systemic injustice by yourself.

You just have to love your neighbors.

Start with the eight closest to you:

• Three across the street

• Three behind you

• One on your left

• One on your right

Pray for them. Learn their names. Wake up each day and look for the moments God provides for you to be fully present.

Some of those moments will be beautiful.

Some will be painful.

All of them will matter.

“Wake up, sleeper,” Paul writes, “and Christ will shine on you… making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”

God is providing opportunities to do the very thing He has already asked you to do:

“Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater.”

(Mark 12:30–31)