Better Together
How Christians Can Be a Welcome Influence in Their Neighborhoods
While public opinions about the Church at large are mixed, feelings toward individual Christians are often much warmer. Redeeming the Church’s broader reputation may need to involve recommitting to its personal presence.
Barna Group undertook this study to learn more about the types of people who are taking initiative in their communities—who gather, donate, serve, create, teach, mobilize and innovate, alongside other passionate neighbors, to meet needs around them. Better Together, the latest report in an ongoing research partnership with Lutheran Hour Ministries, seeks to understand Christians who love their neighborhoods of their own volition, even outside of professional obligation or the formal structure of ministry programs. Join us in learning from—and following the lead of—an exemplary minority of organized, altruistic individuals who have contributed to outward-focused action in their communities.
Alongside new research and data visualizations, Better Together includes:
- Profiles of different types of people who participate in volunteer groups and what drives them toward compassion and collaboration
- Details about how healthy groups form, communicate and grow
- Insights about how churches can step up (or step aside) to empower laity and benefit communities
- Interviews with Gabe Lyons, Makoto Fujimura, Becca Stevens and a panel of faith and nonprofit leaders from across the U.S.
This report is intended to help churches understand the impact and inner workings of groups of good neighbors, and to help leaders develop a vision for how these members might complement their ministry goals.
Better Together Kit
Learn how to love your neighbors and your neighborhood with the new Better Together Kit. Each kit is filled with tools that will help you make a difference right in your own community.
The Hopeful Neighborhood
What Happens When Christians Pursue the Common Good
Are you tired of hearing people dismiss the church as an irrelevant relic? (Do you secretly wonder if they are right?) In his latest book titled The Hopeful Neighborhood, LHM’s Content Manager Don Everts explores an exciting reality that is revealed in Scripture, shown throughout history, and confirmed with the latest research from Barna Group and Lutheran Hour Ministries: when Christians pursue the common good of the neighborhood, the world stands up and notices. This book is filled with constructive, practical ways that Christians and churches bless those around them.
The Hopeful Neighborhood Field Guide
Based on original research from Barna Group and Lutheran Hour Ministries, this Hopeful Neighborhood Field Guide walks you through a simple, powerful process for blessing your own neighborhood, with six sessions on discovering the gifts of your community, imagining the possibilities, and pursuing the common good. Included exercises and assessments provide practical tools for how to turn your hopes into a concrete reality.
Better Together Monograph
How Christians Can Be a Welcome Influence in Their Neighborhoods
Better Together, the third in a series of studies produced in partnership with Barna Group, seeks to understand Christians who love their neighbors and their neighborhoods and want to make a difference right where they live. It’s challenging work, but the results can be life changing — because in life and in ministry, we really are better together.
Neighborhood Bingo
Looking for a fun way of getting to know your neighbors and neighborhood better? Try playing a game of Neighborhood Bingo! This game features dozens of questions and activities designed to help you naturally get to know your neighbors better.
Booklets for Adults
How can we be better neighbors in our communities? In the Everyone is a Gift booklet, adults will be reminded to see others as God’s creation, while Love Thy Neighborhood shares practical advice for caring for and helping our neighbors right where we live.
Everyone is a Gift
This booklet reminds us that people are God’s creation who possess special gifts from Him. God can transform us to see others how He sees them. When this happens, doors open, attitudes shift, conversations change, and relationships can grow because our perspective is grounded in love not divisiveness.Love Thy Neighborhood
This booklet highlights the biblical theme of God’s people caring for and helping their neighbors in the communities where they live. This is done with Christ-centered service, a loving witness, and by showing a genuine, non-partial concern for those in one’s neighborhood.
Booklets for Children
Encourage your pre-school to third-grade children to love their neighbors and take care of them through the rhyming booklet, I Love My Neighborhood. The Precious in His Sight booklet will show children how we should be mindful and respectful of differences in others.
I Love My Neighborhood
This rhyming children’s booklet emphasizes how we should love our neighbors and take care of our neighborhoods. Interactions between kids and adults highlight key concepts such as friendliness, working together, loving others, and sharing one’s faith in Jesus.BUY NOW Read / Download the Book
Precious in His Sight
This children’s booklet shows how we should all be mindful and respectful to differences in others. When a physically challenged schoolgirl suffers crude remarks, her friend steps in. She urges offenders to stop, explaining about human differences, how God loves us as we are, and the need to get along.
The Hopeful Neighborhood Project
The Hopeful Neighborhood Project is a collaborative network committed to improving neighborhood well-being around the world. Our resources and online network equip and encourage neighbors to work together, using their gifts and the gifts of their community, to pursue the common good of their neighborhood.
Read stories about neighbors making a difference, learn about your own gifts by taking the Every Gift inventory, and consider joining the project at hopefulneighborhood.org.
Lutheran Hour Ministries (LHM) has partnered with Barna Group—an industry leader for research-based insights about faith and culture, leadership and vocation, and generational groups—on a critical three-year study of faith in America. This bold collaboration will allow LHM to create resources and online courses that address the needs of both the churched and non-churched.
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