Have you seen our new billboard on I-74 in Brownsburg?

Good Samaritan is starting the Love Your Neighbor idea in Hendricks County as a way of simply encouraging our communities and neighborhoods and people to get to know, understand, and care for the people who live around us. Not just the people we like or who look like, think like, or believe what we do. Instead, Love Your Neighbor means what it says: we seek to love and care for and include every neighbor, no exceptions.

As Christians, we love our neighbors unconditionally because Jesus taught us to do so as the primary act of our faith. Once, a religious scholar asked Jesus which was the greatest religious commandment. “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this…’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-29) For Jesus, it was impossible to love God if one wasn’t loving her or his neighbor.

In a world where our divisions and differences can seem like barriers, our simple movement seeks to cross bridges and cultural divides, to encourage curiosity and understanding, and to build goodwill among people of many different ages, social backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders, faiths, and political viewpoints.

The Love Your Neighbor idea is an experiment for Good Sam’s. It came to our Community Connections Team as the result of a free marketing consultation with Marian University Marketing and Business students in Spring 2018. These college students encouraged us to pique people’s interests with an open-minded idea that appeals to many folks who might not be looking for a church, but who nonetheless align with and support our values of inclusion, acceptance, and love for all people. Our hope is to drive people to the LoveYourNeighbor.in website so that they can learn more. When they arrive there, we hope to surprise and delight them with a church that echoes their values, and invite them to be a part of our worship and service here on the West Side.

Stay tuned for more Love Your Neighbor developments soon…we’ll be experimenting with this theme through May 2019.