An Introduction to Ian
Last Spring, I was walking through the halls at FUMC Allen in North Texas when I noticed the words “Good Neighbor Experiment” flash up on a TV monitor. I was very happy in my job working at a school that rents space from the church, but my true passion, that I couldn’t wait to get home and do, was neighboring. I didn’t know it then, but the call to join the Good Neighbor Experiment (GNE) that I saw in that church would give me a lens to see so much of the work I had already done building relationships with my own neighbors and teaching countless individuals to do the same.
My neighboring journey over the last several years started with remembering. As a kid, I was nurtured by the most loving, tight-knit block of neighbors and that upbringing led me to seek to build something similar everywhere I go in my adult life. Talking with neighbors on my new street starting in 2018, I kept hearing the same collective memories surfacing about times when we left our doors unlocked and a neighbor could always stop by to borrow a cup of sugar. I felt very grounded by those stories at a time when I was otherwise burned out by the crises constantly churning through the news cycle. Reflecting on those crises, neighboring seemed to open a new way towards at least partially mitigating any of the problems I could dream up. If everyone knew their neighbors, celebrated each other, discovered each other’s gifts, and came together in some sort of forum where each person could have an effective say at the most local level, what couldn’t we solve?
That realization revealed a couple of mini-experiments I wanted to try on my block to really walk the walk. I took some produce from my front-yard garden beds to each house on my street as a way to get to know all my neighbors. It took me a year to work up the nerve to get around to all 11 houses, and I definitely failed numerous times, but I was able to release all that and keep reaching out- one house at a time. Those experiments added up and over the next three years, I had learned enough lessons to write a book on what I called “neighbor democracy,” a pathway to a more vibrant, participatory democracy of neighbors. If you aren’t familiar with our work here at the Neighboring Movement, the process I just described includes all the steps from our discernment tool that we call The ReCycle. I was walking a very similar path to my future colleagues in Wichita, but when I saw that bulletin about GNE, it just sounded like a cool name that might be aligned. Being at the height of a busy year, I excitedly typed “Good Neighbor Experiment” in google on my phone, and let the tab be buried for months unexplored. But I believe the Holy Spirit had no plans to let me forget.
I am always careful to label something a movement of the Holy Spirit to make sure I am not just backing up my own ego, but when huge movements of people in completely different parts of the world are coming to the same conclusions about neighboring and are organizing in the same way without knowing of each other, I am confident that the Spirit is doing something new in the world. This was brought home to me when, months later, I accidentally found myself in a zoom meeting led by a Parish priest in India who had been organizing almost my exact vision of neighbor democracy with millions of people over more than 40 years, only he called it “neighborocracy.” That gift reminded me of the tab on my phone, so I spent a weekend reading all about the Neighboring Movement. It was remarkably similar to the workshops I was running through the height of the pandemic, but their practice of Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) was the missing piece of the neighboring puzzle, perfectly linking together what I was doing in Texas and my aspirations to reach the neighboring heights of my friends in India.
Church members in Fort Worth, Texas gearing up to play Cormac Russell’s “We Can” game as part of a Neighborocracy DFW cohort last year.
When I ran across the job listing for the Faith-Based Programming Director, my heart was overwhelmed with a deep sense of alignment that I didn’t think was possible in a job. I owe everyone here at the Neighboring Movement so much for deepening my understanding of abundance in my community and in all of creation, and I am so grateful for the chance to help pass that abundance on to others across the country! My wife, Rachel, and I, have felt such warm hospitality in our initial trips to Wichita for the interview and onboarding. We have some obligations to finish up in Texas so we still haven’t made the move to Wichita. But we cannot wait to be back! Every member of this staff has gone above and beyond to prepare us for this big life change, and I cherish every meeting I get to have with SOCE neighbors and GNE facilitators, people just as passionate about neighboring as I am. I cannot tell you how nerdishly giddy it makes me to be able to walk out my office anytime I want to strike up conversation with people who have dedicated their lives to loving their literal, immediate neighbors. That thought makes the big journey ahead feel like a piece of cake!
