Sarah’s Reviews > No Longer Strangers: Transforming Evangelism with Immigrant Communities > Status Update

We must acknowledge that we are learners, and that we need each other, rather than assume that we are dispensers of wisdom in the soul fountain of knowledge in God’s truth. We must acknowledge that none of us is fully complete and knowing and seeing God’s truth.

Some wounds are better left unhealed, unless we forget and harden our hearts to the suffering of others

Where there is the presence of God, healing naturally takes place. And other words, healing is the effect of God’s presence.

A comprehensive view of loving our neighbor and therefore part of the Great Commission should lead us to conclude that people are emotional, physical, and spiritual beings with systems that impact them, and loving our neighbor means caring equally about all those dimensions

Many of us have treated the Great Commission as if it were the only thing Jesus said and we have reduced it to a mere call for evangelism (and) methodologies that prioritize isolated evangelism at the expense of loving our neighbors

We have learned that it is really important to answer the why behind loving our neighbor. How we answer that question determines our strategies for ministry, as well as how we measure success. When things are challenging, it helps to remind ourselves of how central and important it is to love our neighbors.

What is ridiculous is that while leading these types of ministries [meeting material needs], I would’ve said it was all about loving my neighbor. I didn’t even realize that I was the one to defining how to love my neighbor, and my neighbor felt like a product or a charity case. What was just below the surface was the self-righteous notion that I knew what was best.

Speaking up and telling the truth about refugees as individuals made in the image of God, who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect as the first way we can remind people of our common community. It’s often easier for us to “love our neighbors as ourselves“ when we believe what happened to them can happen to us.

There are plenty of important ways that we should love our neighbors on an interpersonal level… But when systemic injustice is at the root of a problem, loving our neighbor means advocacy as well

The church is called to bring the whole gospel not just two simple individuals, free but to challenge and change simple systems to allow for the flourishing of all