Love Your Neighborhood Article

When Helping Actually Helps

We have all seen the ‘helicopter parent’ at social events—the parent who, out of great love for their child and desire to protect them, goes too far and creates patterns of behavior that will be difficult to overcome.

It is admittedly a fine, blurry line, but it is easy to develop cycles of dependency that actually harm a kid’s development. When you always do for, your child never learns to do for themselves.

This actually works against the parents’ long-term hopeful outcome for the children: to be flourishing adults. What’s more, in the moment, it is easy to justify that response—they need me, they don’t know what they’re doing, what will people think?!

When Helping Hurts

This relationship has an unfortunate corollary to how we often approach outreach ministries and/or community service.

We see people in need, have a sincere and faith-driven desire to serve, and rush into a context we honestly don’t know much about and try to fix things. Our ‘helicopter neighboring’ ends up often contributing to the negative trajectory of neighbors we are trying to help.

A Different Path Forward

In other articles, we will explore some of the underlying reasons for this. Here we only want to address how Love Your Neighborhood provides a different path forward, an approach that you and your faith community can take that looks more like the way of Jesus.

You can do a quick evaluation of your current practices by answering this question: How is our outreach / service / ministry contributing to the restoration and activation of our neighbors? In other words, what are we doing for that we should be helping neighbors do for themselves? 

Even if you are in a crisis response or relief-based ministry (which are essential ministries!), how can you create pathways for people, instead of counting them merely as a number in a program or project? 

If this is a new concept, we highly recommend picking up a copy of Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton or When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. These books are foundational in shifting our traditional views of “charity work.”

We also have another great resource available to us to learn from: The Gospels! The Gospels were not written as a how-to manual or even as a descriptive biography as we know them today, but they do show us how Jesus went about his mission, ministry, and disciple-making, and we can observe his approach and draw out principles for us to contextualize for today. Here are just a few of those observations:

  • As Jesus pursued his ultimate mission, his ministry left whole people in his wake. Whether it was the Woman at the Well, Zacchaeus, the Leprous Man, the Adulteress Woman, etc., these neighbors were restored and then activated into Kingdom work.
  • Jesus famously spent the majority of his public ministry developing twelve young men for next generational leadership.
  • Jesus’ primary aim was for an abundant life for everyone, not merely survival. He did this through changing the very environment in which we live, getting to the root cause, and ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven to bring about an abundant life for all.
  • There is the cryptic passage that states Jesus would not perform many signs and wonders because of his hometown’s faith. It seems that this scene does not convey that Jesus could not, but a recognition that, because of their faithlessness, people would not join with him. By seemingly refusing to perform many signs and wonders, he shows us that participation in the change process is the only effective way towards transformation.

A Simple but Powerful Framework

A Love Your Neighborhood initiative is constructed on the scaffolding of these teachings (and many more!) and built on the foundation of all these principles. 

While there is an endless depth to LYN because neighbors and neighborhoods are endlessly complex, it can also be simple. Are neighbors themselves participating in the change process, and are our activities of ministry at least contributing to wholistic restoration? If your answers to these questions are ‘yes,’ then we believe you are helping neighbors in a way that actually helps!

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