Over the last four weeks this series has looked at the three stories that every Christian needs to be able to share. These stores are the biblical/theological story, the congregational story and their personal faith story. Sharing these three stories is essential if a person is to be an effective witness to the goodness of God that we encounter in Jesus. Effective Christian leaders will spend significant time and energy helping people understand these three stories and giving them time to practice articulating them.

But stories are not shared in a vacuum. Every story has an audience and a good storyteller also knows how to share the story in a way that connects with the hearer. This means that the people in our congregations need to be aware of the communities around them and the people who live there.

In the first congregation where I served as pastor, I remember a church council meeting where we were discussing evangelism and reaching out to the local neighborhood. We were a mostly aging, working class white congregation. The neighborhood was now mostly lower income and non-white. Classism and racism were significant issues. As the conversation unfolded, tensions rose. Finally, one woman said, “I don’t know why we are worried about these people. If they were respectable they’d already be here.”

She (and others) had a very flat and inaccurate story about our neighbors. All thy needed to know is that in their mind, these people were not “respectable.” I could share many other stories where a congregation’s inaccurate and often negative views of the people around them precluded any hope of effective witness.

That’s why, in addition to the three faith stories every Christian needs to be able to tell, there is another story we all need to know. We need to know who our neighbors are and be able to describe them graciously. If the stories we think we know about our neighbors are negative and not able to be understood lovingly, then we need to revisit knowing our neighbors as the neighbors God has given us rather than a problem to be solved.

So, there are three stories every Christian needs to be able to share. But a fourth story, that of our neighbors, needs to be understood and grounded in love if we want to do that well and with integrity.