Love our neighbor

Does big always mean better?

I’m inviting Northwest Arkansas readers into a thought experiment. Most of us know our region is changing. It’s changing because it’s growing and diversifying. If you live in our region, you experience both the joys and challenges of such growth. On the one hand, we have access to more community resources than ever before, and we enjoy a lot of economic and cultural vitality that attends such growth. On the other hand, commutes are longer, and we are all affected by the growing pains of development.

I’ll give you a couple of examples in my own life. I coach soccer. So I used to drive across a small part of town to the Lewis Soccer Complex. But now, with the move of the soccer fields to Kessler Mountain Regional Park, I have to cross the entirety of Fayetteville, on weekdays during rush hour, to access what is admittedly a wonderful park facility.

On the other hand, I live and work in east Fayetteville. Some days, I don’t travel more than a mile from my house. Because I’m embedded in the east Fayetteville community, I know my neighbors, take my kids to the school just blocks away from my church and home, and feel part of what I would call — in the traditional language of Christianity — a parish.

I get that sometimes to go local you have to go big. To provide busing for those without cars, you have to have regional operations. Sometimes, the bigger regional or city-wide organization is essential for the good of the local neighborhoods.

But I also believe that to go big you have to go small. You might have heard of The Little Free Pantry. It started on the driveway of our congregation. Our council president Jessica McClard, together with a group of friends, built the first one. The Little Free Pantry is a grassroots, crowd-sourced solution to immediate and local need. Whether a need for food or a need to give, the Little Free Pantry facilitates neighbors helping neighbors, building community.

Literally, it is a micro-pantry. If there’s just one — and at first there was just one — it can provide one small immediate change in a neighborhood among a group of neighbors. But now, a couple of months later, there are many Little Free Pantries in Fayetteville and even more around the country. In fact, they’re all over the world, in such far flung places as New Zealand and Germany. So a very local idea now has global implications, but only because it was first a tiny, yet impactful, neighborhood project.

Over the course of the last few months, as part of work developing Canopy Northwest Arkansas, a refugee resettlement nonprofit, I’ve had the chance to interview leaders from across our region. In those conversations, I’ve learned, that increasingly, we are trying to think regionally. Our mayors, for example, consult with one another, so when they make decisions for their own cities, they take into account the impact of those decisions on neighboring cities. Many of our development organizations and our larger corporations are also driving us to think regionally.

That’s not a bad thing. But I wonder sometimes, if when we think regionally, do

we still have a small-town mentality that frames our regional imagination? So we want to scale up to the region what worked when we were still individual small towns, rather than considering each neighborhood as the new small town.

Take Fayetteville, for example. We keep just wanting to have one of everything — one high school, one library, one regional park. But is that the best for our city and the best for our neighborhoods? Would we be better served if there were a soccer league in each part of town — with one league meeting at Gulley Park, another meeting at Wilson, another on Wedington? Would we benefit from four really nice branch libraries in place of an expansion of the current single library? Is it really best to have just one really big high school?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do know it’s important to ask them. For a long time, congregations in particular had drifted culturally away from the idea of connecting to and impacting their immediate neighborhoods. As a pastor, I want to know my neighbors — my actual, physical, geographical neighbors. I want to think and act at that local, micro-level, because Jesus did in fact teach us to “Love our neighbor.” I take that teaching literally.