12: Summering & Neighboring in MHK

**SPEAKER_1** (0:19)
All right, welcome, Manhattan, and otherwise, welcome to episode 12 of The Chopping Block. Today we're talking summering and neighboring in MHK.
Call it Manhattan, some call it Manhattanin, some call it Manhappiness, some call it the Little Apple, whatever you call it. We're glad to have you, whenever you're watching this, if you're watching this the morning, evening, middle of the night, from your phone, from your computer, thanks for welcoming us in to The Chopping Block, where we take tasty morsels that didn't quite make it in our Sunday evening sermon, and bring them straight to you.
So as I said, we're talking neighboring and summering and MHK. So the Tallgrass Mission Statement is pretty simple. Because God first loved us, we exist to love God and love our neighbors. And so that's what we're about at Tallgrass Church. So I wanted to share quickly a resource, a book that's really informed and shaped the first year of our church, really. It's called The Neighboring Church, by Rick Rusaw and Brian Mavis. So The Neighboring Church, Getting Better at What Jesus Said Matters Most.
And so we've been talking about, what does it look like to love our actual neighbors? So our neighbor from the biblical definition could be anyone in the world that we can influence and have access to and bless in some way. But we've been trying to work at even the neighbors in our neighborhood who lives next door, learning their names, learning their histories, learning their hopes, their hurts, being present with the people that we're actually in proximity to. And of course, that takes time. So if you need help getting some time in your schedule, I encourage you to get to that 70%, which we talked about in episode 11 So check that out. So I wanted to highlight just two quick points from the neighboring church that I thought were helpful. And the whole book is great, and I commend it to you. But the first one is this.
So Robert Putnam, in his book Better Together, Restoring American Community, he says this. And this is the first point I want to highlight, that good neighboring is just a safer way to live for everyone. So he says this. The more neighbors who know one another by name, the fewer crimes a neighborhood as a whole will suffer. A child born in a state whose residents volunteer, vote and spend time with friends is less likely to be born underway, less likely to drop out of school, and less likely to kill or be killed than the same child. No rich or poor born in another state whose residents do not. Society as a whole benefits enormously from the social ties forged by those who choose connective strategies in pursuit of their particular goals. So no matter what your faith background, your atheist, your agnostic, your Christian background, Muslim, Baha'i, Jewish, whatever your background, if we all neighbor, our neighbors are gonna be safer, our neighborhoods are gonna be safer places to live.
The second thing I wanted to highlight just quickly from this book is that neighboring well leads to a healthier way to live for all. So this is Malcolm Gladwell, maybe a more common name in the household. So Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, the story of success, he says this, he tells the story of the remarkably healthy people of Roseto, Pennsylvania. So researcher and physician Stuart Wolfe discovered Roseto held a medical mystery. Even though the residents received 41% of their calories from fat, they smoked heavily, and they struggled with obesity. Hardly anyone had heart disease. Furthermore, said Wolfe, there was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare, and then when we looked at peptic ulcers, oh, then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it. So Gladwell then summarizes the reason for this healthy community. So check this out. What Wolfe slowly realized, this is quoting Gladwell, was that the secret of Roseto, Pennsylvania, wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be Roseto itself. So as Brun and Wolfe, the researchers, walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetons visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. And all that's just, the reason they were healthy, physically healthier, was because they were neighboring well and integrating and incorporating their families into the neighborhood. So that shoe fits for all of us here in Manhattan, Kansas, no matter what our neighborhood.