The City - Neighborhoods

Over the last couple of days, Anthony and I have been kicking around the idea of ‘neighborhoods’. Social networks are replete with friendship based networks, and while I love the wonderful friends that I’ve been blessed with, they mostly know Jesus…so who’s my mission field? Stated another way, how can I meet new people that I can share the love of Christ with and invite into community?

This is where ‘neighborhoods’ come in.

Simply, your neighborhood is everyone that lives near you. Pretty basic eh? So why is this a cool concept? Let’s look at a concrete yet fictional example.

John is a community group leader in Ballard; he hosts his group just a little down the road from the public library off Market. He’s got a relatively new group with just five folks in regular attendance. He invites people to his group regularly, but they live all over the place! Ballard draws people from all over Seattle (and beyond), and finding the right people has been tough.

Jim is new to Mars Hill. He attended his first service, stopped by The City kiosk afterwards, and signed up to be “connected”, whatever that means. The volunteer that helped him was nice enough, but Jim doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next. He lives near the old firehouse on Market, in fact, he works as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach at the studio there. If only John knew Jim was in his backyard…

This is where the ‘neighborhood’ thing I checked into the code this morning comes into play. John would see in The City that a new guy showed up in his neighborhood (without having to dig for it), maybe The City would even say, “hey, you’re the closest community group!” and John could reach out to Jim with a couple of clicks.

A similar scenario could be played out with a business network downtown…ever wonder who works in your building that goes to Mars Hill? Could be cool to have a lunch group once a week, talk about your life in Christ as you work at the Columbia Tower.

That’s the idea.