At Neighborly, we believe that justice is about restoring and reordering the world by God’s definition of “good.” The Hebrew word for justice, mishpat, carries this restorative weight. It calls us to participate in God’s mission to reshape the world toward His original design—where goodness, order, and human dignity flourish. We don’t just respond to poverty because we have a heart for justice; we respond because the Kingdom is coming, and human suffering has no place in it.

We believe in the evangelion, or “gospel” that Jesus preached (Mark 1:14–15)—a message He declared long before the cross. Evangelion was a term in circulation before Jesus came onto the scene and was used to announce a new king, a military victory, or the extension of an kingdom’s reign into new territory (See Priene Inscription). So when Jesus came announcing his rival gospel, he wasn’t proposing a new belief formula so people could get into Heaven after they die—he was announcing the good news that Heaven and Earth, once severed by sin, are coming back together through Him and his now Spirit empowered followers. In the tradition of every other herald of every other gospel in the ancient world, Jesus was announcing a new king, a victory not though subjugation but sacrifice, and that the kingdom of Heaven had advanced it’s reign into earthly territory. Through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, God relaunched His creation project to “fill the earth” with his rule and reign—and just like it was “in the beginning,” he invited ordinary people to share his authority over creation. We are those people: citizens of a different kind of Kingdom and living windows through which others can observe the new creation. As co-workers towards this end, every act of gospel oriented justice becomes a sign post pointing others to the world to come. With proper theology, the gospel is embodied. As we say in our vision statement, it’s “experienced with all five senses.”

We believe that the ekklesia, or “Church,” has been cast to play the primary supporting character in this narrative. Its role is to faithfully continue God’s creation mandate to our garden-dwelling forefather and mother—to bear fruit, multiply, and fill the earth with his rule. That’s why an Aramaic speaking Jesus took a linguistic detour to use the Greek word “ekklesia.” It has very specific connotations. To his first century audience, an ekklesia was a familiar greco-roman term for a “participatory assembly of ordinary people on mission to advance their empire’s rule into the world.” Sound familiar? It’s no coincidence that the Great Commission echoes the creation mandate—or that Jesus likened the grassroots community entrusted with this task to the ekklesia.

At Neighborly, we see ourselves as one of the tools that can support the ekklesia in it’s mission to reorder the world by God’s definition of good. We exist to serve the ekklesia as it bends its corner of creation back into Edenic shape, using the same metrics Jesus used—a litmus test for disciples: Have we clothed him through the naked? Fed him through the hungry? Given him safe water through the thirsty and the sick? Visited him in prison by caring for the isolated? Welcomed him through the foreigner? This is what we mean when we say we are helping the Church encounter Jesus in the disguise of those at a disadvantage.

We believe that justice, the gospel, and the ekklesia all converge in one calling: to make visible the world that Jesus promised is already on its way.