At Neighborly, we believe that justice is about restoring and reordering the world by God’s definition of “good” as it was in Eden. 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 respond to poverty because we want to be "socially just”; we respond because inequity, human suffering, and loneliness have no place in God’s definition of “good.”

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 a 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 through subjugation but sacrifice, and that the kingdom of Heaven had advanced its 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. We are citizens of a different kind of Kingdom with a different kind of King who has made us into living windows—though often smudged by our own fingerprints—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, or as we say in our vision statement, it’s “experienced with all five senses.”

We believe that the Ekklesia, or “Church,” as it’s often translated, 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. Here’s why. An Aramaic-speaking Jesus took a linguistic detour to use the Greek word “ekklesia”—because when one language lacks the weight, precision, or potency, you borrow power from another. To his first-century audience, an ekklesia was a familiar Greco-roman gathering for a participatory assembly of ordinary people on mission to advance their empire’s rule in the world. Sound familiar? It’s no coincidence that Jesus employed the familiarity of the ekklesia to frame his grassroots participatory community of ordinary people on mission to advance His Kingdom’s rule into the world. It was to this motley crew that Jesus—reviving the Creation Mandate—entrusted the Great Commission: to bear the fruit of the Spirit, multiply by making disciples, and fill the earth with his rule.

At Neighborly, we see ourselves as one of the tools that can support the ekklesia in its 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.