Turn On The Porch Light

Neighbouring

In 2020 I moved into a house that made it almost impossible to know my neighbours. It taught me what FIMBY is for.

Two houses

In 2020 I moved into a house at 631 Cordova. Great house. I lived there with a community of people I loved.

But it had no front porch and no front door onto the street. You went up a long flight of stairs to the second floor, and that was it.

At first I didn’t notice. It was COVID, and nobody was seeing anybody. But once the world opened back up, something started to bother me. I had community inside my house, but I didn’t know my neighbours on either side. They never saw me come or go. I had no front yard to putter around in. There was almost no moment where our paths crossed.

And I wanted them to. I wanted to practise hospitality, and yet some of the people I wanted to welcome most couldn’t even make it up those stairs.

I’d spent years trying to love my neighbours, and my own house was fighting against me. It felt like trying to be a good neighbour with one arm tied behind my back.

Then I moved to 414 East Cordova. Front door. Porch. A little front yard.

Within a few months I knew my neighbour, Shelley, really well. I’m outside puttering, and people who are walking by stop to chat.

Have you ever lived somewhere that made it hard to know your neighbours? A building where you only see people in the elevator? A place where you meant to connect, and somehow it never happened?

Hold onto that feeling. That problem is part of why I built FIMBY.

Wake up from your slumber

When I think about what authentic community asks of us, I keep coming back to Romans 13.

Paul sums up the whole law in one command: love your neighbour as yourself. Then he ties it straight to a wake-up call. His reason? God’s Kingdom is breaking in. Start living like it’s already here.

He puts those two together on purpose. Because loving our neighbour is exactly the kind of command we can agree with completely, and still sleep through.

At 631, the house made it easy to sleep through.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe:

Nobody stopped caring.
The world just made caring the hard thing.

Our whole way of life has slowly become like that house, and nobody decided that it should. It happened one convenience at a time. Every errand got easier to do alone. Every need got met by a company. Eventually, a well-run life required almost no one.

But the errand was never only an errand. The corner store, the video store, the bank teller, the hardware shop that became a big-box store across town. Each one was a reason to be out among the people who lived near you. We didn’t just save time. We removed the occasions.

Which is what 631 did to me. No porch, no front yard, no moment where our paths crossed. One house can do that to one person. Convenience has done it to nearly everybody.

And somewhere along the way, we started treating needing no one as a kind of virtue.

Scripture gives us a very different picture. It gives us a body, where the hand cannot say to the eye, “I have no need of you.” Needing each other was never a sign that you failed. It was the design.

And this church already has real community. We see each other on Sundays. We have small groups and WhatsApp chats. Ask for something, like a drill, and three people will answer. That’s real, and it’s good.

But most weeks, our lives still run side by side instead of together.

Imagine this on your block

Most of us can’t choose our front door. We can’t renovate our buildings, or move. But we can build a porch together … even if it starts on a screen.

Imagine a year from now.

• Your kids are home sick all week. You post an ask in the morning, and by lunchtime someone has offered to babysit tomorrow afternoon.
• Your zucchini plant is producing more than you can eat, so you offer the extra and none goes to waste.
• Nobody on your street buys a pressure washer, because there’s one that’s been borrowed six times this summer.
• The guy who’s been fixing bikes for twenty years shared his skill on FIMBY, and the kid across the street gets a free tune-up.
• Someone posts a Costco item they plan to buy, and two households split the thirty rolls of toilet paper neither of them had room for.
• Monthly Sunday Soup lunches at my place become a neighbourhood rhythm and staple.

And the neighbour you’ve nodded at for years actually knows your name.

This isn’t fiction. In our 2023 pilot, I posted asking for book recommendations. That post ended with me visiting Aaron’s, my neighbour’s, home for the first time. We’d lived a block apart for nine years.

It took me one post.

Acts 2 describes the early church sharing what they had, eating together in their homes, and living a shared life that the people around them could see. It wasn’t just what they believed. It was how they lived.

A trellis doesn’t make anything grow

That’s what FIMBY is for. I’ve spent five years working on it, so I want to be clear about what it is and what it isn’t. No app can love your neighbour for you.

FIMBY is a trellis. A trellis doesn’t make anything grow. It just gives a living thing something to climb.

Think of FIMBY as a porch for people who don’t have one. It makes asking less awkward and offering less of a production. You can ask for something. Offer something. Lend a tool. Share a skill. Split a Costco run. Set a table.

Then the app gets out of the way, because the relationship happens in real life, not on a screen.

Nobody stays the helper

And I think the hardest part for us won’t be the technology. It’ll be receiving.

Most of us would much rather be the helper. I know I would. I find asking for help really hard. Part of me still believes it makes me a burden, and that I’m lazy if I ask for help.

But Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink. He invited himself to Zacchaeus’s table. He was willing to need people. If he was, we can be too.

The invitation

So here’s what I’m asking from us. FIMBY starts with just us, learning the habit while the group is small and forgiving. Then we open the door and invite our neighbours in, by name. Because by the time we open that door, I want our porch to be built and the light already on.

Our church is already very good at helping. So maybe the most helpful thing you can do is let somebody help you. Ask for a ladder. A ride. A cup of sugar. Help moving something.

Someone has to break the ice. For now, asking is the help.

So much of what’s wrong in the world feels too big to change. But we can change how we live with the people around us.

Ask for something. Offer something. Learn a name. Set out one more chair.

Turn on the porch light.
Let the Kingdom grow from there.

By Stephen Rathjen. Adapted from a Sunday teaching at Strathcona Vineyard introducing FIMBY.