Our Story
We are a team that specialises in helping whole church families strengthen their sense of purpose
We believe this is best done by encouraging communal and relational ways of doing church and mission.
We help New Zealand churches by:
- Delivering and facilitating the Redemptive Family Church Series – helping a whole church family imagine ways of doing simple mission together that are effective and warmly relational.
- Facilitating church-wide conversations about things that matter most – using the Appreciative Inquiry process.
- Delivering the Inviting Workshop to church groups, upskilling congregations in the art of making invitations and not taking ‘no’ personally!
- Developing a network of like-minded people who are inspired to plant a church, share resources and ideas.
The Love Your Neighbour Trust (LYN) is an interdenominational, registered charitable trust.`
The Love Your Neighbour story
After the successful rollout of the ‘JESUS Gift to the Nation’ project throughout New Zealand, Howard & Lynette Webb wanted to continue seeing every neighbourhood in New Zealand loved by their local church. Love Your Neighbour was formed in 2005 to gather and tell stories of ordinary churches doing extraordinary things in their community, and to provide forums for community ministry leaders to network and share their wisdom.
In 2009 Bruce Edmonds joined the team. The Community Link training course was developed and for a season we invested deeply in training and equipping community ministry leaders.
In 2015 the team made the strategic decision to focus on working with whole church congregations. We came to see that providing churches with a pathway for cultural change was the best way to make churches more missionally effective.
Two significant achievements followed:
- The team along with some friends planted church@onetwosix in Point Chevalier, which has been a laboratory for testing the truth of what we share with others!
- We developed the Redemptive Family Church Series
In 2020 we published ‘Redemptive Family’, which provides the rationale and biblical framework for the Redemptive Family Church Series.
Our tools and strategy may have changed over time, but our heart and mission has stayed the same. We want to see healthy and vibrant churches throughout New Zealand who understand and embrace their mission and love their local community.