The proliferation of mega-hardware stores and lifestyle programs feed our seemingly insatiable appetite for buying, renovating and selling real estate — Australians have a love affair with home ownership. Yet for all the DIY help available, all the encouragement to express creativity and personality through the transformation of homes and gardens into our own little slice of heaven on earth, most of us, Simon Holt suspects, harbour an awkward ambivalence about the experience of neighbourhood, and are at a bit of a loss to know quite how to go about connecting with those who live in the closest proximty to us. He has listened to the stories of numerous women and men living in a variety of urban and suburban contexts and engages his and their experiences with the conviction that the neighbourhood is a place of spiritual significance.

Clearly, there are many challenges to creating communities that foster and nurture connectedness. The ideal of a place where everyone knows each other is both romantic and uncomfortable and establishing meaningful relationships requires an intentionality of engagement which is not the lived experience in many neighbourhoods as fewer people make a long term commitment to a single address.

Many commute long distances away from home for work, architecture hides all activity from the public eye, fears for safety and security keep neighbours behind locked doors, multiculturalism is changing the face and shape of the suburbs, and friendships come and go with the frequent movement of the upwardly mobile and the upsizing and downsizing that is a natural consequence of the family life cycle.

Holt however challenges the notion that the urban context is alienating and soul destroying, but rather invites us to take a step back and to see our neighbourhoods with new eyes, to recognize them as places of theological importance, insisting that a spirituality that does not nurture our connection with the daily places of life fails to reflect the transforming nature of Christian faith.

Love of neighbour figures prominently in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, so if neighbourliness matters, what does it mean to love God where we live? If we recognize that we are called to the places where we live, both as individuals and churches. Holt proposes four disciplines of engagement, the first being to name the neighbourhood as a spiritually significant place and begin to take notice of it.

He concludes that the disciplines of naming, celebrating, nurturing and inviting are about 'actively investing in neighbourhoods as places of God's presence and as contexts for the purposes of God ... seeking, living and breathing the redemptive peace and presence of God, not in every place, but this place, not in every relationship, but in these relationships,  the ones most immediately before us.'

This highly readable and warmly engaging 152 page little book goes a long way to dispel our fears that its all too hard. Rather, it resounds with the hope that although requiring intenrionality and discipline, engagement with our neighbourhood is eminently worthwhile. At its launch, it was said that anyone who reads it will never look at their neighbourhood in the same way again. If this be the experience of all who open its pages, the book will have served its purpose well.

A strength of this book is the inclusion of many personal stories that reflect a diversity of experience. It will find particular resonance with readers familiar with suburban Melbourne, but the experiences reflected are universal. God Next Door is a very welcome contribution to a topic which deserves much greater attention by Christians in a country where there is such a deep attachment to and investment in the places we live.