My Vertical Neighborhood: How Strangers Became a Community - Paperback

by Lynda J. Macgibbon (Author), Michael Frost (Foreword by)

Top World Guild Awards Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

What if our neighbors were our friends?

When Lynda MacGibbon moved from a small city in eastern Canada to a high-rise apartment in Toronto, she decided to follow Jesus' famous commandment to "love your neighbor" a bit more literally. In the past, she would have looked first for friends at her new job or her new church. This time, though, she decided to look for friends among the strangers who shared her apartment building--her actual neighbors in her new "vertical neighborhood."

In this charming and relatable memoir, MacGibbon tells the story of the community that took shape as neighbors said yes to weekly dinners and a writing group, Christmas morning brunch and even a Bible study. It's a story of the simple, everyday risk of reaching out with love to those around us, and of the beauty and messiness of real human relationships. It's a story of the risks--and rewards--of taking Jesus at his word.

Author Biography

Lynda MacGibbon is vice president of People and Culture for InterVarsity Canada. Before working for InterVarsity, she was a journalist for over twenty years. She lives in Toronto.

Michael Frost is an internationally recognized Australian missiologist and one of the leading voices in the missional church movement. He is the vice principal of Morling College in Sydney, Australia, and the founding director of the Tinsley Institute, a mission study centre located at Morling College. A popular speaker around the world, he has written more than a dozen books including The Shaping of Things to Come, Exiles, The Road to Missional, and Incarnate. An expert in church planting, Frost cofounded the Forge Mission Training Network with Alan Hirsch. He remains an international director of that movement which is now based in the United States.