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Steve Wilson remembers when the swimming pool disappeared from the backyard at the house across the street.

New neighbors from India had filled in the pool and planted a garden in its place. Curious about the vegetables, Steve stopped by one day to ask questions.

Conversations developed over time, and soon they were borrowing tools from Steve and his wife. Then one day, Steve walked across the street, and his neighbors invited him into the backyard “to see what we’re really growing,” a phrase that momentarily concerned Steve. When he reached the backyard, he found vegetables he’d never encountered before.

The conversations grew right alongside the plants.

“They knew we were followers of Christ,” Steve remembers. As the families came to know one another, Steve and his family learned what their neighbors were experiencing and struggling with. That made it possible to share things that were genuinely good news for them.

For Steve, TMS Global’s senior director of Global Church Engagement, the future of cross-cultural mission depends on Christians getting to know their neighbors.

“Today, people from around the globe have moved next door,” Steve says. Some are displaced by force; others move in search of economic opportunities. The result is that people who once had little access to a church may now have one down the street.

Steve would love to see Christians get to know “the Vietnamese congregation that’s down the street from you”—starting, perhaps, pastor to pastor. “What do they have to offer us? What can we learn from them?” he asks. He believes that kind of engagement, in which congregations learn from one another, “really could be something that changes the tide.”

“It’s not the 12,000 miles that they came to be present in our church,” Steve says. “It’s the last 12 feet that we have to close the gap on.”

Steve also tells of Michael, a TMS Global cross-cultural worker in Kosovo, who invests in young people through outdoor leadership experiences. On one hike, a young Kosovar approached Michael with a question. He had seen a video about the prophet Ezekiel on TikTok and wanted to know more. The video had sparked his curiosity, but the questions it raised led to a conversation with someone he knew.

“We need not just reels, but relationships,” Steve says.

Christians can live beside one another, worship in the same city, even attend the same church, and never truly learn from one another. The opportunity is not simply to be near each other. The opportunity is to know one another.

Instead of beginning only with What can I do for you?, Steve describes a relationship in which we can say, “I have something to learn from you, and I have something to offer you.”

The same principle applies globally. “It takes the global church,” Steve says. Reaching the least reached, he believes, will require “churches across nations to work as genuine partners”—a move away from a model in which wealthy churches primarily fund ministry elsewhere and toward genuine partnership and mutuality.

Steve points to a 14-year partnership involving churches in the United States, a Kenyan church network, and an interdenominational group in Kenya. Together, they worked among the Ilchamus and Samburu peoples and saw 1,000 churches planted. For Steve, it is an example of what genuine partnerships across the global church can accomplish.

Steve sees an important role for TMS Global in fostering those partnerships. For nearly 40 years, TMS Global has helped churches build cross-cultural partnerships, equip witnesses, and learn from believers around the world. Sometimes that means connecting church networks and leaders. Sometimes it means helping partners understand one another across cultural differences.

And sometimes, Steve says, TMS can simply make a connection, step back, and celebrate what God does with it.

For Steve, the global and local belong together.

“In a world where mission is from everywhere to everywhere, we need to be locally minded,” he says, “as well as globally engaged as a church.”

Through resources like Who Is My Neighbor? and decades of experience helping Christians engage across cultures, TMS Global exists to help believers close that last 12 feet.

Want to learn how to navigate cultural and religious differences with people God has placed across the street?

Check out Who Is My Neighbor?