Thirty of them. One is your street.
Don't live there? Minister there.
Each guide is a full brief for one kind of neighborhood: who lives there, what they are carrying, and what it looks like to love them well on that block. All thirty are free.
These thirty are for US neighborhoods. In Canada, type your address in the address box and you'll get the guide for your block.
What is inside every guide
Six sections, in this orderWho is on the block and what the street is made of
A day in the life, written from the inside
The real weight they are carrying
Entry points for relationship and presence
How the news is good in this particular ache
Concrete things to do in the first thirty days
Residential Backbone Families
5 guidesOrdinary owner streets carrying work, kids, and quiet strain behind tidy porches.
Families on older suburban streets, where one adult is often raising the children in a house built for two.
Settled suburban households that have everything they need, and haven't needed a neighbor in years.
Denser blocks where the youngest household and the oldest live within sight of each other and have never once had a reason to talk.
People who own their homes on spread-out roads, often outright, where everything is a drive and nobody ever stops by without planning to.
Neighborhoods where somebody is almost always home and almost never has a free hour.
Blue-Collar Homeowners
3 guidesPaid-off porches and long-worked hands on streets built by shift work.
Family streets where the day is spoken for at both ends, and the hour people are actually home isn't the hour anybody comes by.
People on these streets live close to work and run their households on one adult, with nobody to hand the hard day to.
Settled streets where the house is paid off or nearly, the work hasn't changed in years, and nobody can name a single thing they need.
And 8 more families
Reading about a kind of street is useful. Reading about yours is the point.
Every guide is free with a name, email, and zip, and always will be. The Hood Shepherd is a donor-funded 501(c)(3), and donors keep the library open to any church that wants it.