“Issues don’t move people,” shares United Methodist missionary Eric Soard. “People move people. And we need to be better at getting close to the people that are affected by the issues we are supposedly passionate about.”

Soard learned about the importance of ‘proximity’—what John Wesley called “watching over one another in love”—while serving as an educator and the founder of Wesley College in Mwanza, Tanzania.

After weeks of quarantine and stay-at-home orders, we all have a renewed appreciation of the value of proximity.