Our Story
We believe in new beginnings.
In 2015, Andrew and Lily discerned God’s call to return to Ethiopia. At that time, Andrew was completing a PhD in Theological and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago and teaching at Wheaton College. Their dream was to take Andrew’s world-class education and teaching experience, and help train emerging leaders in Ethiopia with a passion for God, people, and the common good.
The IFF board met for the first time in March 2016. Beloved friends gave generously toward our vision. And Andrew and Lily took a leap of faith back to Addis Ababa that August.
The morning after they landed, the BBC’s headline read “Several killed as Ethiopia police clash with protesters.”
This headline was an ominous sign of things to come. In the following years, Ethiopia was rocked by three nationwide states of emergency amid escalating protests and violence. Many feared this conflict would end in civil war or genocide. American citizens were called to the U.S. Embassy to prepare for an emergency evacuation.
During this time, IFF supported Andrew’s teaching and service at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST). There Andrew worked as a professor of Christian Ethics and helped EGST develop a new M.A. program in Public Theology, a joint PhD program with the Vrije University Amsterdam, and the Ethiopian Journal of Theology. We were delighted to support outstanding theological education for some of Ethiopia’s most inspiring young leaders.
But in the face of the rising crisis in Ethiopia, we didn’t feel like we could remain in the safety of the classroom on an academic island. Once again, we felt God calling us to take a leap of faith and more radically pursue our vision of nurturing neighbor-love culture “for the poor, hated, and forgotten.”
This is when our vision for the Neighbor-Love Movement was born.
We observed that the root problem facing Ethiopia was “othering,” which we define as seeing others as less or unrelated to ourselves And this “othering” -- often along religious, ethnic, and political lines -- was fueling dehumanization, violence, and death. Many still fear civil war or genocide in Ethiopia today.
A dream started burning in our hearts to inspire Ethiopia’s 30 million youth with Jesus’s radical message that every person is our precious neighbor, especially the people we’re most tempted to hate. Jesus boldly promised, “Do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28), and we wanted to test Jesus’s promise in an incredibly dangerous moment in Ethiopian history.
So our team developed our Neighbor-Love Covenant, seven Practices that guide how to embody that Covenant, and a call for youth to become Neighbor-Love Ambassadors across boundaries.
In October 2019, we started traveling Ethiopia and inviting Ethiopian youth to join our movement. Since then, we’ve been amazed by the overwhelmingly positive response to our work. Watch our 5-minute NLM Celebration video for a deeper look at some of these highlights:
We’ve won small start-up grants from the American Embassy, the European Institute of Peace, and the Bank of America.
We’ve hosted over 30 events and had over three thousand youth enthusiastically sign our Covenant. Ethiopia’s Attorney General, Minister of Women, Minister of Peace, and many other influential leaders have endorsed our Covenant.
We’ve launched a social media campaign that has attracted over 43,000 followers, 22 million reaches, and 1.3 million engagements.
We’ve published the first video courses and the first book on neighbor-love in any Ethiopian language.
We’ve produced an Amharic video curriculum that will take the Neighbor-Love Movement into all 45 of Ethiopia’s public universities (see our trailer here).
Moving forward, we’re pivoting our focus to writing accessible, inspiring books about the profound roots and practical implications of neighbor-love for faith and flourishing. Some of our titles in development include Practice Flourishing: Praying with History’s Most Beautiful Mind about Humanity’s Greatest Questions (in English), On Hope (in Amharic), What Is Christianity? Presence, Practice, Protest (in English), and Healing Ethnocentrism: The Way to Dignity, Trust, and Flourishing (in Amharic).
Our dream is to open a multipurpose center in Addis Ababa that will serve as the hub of our movement’s daily work, public events, and leadership training. This center will be a place of relationship-building, learning, and peacemaking for all neighbors in the face of genocidal hatred. We’re calling it the Neighbor-Love Embassy, and a donor has already pledged $250,000 toward this vision.
We warmly invite you to join our movement and become a partner in our unfolding story.
We believe in new beginnings…