It’s amazing to think how the world has changed in a generation. Whoever you are, however old you are, I’m pretty confident that the world is drastically different compared to what it was like for your parents at the same age.

Take housing, for example. My dad is 72, and he has lived at five different addresses in his life. I am half his age – 36 – and have lived in fifteen addresses since age 18. We’re probably outliers in both directions, but overall younger generations do move more than their parents did, and this affects our community.

When you live somewhere for a long time you get to know the people there. I still remember the local faces from my childhood in Huddersfield: Brian the grocer, Heather the hairdresser, Mr Battye the dentist. Their establishments were the foundations of the local community; I knew their families, and they knew mine. I’ve never known that kind of community since though, because I’ve never lived long enough in one place to build it.

Instead, community comes often from the things we do; from hobbies, clubs and groups, not common geography. If you move house but don’t move church, or gym, or U3A, then they become your community, not your neighbours. But what does that mean for those who don’t have those communities?

Loneliness is a greater problem now than it ever has been, driven in no small part by this change in how we ‘do’ community. It is easier to drop off the map when you don’t know your neighbours or local shopkeepers, when nobody knows to check on you if you stop showing your face around town. We mostly think of this affecting older people, but it can be a problem for everyone – disabled people, single parents, those without family nearby and more. You only have to look at the case of Kenneth and Bronson Battersby, in the news last week, to see how this can end in tragedy.

When Jesus commanded ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, he followed it up with a parable to show that ‘your neighbour’ meant anyone in need of help and care. But what if now our ‘neighbours’ really are our neighbours? If the people next door needed our help, would we realise? Maybe we should consider where our community is, and take Jesus’s instruction to “love your neighbour” a bit more literally than he intended.