When I entered youth group in 2000 as an unchurched pre-teen, I did so right in the middle of the W.W.J.D.? (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelet craze. The bracelets were meant to denote that a person was a Christian and to remind them to ask that question throughout the day as they encountered people and situations. The bracelets came in a rainbow of colors, though I preferred the black band with the white text because it made the question pop in ways that I could not ignore and proudly announced my new faith to the world.

Today, my generation of youth group kids is now in our late thirties and early-mid forties. We are adults serving in every sector of society with a variety of leadership roles and influences. Though religious connection holds steady, many of those who moved through youth group with me are no longer involved in church life. 1 There are a myriad of reasons for this that would take a book of blog posts to name, but many of the answers go back to that question we wore on our wrists: what would Jesus do?”

In church settings, we were taught that Jesus desired a personal relationship with us. We were challenged to see that neither we nor the world is perfect due to the ways we have missed God’s plan on this side of Heaven. We are encouraged to find hope in the fact that his resurrection was not final and that he had a plan of restoring people through his grace. We were reminded that the image of God was within each of us, no matter who we are, where we’re from, and what we look like. According to our pastors and leaders, these were foundational to what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus and to aid us in answering the question on our wrists.

The issue is that, as we grew up, we started to see that there were many places in our churches and world where the ways Christians were answering the W.W.J.D.? question did not seem to line up with the Jesus of the Gospels we’d heard so much about. We had been told our goal was to follow his teachings and become more like him and, yet, we were not seeing a discipleship reality in which his teachings matched what was being done or said in his name.

In the Gospel of Luke (Luke 10:25-37), we find the powerful Parable of the Good Samaritan. It was one of those foundational stories my generation heard preached and taught often. In it, a lawyer (teacher of the law) asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life.

When Jesus turns the question back on him, the lawyer correctly identifies the two greatest commandments: to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. However, “seeking to justify himself,” the man then asks the pivotal question that prompts the story: “And who is my neighbor?”

This is where the lawyer is essentially trying to narrow the scope of his responsibility. By asking “Who is my neighbor?”, he wasn’t looking for a broader mission; he was looking for a boundary line. He wanted to define who he was required to love and, more importantly, whom he was permitted to ignore. In his mind, if he could limit the definition of “neighbor” to his own social, ethnic, or religious circle, he could check the box of righteousness without actually having to change his heart.

In response, the master teacher tells a story that does not always make sense in our world due to the time-locked people and examples, but does have an extreme relevance for us today.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. . .”

As the robbed and beaten man is lying there on the side of what was a dangerous stretch of road at the time, he just needs someone to help him. First, a priest comes by, and we think the story is going to be over until the priest not only keeps on walking, but he crosses to the other side of the road to avoid the man altogether. Then Jesus says that a Levite (another religious official and a temple assistant) also comes along and, like the priest before him, chooses to pass by on the other side.

This is the point in the story that it was likely assumed Jesus would say that the man had succumbed to his wounds and died because, if the “church people” weren’t willing to help him, then who else is going to? Yet, as with many other moments, Jesus was not done yet.

“But, a Samaritan, while traveling, came near him…”

Now, in the first century, this is the moment the original hearers would have known the man was going to die. There was a great separation between the Jews and Samaritans of Jesus’ day that made them bitter enemies, divided by deep-seated religious, ethnic, and historical animosity.

To a first-century Jewish audience, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was dangerous enough. Still, the appearance of a Samaritan would have been seen as an additional threat, not a source of hope. By making the Samaritan the protagonist who ends up not only saving the man but also paying for his care, Jesus didn’t just tell a story about kindness; he shattered the social and religious boundaries of his time, suggesting that mercy knows no national or sectarian borders.

This is where we find the rub with our bracelet question for many in my generation. We were taught that our neighbor was everyone, even those we hate. We were taught that what Jesus would do is love and welcome even the half-dead and the bitter enemy. We were told that our mercy was to extend to even those with whom it made no sense for us to give anything.

Yet, we’ve aged alongside many churches that have not aged well. We’ve seen Christians in every area of society redefine Jesus’ initial definition of ‘neighbor’ around racial, national, political, and socio-economic lines. We’ve watched as neighborhoods of uniformity have been built and surrounded with fences intended to keep “those people” who we don’t even want to think about building next door, out. We’ve seen all of this done in the name of Jesus, the one who they say backs all of it up. Whether it be to build a Christian nation, to share the gospel, or to build a pandering political platform, we say that what Jesus would do is lock the gates unless those who fit our understanding of neighbor are the ones knocking.

This injustice has not only led many to walk away from our churches, but it has led to a world where who Jesus is has warped his image so far from the teacher telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan that he wouldn’t even recognize himself anymore. We have remade Jesus in our own image because we didn’t like the answer to our W.W.J.D. question. We’ve built the “Kingdom of Us” and not the “Kingdom of God,” as we have left our neighbors lying half-dead in the ditches of darkness while we cross to the safer side.

As we move forward as the church, we are faced with a choice that a simple plastic bracelet cannot make for us: we must decide if we are willing to stop “crossing to the other side.”

The tragedy of the lawyer’s question was not that he didn’t know the Law, but that he was looking for a way to obey it without it costing him his comfort. If we are to truly reclaim the question “What Would Jesus Do?”, we must accept the uncomfortable reality of what he actually did. He didn’t build a fence; he crossed a road. He didn’t ask for a background check; he poured out oil and wine. He didn’t seek to justify his own apathy; he sought to justify the humanity of the “other.”

For a generation that has seen the “Kingdom of Us” fail to satisfy the soul, the path back to the Gospel isn’t found in better branding or more exclusive boundaries. It is found in the ditch. It is found in the radical, scandalous mercy that prioritizes the wounded over the worthy as we work to stop defining our “neighbor” by who looks, votes, or prays like us. As we move from a theology of “avoidance” to a theology of “presence.” As we realize that the world isn’t leaving the church because they hate Jesus, many are leaving because they love the Jesus of the Gospels and can no longer find him in our pews.

The lawyer asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” as a way to limit his love. Jesus ended the story by asking, “Who became a neighbor?” The shift is subtle but demanding, and it moves the burden from the victim to the follower. If we want to be the church of the future, we must stop trying to justify why we aren’t helping and start being the mercy that the world so desperately needs.

It’s time to stop wearing the question and start becoming the answer… together.

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1: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/08/religion-holds-steady-in-america/