The Place of the Parish

Imagining Mission in our Neighbourhood

Robinson

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780334058274
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

In "The Place of the Parish" Martin Robinson explores this shift, considering how it is manifested in a variety of contexts, rural, inner-city, Anglican and independent. Drawing on specific examples linked to the so-called 'New Parish Movement', he demonstrates how a theology of place is made manifest in the mission of the church today.

1

Why is Place Important?

The geneticist Steve Jones makes the arresting claim that the invention of the bicycle was a huge factor in promoting the development of a healthy human gene pool. The point he is making is simply that before the invention of the bicycle we tended to marry people who lived within walking distance of where we lived. Especially in rural areas, that limited the gene pool to a relatively small number of people.

Following the invention of the bicycle, the availability of the car further extended the range of people we might be likely to marry. Following that, the tendency of large percentages of the population to attend university meant that many people might marry others who had previously lived anywhere in the country. Still further, the development of significant patterns of international migration and globalization in terms of employment and trade means that our children and grandchildren might well marry partners from other continents and not just other parts of our own nation. So the bicycle, Steve Jones argues, helped to set off a mixing of the gene pool that on the whole has improved the overall health of the human race.

Leaving aside the issue of genetic diversity, the reality of mobility is evident from our own experience of life. I often ask the question when visiting local congregations, ‘How many people grew up in this neighbourhood?’ and ‘How many people came into this congregation because their parents were members of this church?’ The results vary somewhat depending on whether the congregation is located in a city, a market town or a rural area. But no matter what the location, it is always a minority of people who grew up in that area. Most churches are populated by people who have moved from another location.1

Steve Jones’s description of the development of our tendency towards mobility in the modern world carries with it the suggestion that increased mobility has made the local become less significant. In many communities, local shops, local schools, hospitals, pubs, post offices and banks have been closing. Even in larger and more prosperous towns and cities, suburban shopping streets have seen familiar shops closing, partly under pressure from larger supermarkets, out-of-town shopping centres and shopping on the internet. The car, far more than the bicycle, has been a factor in denuding local communities of the rich variety available within walking distance. The shops with which we were so familiar have been replaced by charity shops, betting shops, and fast food outlets.

New housing estates, especially those built by developers who have a commuter customer in mind, are increasingly designed with no amenities such as shops, schools, community centres or churches. Places where it is possible to meet, to interact with other people, to engage in meaningful conversation, are simply not available in increasing numbers of neighbourhoods. The term ‘dormitory community’ has been coined to describe developments where people only live to eat and sleep. Their remaining time is taken up with very long hours at work combined with commuting.

Gated communities and secure apartment blocks, which can only be accessed by the residents of those homes, make it increasingly difficult to meet and greet even those who might live in the same street or adjoining properties. Our towns and cities have become simultaneously crowded and lonely places in which to live.

The erosion of our sense of local community is reflected to some extent in patterns of church attendance. Large regional churches, whether located in city centres or suburban areas, attract congregations from many local communities. With increased mobility, parish boundaries have become irrelevant. What matters is locating a church that features worship styles and programmes that are welcoming and attractive. Sometimes the worship areas look and feel more like vast warehouses where windows are unimportant, as is the immediate neighbourhood.

There are those who argue that none of this matters, that forms of community are changing and new kinds of community are emerging. Particularly in larger capital cities where there is a good public transport infrastructure, where a person lives is not as important as the networks of people with whom it’s possible to build strong relationships. Some larger churches in London base their small groups in coffee bars located near tube stations. Others suggest that the internet provides meaningful connection and community for those who might be described as forming ‘affinity’ groups. Two recent authors explain the paradigm shift in such thinking between geography as a location for belonging and affinity based elsewhere, with the following illustration:

Recently, Andrew’s father was trying to understand how the local twenty over competition is structured and players are selected. He had followed cricket for his whole life with one structure and suddenly there were new and unusual competitions and players. For his generation, cricket is now a somewhat incomprehensible activity. So, he asked his twelve-year-old grandchildren to explain. For young students of the game, fluidity is all they know. One of the sticking points that Andrew’s father pressed them on was what region, state or country the teams were representing. For someone of his generation, cricket was not just entertainment but also about representation. He couldn’t understand the point of meaningless entertainment in a private competition when it came to cricket. His grandchildren had a completely different perspective and struggled to understand the nature of his question. Both generations needed to make a paradigm shift to understand the other’s world.2

However, it may be that this is not an either-or situation. It is possible that affinity groups, or non-geographic ways of connecting, might add another layer alongside ways of belonging that are more connected to place. It’s fine for those who do not yet have the commitments of marriage and children to travel across cities to form community but arguably that does not work as people form other attachments – and possibly even move out of cities in order to create a different, more local, lifestyle.

There is an argument to suggest that cyber communities are really pseudo communities where the real self is not revealed. They are not so much about intimacy and vulnerability as entertainment and exploration. Such communities are invaluable for the sharing of knowledge or information, for maintaining relationships that have been founded elsewhere, but there are limits to the kind of relationship that can be maintained in cyberspace. Those who meet online eventually meet in person in order to test whether a compatible relationship can be formed, whatever the promise of online communication might suggest. There is an inescapable reality that we are not just minds or souls. We are embodied beings and that physical fact creates both joy and limitations. There is an important sense in which to be human is to be placed.3 If you have a body, then you must be connected to a place or places.

A community too is a placed reality. The sense of place is created through nature and through human creativity. The streets, shops, parks, memories and local stories may have been collecting for many generations. A church community will take its own place within that setting. If a church wishes to respond to God’s presence and work in that community, day by day, and through the generations, it must learn how to be present among the houses, streets and stories.

John Inge argues that through our Greek intellectual heritage, powerful now in modernity and postmodernity, this fundamental part of being human has been neglected.4 Greek thought, particularly associated with Plato and Neoplatonism, tended to prefer abstraction and generalization rather than the immediate, particular reality. The idea of a tree and the idea of a house were considered to be more significant than this actual, specific tree or house. Susceptible to the bias of the times, Christians have tended to spiritualize talk of place in the Bible, forgetting that we have been created as embodied and placed.

Andrew Rumsey quotes John Inge as suggesting that a Christian understanding of place has a sacramental quality. He notes that Inge suggests that place is the seat of relations between God and the world.5 Rumsey also draws on the thought of Doreen Massey, who says that space or place is socially constructed but society is also spatially constructed.6 In other words, it is impossible to have a social structure that is entirely abstract; there needs to be a physical location. Equally, places draw much of their significance from a complex interaction with people – their beliefs, their stories, their history, their lives.

There is a need to recover this aspect of our personhood, and to look again at Scripture and theology in relation to place. It is important to grapple with Scripture to understand the significance of this phenomenon in order to consider how to read our own community.

Place in the Old Testament

According to Walter Brueggemann, place is the setting for connection and commitment. There is a continuing temptation to a disconnected freedom, space, which is strongly represented in postmodernity. In his view, our nature as embodied beings – and therefore placed beings – needs to be acknowledged:

Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is indeed a protest against the unpromising pursuit of space. It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitments and undefined freedom.7

Looking at the Old Testament narratives, Brueggemann describes land as an essential third component in the relationship between Israel and Yahweh. He sees that it is land that makes that relationship possible, although there are many twists and turns in that unfolding three-way relationship. Yahweh and his people experience one another through their shared place. Some of that sharing includes the loss of place, or sojourning, as Abram leaves his country, his kindred and his father’s house, responding to a promise.8 Some of the sharing involves wandering in the desert, when the memory of the promise of land was weak. Some of that sharing includes exile, as Israel, having lost its relationship with Yahweh, loses the land too. In exile the sharing comes to mean again the promise of land, the hope of land and a longing for home.

He sees the core idea in Israel’s relationship with Yahweh and land as being one of grasp and gift. When Israel responds to the promise of the gift, and receives the gift of land with gratitude, caring for the land and its people, then this three-way relationship thrives. When Israel’s elite is tempted to manage this gift, and to grasp it, and to exclude and enslave the poor, then eventually the land is lost. The Lord, people and place are inextricably woven together in harmony.9

Walter Brueggemann describes his discovery of this central theme almost as a conversion. He had, with other theologians of the twentieth century, tended towards a hermeneutic of time and pivotal events: ‘the mighty deeds of God in history’.10 But he explains that the twentieth-century failure of the promise of the cities alerted him and others to the human need for a place and a home.11 Scripture speaks of community and home, rather than individuality and the search for meaning.

Brueggemann was also aware that acknowledging the sig...