No.10: Questions of Place
Editorial
Editorial: Questions of Place
We are witnessing a resurgence of interest in questions of place. This is quite a significant shift in which many of us are trying to sort out what it means to have our lives shaped by the notion of neighborhood. It’s a tricky question because since the early 60s modern western life has been characterized by mobility and an expectation of progress. All of this is changing... What, therefore, is the meaning of place for Christian life in the modern West? I’m discovering this is not as easy a question...
Editorial: Westernised Europeans and their Localities
Earlier this year I was giving a talk on evangelism to a group of European leaders, most of whom were students. One of the points in my presentation was the rediscovery of the local, of communities and of churches who were attempting to reconnect with their neighbourhood. We entered into a fascinating debate but there was one comment that caught my attention in a very acute way. Someone from Vienna questioned the contention that there was any longer such a thing as community in the local...
Editorial: Place, Time and Identity
This issue of JMP has focused on the meaning of place in contemporary societies and its implications for the life and witness of Christian communities. Each of us, as we read this, are situated in some place – our home, work place, local coffee shop, etc., that locates and gives shape to our everyday lives. We have learned through this issue that the places where we dwell are complicated geographies that in our late modern contexts, raise complex questions...
Stories
Building Trust: How Come You Guys Don’t Give Up On Us?
The redeveloped building centred around a coffee bar, a worship area and a series of rooms that could be used by the community for activities as diverse as a food bank, a ladies pamper night and, under TLG, a school for excluded children. Much of this activity has produced good relationships with many in the community that have struggled with life and finding their place in the broader society. Some of these folk...
Following the Spirit, Finding Life, Sharing Bread
In this video interview with Alan Roxburgh, Fred Liggin recalls when his church took up listening practices among the elders and then the congregation and at the same time, began walking with a homeless family who went on to flourish within their community. Eighteen other faith groups in the city became interested in this way of working and across the city...
A Latino experience of place in the USA: the difference race makes.
As the child of Guatemalan missionaries Jennifer Guerra Aldana has had to negotiate issues of race and displacement. She now serves as pastor in a bilingual congregation. In a video interview with Alan Roxburgh she describes how in her ministry they seek to hold the tension of an inter-cultural approach which values insights from the juxtaposition of cultures. In the light of this, Alan Roxburgh introduces the conversation about a theology of place and his growing awareness that this conversation sometimes makes assumptions based on white privilege...
Re-imagining church and mission in the Scottish borders
The first year was to be a year of listening to the community. What was God up to in this neighbourhood? That was not an easy discipline for Alistair who was something of an activist and could easily frame what he might do in this situation. The point of the year of listening was to ask questions and particularly to gain a sense of the spiritual journeys that people were engaged in. Year two saw Alistair and Ruth initiating a gathering – the Gateways Gathering. This gathering responded ...
Sacred Space
Andrea Campanale, with other local Christians set up ‘Sacred Space’ as a way to reach spiritual seekers in their town. They organized artistic events which had the potential to open up questions of faith and Andrea learned a form of Christian ‘card reading’, which made a way into faith conversations. In conversation with Martin Robinson and Mary Publicover Andrea used the language of ‘space’ (Sacred Space) to describe the opportunities they created for talk and listening and, she felt, divine encounter.
The Bayview Webinar: The Long Journey into Neighborhood.
Danny Fong is founding pastor of a church plant in San Francisco, in The Bayview neighborhood. He describes this, in his conversation with Mark Lau Branson, as one of the abandoned places of the empire. It has long been a community of migrants and a place of poverty and racial tension. Danny’s church planting team had first felt a call towards the neglected fringes of the city fifteen years ago, but as a community of Chinese-Americans, had been warned away...
The Bayview Webinar: Discerning God in the local economy
Danny Fong and other directors of their technology company were sensitive to the labor issues of the Bayview district and the poverty of opportunity for young people. Three years ago, they opted to move their business into the neighborhood and to share their space with the church. The principal of the business, Chi-Ming Chien, took a sabbatical. Walking the streets, he noted signs of activity but also abandoned premises...
Conversations
A Church in Englewood and Place in our Culture
Chris Smith is co-author of Slow Church[1] and editor of the Englewood Review of Books. Here in conversation with Alan Roxburgh he describes how his own church transitioned from its life as a large city church into a vibrant neighbourhood church deeply embedded within its community. That church was able to make this transition because of its long history...
Webinar: Why Stories Matter
It is stories that transform our lives. But we have largely given over the awareness of our lives to experts and so-called professionals who, so the reasoning goes, because of their training, expertise and degrees, know our minds. We have to discover, again, how to share and listen to the stories buried, and often lost, within us. As God’s people we believe it is within such stories that the Spirit is fermenting imagination and life.
Webinar: Beyond the Billboard
Sally Mann and Alan Roxburgh lead this conversation which keeps a hopeful focus on what God is doing Beyond the Billboard. The billboard is a manufactured thing, a commodity, and it may mask a beautiful view beyond. Sally and Alan wonder if we have tended to treat our churches and our faith as a kind of billboard. There are brands and programmes and ideas, but...
An Indigenous Theology of Place and Land
Mark MacDonald is the National Indigenous Anglican Bishop for Canada. This conversation with Alan Roxburgh contrasts the indigenous understanding of the moral and spiritual significance of land with the emphasis on contract, ownership and resource in western culture. For indigenous people 'land' describes something more akin to ‘ecosystem’, all the relationships which create and sustain life in a place. The land is holy, loved by God...
Indigenous Theology: There is no Healing Apart from the Land
Mark Macdonald explains that land is essential for healing, and also for the identity and resistance of indigenous people under the onslaught of western culture. For indigenous people the land is not inert. The Spirit infuses the land, there is personality, locality and unique relationship. Alan Roxburgh and Mark MacDonald go on the wrestle with the question of response. Christians must articulate their own ancient stories of land and people, but the time is short.
Indigenous theology and the urban landscape
In a fifth clip from this conversation Alan Roxburgh puts a challenge to Bishop Mark MacDoanld that concerns for land are not relevant for urban life, but are a mere expression of nostalgia. Mark counters with examples from Indigenous groups who have shown an appreciation for the gifts of urban life, or who choose to live in a way which is fiercely environmental.
Place and mission from an African immigrant perspective
Alan Roxburgh and Harvey Kwiyani consider the underlying narratives of the African understanding of mission, place and the migration experience. What underlies their sense of call to kingdom life in this new place? Harvey explains that African culture generally is spirit-centred, so as Christians, Africans have a high expectation...
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Articles
Looking for Hope … all over the place
Anniversaries are moments of pause looking back at the expectations with which one began a journey and checking out the realities of the present. This month is the anniversary of the 1968 May workers and student uprisings in Paris that spread across Europe and the Atlantic, creating for some governments the fear of revolution. These events were driven by a faith that...
Editorial: Place, Time and Identity
This issue of JMP has focused on the meaning of place in contemporary societies and its implications for the life and witness of Christian communities. Each of us, as we read this, are situated in some place – our home, work place, local coffee shop, etc., that locates and gives shape to our everyday lives. We have learned through this issue that the places where we dwell are complicated geographies that in our late modern contexts, raise complex questions...
The parable of the mustard pot: the significance of ‘parish’ in contemporary mission and culture
Parochial Christianity resists modernity’s preference for separating ‘Christ’ and ‘culture’, embodying instead the New Testament idea that if anyone is ‘in Christ’, they already inhabit a new kind of place – the ‘heavenly’ place that Christians believe to be the world’s true destination. The vocation of the local church is thus to anticipate this new place in the midst of the old - and its principal testimony to the renewal all things will be the kind of ‘little world’ that it makes...
Book Reviews
Book review: Faithful Presence by David Fitch
This conversation between David Fitch and Alan Roxburgh revolves around David’s recent book Faithful Presence[1] and his life in a church plant near Chicago. David describes his book under three headings: The Presence of God at work in localities, discerned through Practices such as Eucharist, shared meals and reconciliation. We are located in Places where sometimes we will be gathered with other Christians and sometimes...
The End of Liberalism? What the Euro-tribal churches are missing.
The books mentioned propose that the modern, liberal Western imagination is at the root of our current crises and malaise. Liberalism isn’t something that needs to be fixed or adjusted; it is the problem. The challenge isn’t fixing but the construction of a fundamentally different imagination rooted in the Christian and Classic understandings of virtue and the Good. Liberalism is an ideology...
Books in conversation: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the book of Acts
It's a serendipitous experience to read books across different genres and make connections that stretch you. Two books by Edward Luce have done this for me recently: Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) and The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Little, Brown Book Group, 2017). These books articulate a concern about the crisis of Western democracy apparent in many books and articles. While reading these I was also reading C Kavin Rowe’s’ The World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2009) which made some connections which go beyond the familiar frameworks of the twentieth century.