Thank you for sharing your love for your people and your place.
I also appreciated this section of your newsletter -- I have long been fascinated by the ways that material reality in its various forms—technology, geography, economic reality, etc.—drives many things that we regard in narrowly ideological terms. Ecclesiology is an exemplary case here: whatever people’s doctrines of the church and whether we welcome them or not, I suspect that by far the greatest factors shaping the form of church order we work within are material ones. It would be welcome to see more conversations about our doctrine of the Church and reflection and deliberation concerning its practices registering this.
It would be interesting to hear voices from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and other areas speak to this issue.
There is a certain logic here about how churches should work in a parish model and entertain a centered geographical presence in a neighborhood. Alastair and Susannah present a pretty common argument about how unintentional many evangelical or other churches are about "neighborhood". What you say perhaps rings true in a most basic sense. Churches should be a part of their community. But, in America and elsewhere we live in very different times and places than the ideal Stoke-on-Trent life put forward here. The interesting thing for myself is that western rural Pennsylvania looks much like central England.
However, England's countryside looks the way it does for a lot of reasons that depend on a global imperial footprint over the last several hundred years and the rise of global capitalism more recently. We should also probably remember that England is part of a restored nation and continent whose beauty looks the way it does because of post-World War II modernization and development, literally billions of mid-twentieth century American dollars borrowed by the UK for that very purpose. You knock the gentrification and colonizing ways of American evangelical churches from the very perch your own country and churches established with us and tried to perfect all across the world.
The church of Christ can certainly work within a parish-based system but not every locale renders such a model sufficient for kingdom work or remains all that helpful. What would parish life look like in Hong Kong or Mexico City? Or, how about Dallas, Texas or New York City? There is certainly something to be said for purposeful living in a particular community and intentionally serving a particular neighborhood, but what really is a neighborhood in today's society?
I ask the age-old question about who is our neighbor and what is a neighborhood because it's still very relevant to the purpose and life of the church. Times and places change, so how does the church effectively serve its sphere of influence in a world where borders, locale, and even the notion of face-to-face proximity are often disappearing into thin air. Living as a community is certainly important but what does that look like in the vast open spaces of rural America compared to the isolated garden life of central England? And, what of America's swelling metroplexes and the myriad number of smaller cities and towns that dot a landscape forty times the size of England alone?
Further, what of hangouts on Discord or the massive communities of video game enthusiasts that themselves are the size of the very cities and towns in question or even larger? How about the Facebook groups and constant communication and presence we enjoy from others online? The public square has moved from the town square and seats of castle-inspired power to Twitter, Facebook, and many other "places" that exist on massive server farms quite apart from the physical location of the community's existence.
So, in one sense I'd very much like to agree with you here but given the state of our technological society and its continued sociotechnological innovation I don't see how the parish system as framed is going to work in any way similar to how it has in the past. We might also consider that the parish system developed in what we call Europe today more broadly not because it was biblical necessarily but because relevant social institutions decentralized as the Roman Empire fell to pieces. Something had to take Rome's place and the parish system gradually developed as a result along with monasteries and feudal societies. The other historical question we might ask is whether the parish system has really worked in England at all since only about 2-3% of the people even go regularly to a parish church in a country that was once thoroughly Christian. Are we really to believe that the very system of ecclesial life in question had nothing to do with the vast unfaithfulness that exists in what was once the very model of Christendom?
Such a contention seems sociologically problematic and so there is more here to discuss. Britain is what she is today precisely because of her work in the rest of the world, a social and political superstructure she was very instrumental putting in place. The church has an obligation as a matter of mission to the whole world and especially to the world that English Protestantism as a matter of empire and economic endeavors made possible. The genteel life of Stoke-on-Trent exists because all the industrial manufacturing that once clouded its skies now takes place in places like Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and Mexico. Those communities face all the challenges of a booming industrialization while English clerics might rejoice in what a beautiful green place Shakespeare's home now is. But, the truth is that the neighborhoods of Shanghai and Guadalajara are filled with people that don't know Christ and aren't the product of a near two thousand year presence of Christianity in their neighborhoods.
So, I get it. We need to be intentional in our communities but we can't treat this topic with the sort of green-treed picture heavy romanticized appraisal of neighborhood that makes us think we all should live in a Shire like nice little hobbits with that occasional episcopal visit by Gandalf, dragon fireworks and all. We do ourselves and the church no favor by pretending life is something other than what it is now or that we ought to concentrate in the main on those physically closest to us. Our mission is the Great Commission and not setting up and maintaining a great neighborhood or town. And, look, I live in a post-industrial town in western Pennsylvania that could double for whatever you find in the English countryside minus what has been there over a thousand years. But, our focus can't merely be where we live because the gospel in the main has never been just about that reality. The gospel does transform neighborhoods and cities but we don't do that without keeping our focus on the continued proclamation of God's word to the whole world.
Most of the factors that make Stoke and other places like it effective as neighbourhoods have nothing to do with their picturesque or prosperous character (and I'm grinning somewhat at the impression that you seem to have of life in Stoke-on-Trent, albeit one encouraged by one facet of it that my pictures show). Stoke-on-Trent is one of the ten lowest income cities in the UK and people here would have considerably lower median income than pretty much anywhere in the USA.
Ironically, Stoke's effectiveness for fostering neighbourhood and place has rather more to do with its relative poverty, the fact that people generally have smaller and older terraced houses closely packed together, move home a lot less, live closer to or with family, drive a lot less, walk and use public transport a lot more, etc. The factors that are most corrosive of neighbourhood often have a lot more to do with wealth: greater dependence on the automobile, uprootedness through further education, larger and more detached houses, more frequent moving home, etc. That doesn't mean that urbanization, displacement through war, family breakdown, and economic migration aren't huge issues in various parts of the world. Nor that our lives are tidily detached from or free from any complicity in the forces driving such things.
However, while the Church does have a mission to all of the world, we and the congregations we attend have far more focused and limited missions. Part of the significance of the duty of loving our NEIGHBOUR is that it gives a focus that love would otherwise lack and ensuring that it does not cease to function as a DUTY. While our realm of Christian loving concern and responsibility as individuals and churches should be an expanding one, unless it is tethered to a particular object, it can dissipate into a guilty sense of our inability to accomplish a messianic task of universal love that we have set for ourselves. God has not called me to be a faithful presence in Shanghai or Guadalajara, but in Stoke-on-Trent.
Nor are our labours in our own communities, local churches, and families to be considered in terms of opportunity costs, as if a mother's loving effort in raising her child should be judged ill because it could have been employed with much greater effect, or with more equitable outcomes, upon a different child entirely. Likewise, the idea that Stoke's current greener way of life largely exists because all of the industrial manufacturing occurs elsewhere seems to depend upon a not unrelated zero-sum-game assumption. Much of the cleaning up of Stoke results from changing production methods, scientific and technological innovation, government environmental regulations, and a movement away from coal power. The result is that the major polluting industry now produces its products with a greatly reduced workforce and minimal pollution.
As I remarked within the post itself, the parochial system was always going to be harder to effect in the USA, for several reasons. My point is that it is important to recognize what is lost in the absence of firmer grounding in place. I also want people to consider the degree to which a car-centric, extremely mobile, suburban way of life is to a great extent a CHOICE that some societies and their members have made, and that it is a choice with considerable costs. It isn't merely forced upon them by material factors. There are places in the USA where it is quite possible to practice thicker forms of community, but those places tend to be those where such a choice was less possible. You mention New York, for instance, where I live for half of the year. It is certainly possible to have thicker community and parishes in New York, in part because it is dense and much more hospitable to and designed for pedestrians. It looks different from Stoke-on-Trent, but it is entirely possible to do there.
I'll have to end on this point, but part of what we need to consider is that, even though social media sites may be the primary realms of people's gathering and ordering, the capacity for such places to achieve some basic human communal ends are profoundly attenuated. There are also contexts within which the Church will find it hard to be the Church. By contrast, the parish is a way in which churches can form, be present within, and claim space for Christ. Within a parish, over time a church can grow to enjoy a strong civil visibility and presence. Without any rootedness in a settled place, it can easily become like a mall for the individual soul, even when churches struggle against the tendency, failing to incorporate and integrate the entire fabric of the Christian's life in the worship of God. In other words, striving towards a presence in our places—which will vary from place to place, and be very difficult in places that are inherently unsettled—is part of how we fully the Great Commission.
Hm. I don't know that you really responded to what I've said here. For one thing, there are few poorer places here in the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania than you might think so the comparison made is not just about the romantic attachment to place we might consider for Stoke. I don't see any work here in terms of defining what we mean by neighbor except perhaps the notion that life is about where we can walk and who we can be with in that walking. The Good Samaritan though seems to be more than that as does the mission of the church, local or otherwise. Even the most insular English life is supported by a vast global infrastructure where other neighbors do not fare so well precisely because we do. New York City is a place where you could certainly have a neighborhood due to population density but the infrastructure required to do so and the wealth of incoming support to make it happen hails from other shores and nations not typically considered. We live in a global society much more than we ever did before and so even our understanding of neighbor has to develop beyond the close relations we're used to considering. Otherwise, relying on things like public transportation and a greener way of life in thinking we're neighborly contra something like American suburbia is really just one more neo-Marxist utopian scheme.
Thank you for sharing your love for your people and your place.
I also appreciated this section of your newsletter -- I have long been fascinated by the ways that material reality in its various forms—technology, geography, economic reality, etc.—drives many things that we regard in narrowly ideological terms. Ecclesiology is an exemplary case here: whatever people’s doctrines of the church and whether we welcome them or not, I suspect that by far the greatest factors shaping the form of church order we work within are material ones. It would be welcome to see more conversations about our doctrine of the Church and reflection and deliberation concerning its practices registering this.
It would be interesting to hear voices from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and other areas speak to this issue.
There is a certain logic here about how churches should work in a parish model and entertain a centered geographical presence in a neighborhood. Alastair and Susannah present a pretty common argument about how unintentional many evangelical or other churches are about "neighborhood". What you say perhaps rings true in a most basic sense. Churches should be a part of their community. But, in America and elsewhere we live in very different times and places than the ideal Stoke-on-Trent life put forward here. The interesting thing for myself is that western rural Pennsylvania looks much like central England.
However, England's countryside looks the way it does for a lot of reasons that depend on a global imperial footprint over the last several hundred years and the rise of global capitalism more recently. We should also probably remember that England is part of a restored nation and continent whose beauty looks the way it does because of post-World War II modernization and development, literally billions of mid-twentieth century American dollars borrowed by the UK for that very purpose. You knock the gentrification and colonizing ways of American evangelical churches from the very perch your own country and churches established with us and tried to perfect all across the world.
The church of Christ can certainly work within a parish-based system but not every locale renders such a model sufficient for kingdom work or remains all that helpful. What would parish life look like in Hong Kong or Mexico City? Or, how about Dallas, Texas or New York City? There is certainly something to be said for purposeful living in a particular community and intentionally serving a particular neighborhood, but what really is a neighborhood in today's society?
I ask the age-old question about who is our neighbor and what is a neighborhood because it's still very relevant to the purpose and life of the church. Times and places change, so how does the church effectively serve its sphere of influence in a world where borders, locale, and even the notion of face-to-face proximity are often disappearing into thin air. Living as a community is certainly important but what does that look like in the vast open spaces of rural America compared to the isolated garden life of central England? And, what of America's swelling metroplexes and the myriad number of smaller cities and towns that dot a landscape forty times the size of England alone?
Further, what of hangouts on Discord or the massive communities of video game enthusiasts that themselves are the size of the very cities and towns in question or even larger? How about the Facebook groups and constant communication and presence we enjoy from others online? The public square has moved from the town square and seats of castle-inspired power to Twitter, Facebook, and many other "places" that exist on massive server farms quite apart from the physical location of the community's existence.
So, in one sense I'd very much like to agree with you here but given the state of our technological society and its continued sociotechnological innovation I don't see how the parish system as framed is going to work in any way similar to how it has in the past. We might also consider that the parish system developed in what we call Europe today more broadly not because it was biblical necessarily but because relevant social institutions decentralized as the Roman Empire fell to pieces. Something had to take Rome's place and the parish system gradually developed as a result along with monasteries and feudal societies. The other historical question we might ask is whether the parish system has really worked in England at all since only about 2-3% of the people even go regularly to a parish church in a country that was once thoroughly Christian. Are we really to believe that the very system of ecclesial life in question had nothing to do with the vast unfaithfulness that exists in what was once the very model of Christendom?
Such a contention seems sociologically problematic and so there is more here to discuss. Britain is what she is today precisely because of her work in the rest of the world, a social and political superstructure she was very instrumental putting in place. The church has an obligation as a matter of mission to the whole world and especially to the world that English Protestantism as a matter of empire and economic endeavors made possible. The genteel life of Stoke-on-Trent exists because all the industrial manufacturing that once clouded its skies now takes place in places like Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and Mexico. Those communities face all the challenges of a booming industrialization while English clerics might rejoice in what a beautiful green place Shakespeare's home now is. But, the truth is that the neighborhoods of Shanghai and Guadalajara are filled with people that don't know Christ and aren't the product of a near two thousand year presence of Christianity in their neighborhoods.
So, I get it. We need to be intentional in our communities but we can't treat this topic with the sort of green-treed picture heavy romanticized appraisal of neighborhood that makes us think we all should live in a Shire like nice little hobbits with that occasional episcopal visit by Gandalf, dragon fireworks and all. We do ourselves and the church no favor by pretending life is something other than what it is now or that we ought to concentrate in the main on those physically closest to us. Our mission is the Great Commission and not setting up and maintaining a great neighborhood or town. And, look, I live in a post-industrial town in western Pennsylvania that could double for whatever you find in the English countryside minus what has been there over a thousand years. But, our focus can't merely be where we live because the gospel in the main has never been just about that reality. The gospel does transform neighborhoods and cities but we don't do that without keeping our focus on the continued proclamation of God's word to the whole world.
Most of the factors that make Stoke and other places like it effective as neighbourhoods have nothing to do with their picturesque or prosperous character (and I'm grinning somewhat at the impression that you seem to have of life in Stoke-on-Trent, albeit one encouraged by one facet of it that my pictures show). Stoke-on-Trent is one of the ten lowest income cities in the UK and people here would have considerably lower median income than pretty much anywhere in the USA.
Ironically, Stoke's effectiveness for fostering neighbourhood and place has rather more to do with its relative poverty, the fact that people generally have smaller and older terraced houses closely packed together, move home a lot less, live closer to or with family, drive a lot less, walk and use public transport a lot more, etc. The factors that are most corrosive of neighbourhood often have a lot more to do with wealth: greater dependence on the automobile, uprootedness through further education, larger and more detached houses, more frequent moving home, etc. That doesn't mean that urbanization, displacement through war, family breakdown, and economic migration aren't huge issues in various parts of the world. Nor that our lives are tidily detached from or free from any complicity in the forces driving such things.
However, while the Church does have a mission to all of the world, we and the congregations we attend have far more focused and limited missions. Part of the significance of the duty of loving our NEIGHBOUR is that it gives a focus that love would otherwise lack and ensuring that it does not cease to function as a DUTY. While our realm of Christian loving concern and responsibility as individuals and churches should be an expanding one, unless it is tethered to a particular object, it can dissipate into a guilty sense of our inability to accomplish a messianic task of universal love that we have set for ourselves. God has not called me to be a faithful presence in Shanghai or Guadalajara, but in Stoke-on-Trent.
Nor are our labours in our own communities, local churches, and families to be considered in terms of opportunity costs, as if a mother's loving effort in raising her child should be judged ill because it could have been employed with much greater effect, or with more equitable outcomes, upon a different child entirely. Likewise, the idea that Stoke's current greener way of life largely exists because all of the industrial manufacturing occurs elsewhere seems to depend upon a not unrelated zero-sum-game assumption. Much of the cleaning up of Stoke results from changing production methods, scientific and technological innovation, government environmental regulations, and a movement away from coal power. The result is that the major polluting industry now produces its products with a greatly reduced workforce and minimal pollution.
As I remarked within the post itself, the parochial system was always going to be harder to effect in the USA, for several reasons. My point is that it is important to recognize what is lost in the absence of firmer grounding in place. I also want people to consider the degree to which a car-centric, extremely mobile, suburban way of life is to a great extent a CHOICE that some societies and their members have made, and that it is a choice with considerable costs. It isn't merely forced upon them by material factors. There are places in the USA where it is quite possible to practice thicker forms of community, but those places tend to be those where such a choice was less possible. You mention New York, for instance, where I live for half of the year. It is certainly possible to have thicker community and parishes in New York, in part because it is dense and much more hospitable to and designed for pedestrians. It looks different from Stoke-on-Trent, but it is entirely possible to do there.
I'll have to end on this point, but part of what we need to consider is that, even though social media sites may be the primary realms of people's gathering and ordering, the capacity for such places to achieve some basic human communal ends are profoundly attenuated. There are also contexts within which the Church will find it hard to be the Church. By contrast, the parish is a way in which churches can form, be present within, and claim space for Christ. Within a parish, over time a church can grow to enjoy a strong civil visibility and presence. Without any rootedness in a settled place, it can easily become like a mall for the individual soul, even when churches struggle against the tendency, failing to incorporate and integrate the entire fabric of the Christian's life in the worship of God. In other words, striving towards a presence in our places—which will vary from place to place, and be very difficult in places that are inherently unsettled—is part of how we fully the Great Commission.
Hm. I don't know that you really responded to what I've said here. For one thing, there are few poorer places here in the Rust Belt of Pennsylvania than you might think so the comparison made is not just about the romantic attachment to place we might consider for Stoke. I don't see any work here in terms of defining what we mean by neighbor except perhaps the notion that life is about where we can walk and who we can be with in that walking. The Good Samaritan though seems to be more than that as does the mission of the church, local or otherwise. Even the most insular English life is supported by a vast global infrastructure where other neighbors do not fare so well precisely because we do. New York City is a place where you could certainly have a neighborhood due to population density but the infrastructure required to do so and the wealth of incoming support to make it happen hails from other shores and nations not typically considered. We live in a global society much more than we ever did before and so even our understanding of neighbor has to develop beyond the close relations we're used to considering. Otherwise, relying on things like public transportation and a greener way of life in thinking we're neighborly contra something like American suburbia is really just one more neo-Marxist utopian scheme.
Thank you. This was a lovely post. But what is happening in photo #16?
Thanks! They are an artistic installation in Trentham Gardens.