The Beauty of Thinking Geographically

While thinking geographically about church can be unhelpfully constraining in some ways, there are also ways that it's so great.

Like many modern Western cities, Melbourne could be understood as a cluster of urban villages. It still has 'dormitory suburbs', inhabited by a significant population of fairly long-distance commuters. But there are also lots of pockets of the greater city where people live, work and play and which they really own as their personal little patch. This is a way of breaking down a place of four million people to an area where there can still be a sense of local community and neighbourhood. This is something I deeply love about our suburb. We cross paths with the same circles of people at the school gate, the supermarket, the pub, the park, the garden nursery - and it's certainly a mistake to try to escape people you know by heading out to our local cafe!

Given all this, we see that there's still something very fitting about the local church being the local church even in big cities.

Faith communities - all communities really - are strengthened in proportion to the amount of time that their members spend together. While there may be many circumstances where it's only possible for members to come together once a week for the formal Sunday service (or two weeks in three as the average tends to be for Anglican churches), there's no question that community bonds will be tighter if there's more regular contact than this. This is harder for members of commuter churches, but something that the local church can offer.

For the local church to be deeply embedded in the local community, it really needs to know the local culture. And not just the broad culture (though its always good to understand this well), but the micro-culture of the parish. Using Melbourne as the example again, it would be very clumsy to think that you could presume cultural lessons learnt in say, Hawthorn, were directly applicable to say, Brunswick, or vice versa. Essendon has a very different flavour to Fitzroy. Docklands is really not like Northcote. St Kilda is not like Kew. Williamstown is not like Glen Iris.

Those with a hand in appointing local church leaders should also be acutely aware of the nature of their immediate context. As well as looking at the character and competence of an applicant, they should be asking whether or not there's a good cultural fit. It may not be ideal to appoint a deeply upper-middle class person to lead a church in a real blue collar suburb. (If they're more likely to enjoy a Pinot Gris while listening to Classic FM than they are to grab a VB while watching the footy, they might not be the best fit for the area!) Of course, there is Paul's example of a leader seeking to be all things to all people in 1 Cor 9:19-23 and this is certainly something for all church leaders to strive for. But we also need some sober reflection about our different capacities to make different cultural leaps.

First and foremost, the key to being a good fit for a particular area is to really come to love it. All the people of the local church should love its setting. Too often Christians - including evangelical Anglicans - become experts at critiquing the world around them, and there will always be a need for that because every place needs to be ongoingly reformed. But they must also seek to passionately embrace what's good about the local culture. Celebrate it and show what parts of it reflect gospel values and what parts of it will be further fulfilled in Jesus. Even if the affection is slow in coming, the attitude of love must be fostered. Especially because places are made up of people and different places tend to have different types of people. And if a local church doesn't actively love the type of people around it, it's really not being all that it's called to be. If it does however, it can be a truly beautiful and effective community to be part of.