Becoming More Attentive to Our Places (and Our Neighbors in Them)

The Fifth and Final Part of Our Introduction to Cultivating Communities. PLUS, an invitation to join our Monthly Book Conversation for November!

This is the fifth and final post in our series introducing Cultivating Communities.

If you missed it, you can read the previous post by Lindsey Cornett here:
(and it includes links to the first three posts in it)

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Photo by Mohit Kumar on Unsplash

In this final post of our series introducing Cultivating Communities, I will tackle the question: why does place matter for churches? Especially in an age in which it’s not unusual for Christians to commute 20 or 30 minutes, or even more, to gather with their church, why is place central to Christian discipleship in the church?

Place matters because the means by which God has chosen to redeem creation is through the incarnation.

At a particular historical time and place, Jesus was born, grew up, taught, was crucified, resurrected, and ascended into heaven. And with his ascension, the Holy Spirit descended upon his followers and guides and empowers them as they embody Jesus in their particular places. In an earlier post in this series, we asked the question: What does your church embody? But we didn’t explore in that post all the dynamics of embodiment. If a local church embodies Christ, it follows in the incarnational way of Jesus, demonstrating God’s abundant love for humanity (and all creation) in ways that its particular neighbors can understand and engage with.

Every place is unique and contains a unique mix of people, each with their own gifts, passions, challenges, and brokenness. And there, God gathers communities of Christ followers that have the capacity to pay attention to their place and its inhabitants and to embody Christ together in ways that communicate good news to the neighbors there.

What is a church’s place? And especially for churches whose members are scattered across a radius of many miles? There’s not an easy answer to this question; a church can and does exist in many places, but the specific place in which it gathers for worship plays a primary role in its life together, even if few or no members of the church live in close proximity to its gathering place. To paraphrase the apostle John, how can we claim to love and worship God (whom we have not seen) if we aren’t trying to love the actual flesh-and-blood people that surround us as we worship.

Further complicating most churches’ relationship with place is that, for at least the last century, humanity in the Western world has been increasingly lived placeless lives. The automobile, of course, has played a crucial role in this shift. A classic book on this placelessness is James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere (1993), which focuses largely on suburbs, but thirty years later, could be expanded to explore how suburban places have contributed to the placelessness of cities, rural areas, and just about everywhere. Because of our deep connected with other places through the rise of automobility and then also more recently through internet technologies, we are formed as a society to live as if place did not matter. As the incarnational people of God, one key part of our life together is embodying an alternative to this prevailing placelessness. But our formation runs deep, where do we even begin to imagine being a church that is rooted in its place?

I briefly want to recommend six practices that, taken in order, will help us be a community that is more attentive to our neighbors:

1. Paying Attention to Who Your Neighbors Are

Learning to belong to a place begins with simply learning to pay attention.
Where do neighbors gather in your place? Who shows up at these gatherings? Who doesn’t? What are the demographics of your place? (Learn to use federal census data or other sources of demographic data). Who are the people on the margins of your place?

2. Mapping Your Place

Mapping is a more detailed way of being attentive to your place. It illustrates the connections that exist (or could exist) between people or organizations. Asset mapping is often a great place to great, and Luther Snow has written an immensely helpful book for churches: The Power of Asset Mapping. And there are other types of mapping, such as power mapping, that can help you begin to make some sense of your place.

3. Learning the Economy of Your Place

What are the common things of your place – including roads, sidewalks, parks, libraries, and more? How are these common things created and sustained? Who uses these common things, and who doesn’t? And how are they used?

4. Listening to Your Neighbors

Listening to a broad range of neighbors is an essential part of the work of belonging to a place. It’s easy to listen to neighbors who share much in common with those in your congregation, but how can you intentionally be listening to neighbors who are vastly different from you – who speak a different language, for instance? And listening is not just a one-time event, but an on-going posture, an essential part of being together as neighbors.

5. Empowering Neighbors

Too often, churches operate within their places from a position of power and privilege. While it’s good to feed people who are hungry, it’s much better to teach them how to fish (as the old proverb goes). Does the way that we function in our place ultimately serve to empower our neighbors? And especially, are we empowering the youth of our place, offering them opportunities to learn skills and participate in leadership of the neighborhood?

6. Working Alongside Neighbors for the Flourishing of Your Place

Are you encouraging members of your church to participate in neighborhood organizations? Are you working alongside your neighbors on issues that matter the most to them (which you learn from listening)? How aware is your church of local politics? How can you be more deeply involved (in cross- or non-partisan ways) in local politics? Learn how to partner well as a church with local organizations, especially ones that are doing work that is vital for the welfare of the place.

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I’ll emphasize again that the basic order of these practices matter. Many churches would prefer to jump into the bigger and more visible practices like numbers 5 and 6, but we can only do those well if we’ve developed the capacity for some of the earlier practices on the list, and none of these practices are ones that are ever completed. The earlier ones on the list, we could say, are more foundational and set us up to do some of the latter practices better and more sustainably.

At Cultivating Communities, we help congregations not only with practices like conversation and discernment that help deepen their formation, but also with practices that those described here that help them be better, and more Christlike, neighbors in their place.

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We’re excited to tell you more about our selection for November’s online book discussion:

For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional
by Hanna Reichel (Eerdmans, 2025)

“This is the book I have been waiting for. Every page, every sentence imparts uncommon wisdom for such a time as this. Sparingly written yet conveying remarkable historical and theological depth, this is a book every Christian should read and reread, now and in the days ahead. An invaluable gift to the twenty-first-century church.”
― Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Hanna Reichel is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Raised an ecumenical Lutheran, Reichel serves as a ruling elder in the PC(USA) and on the Theology Working Group of the World Communion of Reformed Churches.

Having lived in both Germany and South Africa at different points in their life, Hanna is also an expert on the Weimar Republic and German Confessing Church. This expertise makes their perspective on our current moment particularly insightful and poignant.

In the book’s introduction, Hanna writes: “...all of us must keep living despite what feels like the end of a world. And this task requires just as much discernment, just as much attention, and just as much resourcing. This, then, is the task this little book sets for itself…People who are looking for some insight as to how to live as Christians in such a time as this.”

The devotional is arranged in 4 parts of 7 chapters, perfect for reading over the course of a month, but also contains an appendix that organizes the entries according to need and topic (overwhelm, self-examination, encouragement, etc.).

We look forward to reading it with you this month!

You’ll get a taste of our conversation about this book here on Substack, but the hub for the discussion is our Monthly Book Conversation Facebook Group. Join us there, and join in the conversation about this timely new book!