“Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread“ Bilbo Baggins
JRR Tolkien
When you are leading a neighborhood expression of a church, you understand that you can’t exactly phone it in. The streets are your church, the rhythm’s of the neighborhood your liturgy, and your neighbors the congregants whether they ever step foot in your actual community or not. My wife and I had the joy of launching such an expression in the heart of the city 8 years ago now. For 4 years we lived, loved, and walked the streets of one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the country. Beautiful things happened, lives were changed and community built … until the socio-economic realities forced us out. Because of this time, a new opportunity emerged for me.
For these past 3 years I have had a daily commute back to our former neighborhood creating and curating a neighborhood gathering space. Early on, despite always having the pain and mixed emotions of no longer living here, things were relatively familiar for me in the neighborhood sense. Relationships were still there with most of those who we had worked diligently to bring about the “prosperity of the city”. But as I will relate in later posts, one of the unchanging things about neighborhood is the constant change. When you live in a place, although still difficult to navigate, at least you are in the conversation and can adapt more readily. I have found that when your 9 to 5-ing it, you are quickly looped out of the flow and it becomes harder to adapt and adjust. Our residential life leaves little energy and focus for my professional life. Sometimes it helps to just get out of my space and walk the streets again to reconnect. Today is such a day. Sometimes it breathes life into me. Sometimes it just reminds me how disconnected I really am. I’ve just finished such a walk and am processing these tensions within me. I’m sitting in a space that I’ve spent hours over the years wrestling with all of what the neighborhood had to offer. Honestly I’m trying to find the faintest connection to the passion and promise we once felt for this place. What used to emanate from the very streets we walked, now takes so much emotional effort to try and recapture. I’m still not even sure I can. I am feeling a few things very strongly though:
- Remote working isn’t really an option. What I mean is that you can’t invest in neighborhood anything truly effectively if you don’t reside in the neighborhood. I’m sure that will not sit well with many of my pastor friends who don’t live anywhere near their congregations. Now if your church is an “attractional” model, that is if you are trying to get people to come to you, then this doesn’t apply. If you are not seeking the well being of the community your church is located in by actually being part of the community, then live where you want to.
- Many don’t understand this principle. The organization that initially sponsored our new church work in this neighborhood never did. They recommended we live in a more affordable neighborhood while trying to build community down here. It’s not all that unusual a sentiment. Many (I’d actually offer most) church leaderships would rather the pastor move to a more affordable neighborhood than give them a salary that allowed/encouraged them to live where the church was. Many pastors I know chose on their own to move to neighborhoods so they could buy bigger and better homes, some of them for very valid reasons, some honestly for ego.
- It is possible to have influence in your professional space without living there, but it’s very costly and it will take a toll somewhere. For the past year I’ve been connected to a counselor and this very subject takes up a great deal of our time together … without a great deal of resolution. I find myself mentally exhausted and uncharacteristically frustrated too often.
so there it is … I’m continuing to try to do what I see as inherently impossible. I’m trying to be the incarnational (read living/breathing) presence of Christ between the hours of 9 and 5 and preferably Monday through Friday. I don’t believe that it can really successfully be done …. so why am I even trying? I have no idea.