About place: a reflection on living intentionally
How living intentionally and in a specific place is transforming us, a bit about the fragmentation of private land and walls, and what some of this could mean for the church
Our new home
We recently moved, and it’s pretty exciting. But, when I’ve told people about it, some regular responses have been, “How exciting! Are you buying a house?” or “Are you moving to a better neighborhood?” or “Is this an upgrade? “A bigger home?” “A larger lot?” These are common enough things to ask, and I probably would have asked the same things of others I know who have moved recently. But, I’ve had to carefully navigate answering these questions because our answer to all of them is a rather hard-to-hide and emphatic “no.”
Our new home is not bigger. Rent is higher, and the lot is smaller. We have no yard (after having a relatively big one). There are more neighbors who are much closer in proximity. We didn’t move for a new school for the kids, or to be closer to work—it’s less than a mile from where we used to live.
But, we’ve never been so excited about a move before.
Intentionally in proximity and place
For the last year or so, we’ve committed to live in what we’re calling an intentional community with a group of close friends of ours. Basically, there’s around ten of us (not including our kids) who have chosen to commit to live in proximity in a specific geographic place with a common purpose around our shared values. We have regular times of gathering to pray, eat meals together, and grow in relationship, but the main pull for us is place.1
For us, that place is a suburb called Oranga, and a specific street in particular. At its heart is a vibrant community center with a playground, pump track, basketball court, rugby pitches, and more. There’s a decade-long, council-led building project that is injecting new, affordable homes into the area. Two primary schools border the community, so lots of kids live there, many of whom go to school with our children and are friends of theirs. At drop-off and pick-up times, kids are everywhere.
The house we are in is tucked into the back of a sub-divided lot that originally had just one home, but now has three. The people who live in the two adjacent houses in the lot are members of our intentional community, so it’s ideal for our purposes. The houses are packed tightly—we basically have three feet of “grass” that stretches around our house. But, after living there for a couple months, we’ve noticed some rather confronting, but liberating truths.
Walls divide us
When we first moved to New Zealand in 2020 and were looking for a place to live, we found a house that was “perfect.” The first thing that stood out about it was its large, six-foot high, brick wall with a gate behind which we could park our car. I saw it and thought our kids and our stuff would be safe there. The kids were safe (as was our stuff), and I’m obviously grateful for that. I could cook inside the house while they ran around outside in the yard, and I didn’t have to worry over them aside from falling out of a tree they climbed. Stray dogs, and wandering folks from the street couldn’t accidentally stumble into our space and disrupt us. It was separate and secure.
But what we didn’t think about with that wall that offered such security was what it separated us from—and yes, I’m aware the very point of walls is to separate and divide things. We never saw people walking by, and we never had to engage the neighborhood. We mostly stayed in our yard, safe and protected. We invited people to our house. We served them our way, in our space. It was easier this way, but didn’t necessarily come from a deliberate choice about how to live and engage. We controlled the culture of the space where we engaged our neighbors—to an extent, this may be unavoidable when someone comes into your home. There is indeed good that happened behind our wall, but, we realize now that we missed a lot.
Where we live now, we don’t have a wall. One step out the front door, and we see our neighbors walking down the sidewalk. We wave and say “hi.” We hear more of the buzz of the neighborhood, and we notice more of what happens outside our doors—a mix of all sorts of goings-on. There’s a dairy, Thai takeaway, laundrymat, and a liquor store right across the street. Visiting these places gives us a chance to talk to business owners and other neighbors and get to know them. We are learning people’s names and trying to engage their stories and invite them into ours. We regularly play pick-up games of soccer or basketball in the evenings at the community center. There are often ten or more kids who join.
We feel like we have been dropped in the center of a place that has ways of engaging, expectations, hopes, and dreams tied to the neighborhood. And we have the opportunity to connect to those things. The rhythms of the neighborhood have begun to change us, and we are becoming a part of these movements. Our hope is that we can be a positive addition to what is already happening. The Spirit is and has been at work, and we are invited to join up with what has been going on. This is true of every space and place, if we take time to see past things like walls and gates—or remove them altogether.
A misguided economic framework
If I’m honest, however, I never anticipated living in a place like this, in this way. I recently listended to a conversation Willie Jennings had with Carey Baptist College, the school where my wife teaches and I work at in Auckland. Toward the end, as part of the question and answer session, Jennings talks about a conversation he where he said:
“Every nation should ban gated communities…Our economics will always press against forms of economic logic that wants to invite us into enclosure, segregation, and fragmentation…The economics of the West is always against the spirit of God."2
I bristled when I first heard this. It is jarring and contrary to what I was told to believe, how I was expected to vote, and what I actively pursued for some time. It’s pointedly critical of values I had internalized. But, I’ve thought longer on it and am realizing the truth at the heart of that statement.
While we didn’t own the home in which we lived before this move (and still don’t own one) in New Zealand, home-ownership has long been a goal of ours. It’s also something we profited from before. Owning and selling a home is what funded our move to Scotland for my wife to complete her PhD and for me to be a stay-at-home dad with the kids. Getting to pursue a doctorate for my wife while I was able to choose to not work was a massive privilege for us. But, we were only able to have money for our first home deposit because of gifts others gave us. We are grateful for their generosity, and it gave us a leg-up. We didn’t earn it. But we had a financial privilege that many never do.
Over the last several years, we have profoundly noticed how the ideals we had spent much of our lives pursuing were deeply enmeshed in a specific value system, one that resonates in white communities of faith, of politics, and of social class. It’s a Euro-centric, Western framework.
But we didn’t realize until this move that we were the ones missing out by the choices we made about where and how we lived. It wasn’t just that we were advantaged in certain ways, but that we were actually at a deficit because of these realities. Maybe it’s not always bad to own land, but there are certainly unspoken expectations and entitlements that come along with it—not to mention deeply complex issues of land rights in colonized nations (which is pretty much the reality everywhere, by the way). And there is certainly a significant cost.
I’ve come to largely agree with Willie Jennings about gated communities (and gated homes like we had), however, because they disconnect people from place. We aren’t meant to live behind walls and be isolated from our neighborhoods. We aren’t meant to parcel out land for a few to take as personal, private property, resulting in disjointed, economically disperate communities and classes. Homes may become havens of escape, and “safe” spaces, but often at the expense of true relationships with the very people we are meant to engage.
This is true for our churches too. The economics of the West seem implicit to churches I have grown up in and been around nearly all my life. Churches own land, construct buildings, and seek to attract people to their ways of doing things. They sometimes actively seek to build more, grow bigger, and then, maybe have an impact for Jesus afteward.
Churches need to rethink how to engage place
I’m not an expert on place, land, socioeconomics, race, or indigeneity. But living intentionally in a specific place has begun to alter my perceptions of what I should pursue, how I find belonging, where my money goes, what I do with my time each day, and most significantly as of late, how I engage with people and place. Because of where we live and how we live in that place, I am seeing people differently. I am becoming connected to my place.
This has recently gotten me thinking about some of the same things about church, and, in particular, where our money goes. I didn’t want to do extensive research on how much money churches spend on staff and buildings because I know I would rage and throw my computer across the room. But, I did a little and found that most churches spend between 50-80% on staff and buildings.3
I can say with confidence that far more of the average church’s budget goes to pay professional Christians to do ministry inside privately owned buildings than goes to the poor or to invest in local neighborhoods. Pick a random church this Sunday, and you’ll probably find this to be true of it. And while I am sure there are (at least a few) exceptions, and recognize there is a practical cost to doing things, it’s no wonder why traditional metrics of success are showing declines in churches’ growth and impact. But is that going to actually change what we do and where we spend our money?
The culture of the Spirit
Here’s another thought from Jennings on the need for the church to engage place differently and the dangers of expecting people to adapt to our culture of the way we often do church:
“Churches must be about the business of engaging place and space. Our way back to a healthy doctrine of creation demands that we engage the powers of spatial fragmentation and commodification and challenge a demonic process of desacralization of the earth that began when the Church and the kingdoms of this world joined forces to claim the world as private property. What specific strategy Churches employ will depend on listening carefully to the Spirit of God as our God guides us in where, how, and with whom we should live for the sake of our witness to the coming reign of God. Yet we must not be self-deceived by our love of homogeneity inside of which flow market operations. A church comfortable inside its boundaries—socioeconomic, educational, racial, spatial—is a church formed to protect those boundaries at any cost. Such a church has forgotten its real baptism."4
The reality is we live and operate in the world in a certain way, and I suspect many of us are not conscious of the values of Western culture that permeate our homes, our churches, and our lives. These invisible realities don’t make us evil, but we risk much if we fail to interrogate them. The culture of the Spirit requires us to wrestle with and stand against the ideologies of this world. This makes me wonder:
Do we even need buildings for our churches?
Who is served by what we own (personal homes and corporate/church buildings)?
Are you able to engage the place where you live? Are the people in your neighborhood the same as you (racially, culturally, etc.)?
How often are you in spaces where you submit to another culture’s ways of engaging place? And how far do you have to go to do so?
What could churches do differently with our resources if we were able to see a Spirit-filled body of believers equipped for ministry rather than just a select few, or one?
Who do we become if our “walls” or buildings go away?
What do we lose if we no longer control the culture of our space? Or, what do we gain if we share creation of church culture with those who see the world differently and ask new, challenging questions?
How can our place shape us and how we live as Christians?
What is the Spirit doing that has nothing to do with our buildings or our professional ministers?
I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment, and thanks for reading Grumpy Ramblings!
A lot of groups that use the phrase, “intentional community,” are focused on sustainable living, organic farming, and the like. This isn’t our focus, but those sorts of things could (and perhaps should) be reasonable points of emphasis for Christian intentional communities. For more on what I have in mind, see: https://www.metanoianz.com/blog/demystifying-intentional-community.
Willie Jennings “Overcoming Racial Faith,” accessed 3 September 2024, video, 1:05:30, https://www.lifelonglearning.nz/resources/overcoming-racial-faith/.
For example, see, https://www.churchlawandtax.com/manage-finances/budgets/how-churches-spend-their-money/. Search for yourself, and you’ll find a whole bunch of other data on this. And if you really want to have fun, peruse charity registries from for churches and their budgets to see this in more detail.
Willie Jennings, “Being Baptized: Race.” The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 2nd Edition (2011): 277-289, 287.
Hi Matt, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Now you have got me thinking again about sacred space and about budgets. Like you, I wonder what makes space sacred. I suspect it might be because we might encounter God there. But if the universe is a cosmic temple and if the Jerusalem temple was a microcosm of the universe then the whole world is sacred space. In the OT you had to go to Jerusalem to encounter God, now we no longer need to worship on this mountain nor in Jerusalem (John 4:21). So sacred space might be any space we decide to set aside for worship. Some church traditions consecrate their church buildings (and deconsecrate them when they are no longer useful). While we Baptists might not go that far, I do think there is value in setting apart a space for worship, and where encounters with God can be facilitated. And that might be a church building.
I take your point exactly on church budgets, and I agree that churches ought to reconsider their budget priorities probably more often than we do. Twenty-five years ago the congregation of a church I am familiar with was much larger than it is now and a building fund was started as they felt we would outgrow the building. Now that is no longer a priority. There is a modest sum in the fund (and questions about honouring what the money was given for are complex), but I wonder if there are creative things that can be done with that fund along the lines of what you describe like a café or social housing. Here is money given for a new building that will not be needed in the foreseeable future languishing in the bank.
Stipend budgets are complex. Like you, I am committed to theological education and have been involved in that in various capacities for most of my adult life, both part-time and full-time. I have never been a paid pastoral worker, but in the churches I have been involved in I have been committed to using whatever gifts God has given me to contribute to the life of those churches. There are plenty of opportunities to do that where I am currently, and I am grateful for those opportunities. Nor am I the only person who has such opportunities. That said, there is a lot to be said for bi-vocational pastors, although in practical terms once a church reaches a certain critical mass, that may not always be possible.
I have probably said enough. Thanks for the conversation.
Thanks, Matt for a thought-provoking blog. I am interested in your comments on church buildings and professional ministers, and I understand some of your points, but I think we need to be careful not to go too far in one direction.
I understand Baptist churches in NZ have properties worth $4 billion and a lot could be done if some of those buildings were sold. On the other hand, sacred space is important. I will give four examples.
In 1996 I went to Syria and visited Maaloula, a Christian town built into the side of a hill about 50km from Damascus, where the people still speak Aramaic. It contains a Syrian Orthodox monastery that was invaded and taken over by Jihadists in 2013 and now returned to the nuns. Part of the monastery complex is what is believed to be the oldest church in the world in continuous use since the second century. A place set aside for Christian worship for maybe 1900 years. That is truly a sacred space and we would be poorer without it.
I have been to Cyprus many times and have often visited the 9th-century Church of Saint Lazarus. After Jesus raised him from the dead Lazarus is said to have fled to Cyprus where he became the first bishop (so the story goes). You can go downstairs to the Crypt where Lazarus is said to have been buried. There is said to have been a church on that site long before St Lazarus was built. This too is a sacred space where people have come to pray for maybe almost 2000 years and we would be poorer without it.
About 20 years ago on one of my trips to Cyprus, I had a 10-hour layover in Frankfurt. There is a train line through Frankfurt Airport, and I took a train to Mainz to fill in some of the day. I took in the Gutenberg Museum and then wandered into the Mainz Cathedral. There I sat in a prayer chapel and mingled my prayers with those of countless people who had prayed in that place for 1,000 years. It was a sacred moment for me. (And then I got lost trying to find my way back to the railway station.)
And to bring it up to date, around 50 years ago I took my pre-school daughter to Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. She looked up at the high vaulted ceilings, leaned over to me, and said, “Daddy these people must love God very much.”
Of course, there are things we could do for the poor with some of what we have with church buildings, but I think Christians have been right to set aside spaces for believers to gather for worship over the centuries. And we would be much poorer if some of these spaces no longer existed.
As for professional ministers, I grew up in a group that now calls itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church They don’t believe in theological education or professional ministers and have now become (in my opinion) a heretical cult. As a graduate of Regent College and as someone who for twenty years while working as an accountant, ran a part-time school of theology for professional people in the secular workplace, of course, I agree with you when you ask, “What could churches do differently with our resources if we were able to see a Spirit-filled body of believers equipped for ministry rather than just a select few, or one? But if I read Ephesians 4:11–13 right, someone needs to do the equipping. And it seems to me that one way to do that is to train someone (in a theological college), set them aside for that purpose and pay them a stipend. There is a balance to be sure, but I don’t think there is wisdom in doing away with sacred spaces and “sacred” (in the sense of set apart) people to equip the people for the work of the ministry.
Thanks, Matt for a thought-provoking blog. I am interested in your comments on church buildings and professional ministers, and I understand some of your points, but I think we need to be careful not to go too far in one direction.
I understand Baptist churches in NZ have properties worth $4 billion and a lot could be done if some of those buildings were sold. On the other hand, sacred space is important. I will give four examples.
In 1996 I went to Syria and visited Maaloula, a Christian town built into the side of a hill about 50km from Damascus, where the people still speak Aramaic. It contains a Syrian Orthodox monastery that was invaded and taken over by Jihadists in 2013 and now returned to the nuns. Part of the monastery complex is what is believed to be the oldest church in the world in continuous use since the second century. A place set aside for Christian worship for maybe 1900 years. That is truly a sacred space and we would be poorer without it.
I have been to Cyprus many times and have often visited the 9th-century Church of Saint Lazarus. After Jesus raised him from the dead Lazarus is said to have fled to Cyprus where he became the first bishop (so the story goes). You can go downstairs to the Crypt where Lazarus is said to have been buried. There is said to have been a church on that site long before St Lazarus was built. This too is a sacred space where people have come to pray for maybe almost 2000 years and we would be poorer without it.
About 20 years ago on one of my trips to Cyprus, I had a 10-hour layover in Frankfurt. There is a train line through Frankfurt Airport, and I took a train to Mainz to fill in some of the day. I took in the Gutenberg Museum and then wandered into the Mainz Cathedral. There I sat in a prayer chapel and mingled my prayers with those of countless people who had prayed in that place for 1,000 years. It was a sacred moment for me. (And then I got lost trying to find my way back to the railway station.)
And to bring it up to date, around 50 years ago I took my pre-school daughter to Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. She looked up at the high vaulted ceilings, leaned over to me, and said, “Daddy these people must love God very much.”
Of course, there are things we could do for the poor with some of what we have with church buildings, but I think Christians have been right to set aside spaces for believers to gather for worship over the centuries. And we would be much poorer if some of these spaces no longer existed.
As for professional ministers, I grew up in a group that now calls itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church They don’t believe in theological education or professional ministers and have now become (in my opinion) a heretical cult. As a graduate of Regent College and as someone who for twenty years while working as an accountant, ran a part-time school of theology for professional people in the secular workplace, of course, I agree with you when you ask, “What could churches do differently with our resources if we were able to see a Spirit-filled body of believers equipped for ministry rather than just a select few, or one? But if I read Ephesians 4:11–13 right, someone needs to do the equipping. And it seems to me that one way to do that is to train someone (in a theological college), set them aside for that purpose and pay them a stipend. There is a balance to be sure, but I don’t think there is wisdom in doing away with sacred spaces and “sacred” (in the sense of set apart) people to equip the people for the work of the ministry.