The New Parish

How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community

Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, Dwight J. Friesen

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830895960
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Christianity Today Award of MeritReaders' Choice Awards Honorable MentionBest Books About the Church from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore"When... faith communities begin connecting together, in and for the neighborhood, they learn to depend on God for strength to love, forgive and show grace like never before.... The gospel becomes so much more tangible and compelling when the local church is actually a part of the community, connected to the struggles of the people, and even the land itself."Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens and Dwight J. Friesen have seen—in cities, suburbs and small towns all over North America—how powerful the gospel can be when it takes root in the context of a place, at the intersection of geography, demography, economy and culture. This is not a new idea—the concept of a parish is as old as Paul's letters to the various communities of the ancient church. But in an age of dislocation and disengagement, the notion of a church that knows its place and gives itself to where it finds itself is like a breath of fresh air, like a sign of new life.

Part One

WHY DO WE NEED
A NEW PARISH?

1

Dislocated

Naming the Crisis We All Create

You are Christ’s body. . . . You must never forget this.

The apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:27 The Message

You think because you understand “one” you must also
understand “two,” because one and one make two.
But you must also understand “and.”

Ancient Sufi teaching

In August of 2000 Toshiyuki Nakagaki made a very bizarre announcement to the world. He and his colleagues had trained a type of brainless slime to solve a complex maze. To demonstrate their achievement, Nakagaki’s team decided to chop up a single slime mold and scatter the pieces throughout a plastic maze. The separate slime clusters began to grow and find one another, until they filled the entire labyrinth. Next, Nakagaki placed food samples at the start and end of the maze with four different routes to the goal. Four hours later the hungry slime mold had retracted its tentacles from the dead-end corridors, growing exclusively along the shortest route between the two pieces of food. The brainless blob became “smart slime,” solving the complex maze.1

In a world that trains you to reduce all things to the lowest common denominator, the collective characteristics of slime molds are breathtaking. When food is scarce, slimes that are in the same proximity don’t fight over scarce resources. Instead, they join together in an orderly manner to form a completely new multicellular creature—a type of slug—from scratch. The right context and connectivity releases collective features you could never foresee by observing them individually.

The New Parish is an exploration of a forgotten, but truly hopeful, possibility. Don’t take this the wrong way, but we think the local church is meant to function like slime.

When followers of Jesus share life together in a particular place they become much greater than the sum of their parts—they actually become something altogether new. The parish forms the context, and relationships of faith form the connectivity for wonderful new possibilities.

• • •

For several years the three of us have been connecting with churches rooted in the neighborhood. Everywhere we go, we find the Spirit working miracles of transformation through their shared life together in the parish. The consistent storyline is so encouraging. When these faith communities begin connecting together, in and for their neighborhood, they learn to depend on God for strength to love, forgive and show grace like never before. We’ve also been inspired by the way these groups reach outward in love and care toward the neighborhood at large. The gospel becomes so much more tangible and compelling when the local church is actually a part of the community, connected to the struggles of the people and even the land itself.

It can be easy to miss what holds this together. By crafting a life together in a definable place, the parish becomes a platform for a whole new way of being the church. When the word parish is used in this book it refers to all the relationships (including the land) where the local church lives out its faith together. It is a unique word that recalls a geography large enough to live life together (live, work, play, etc.) and small enough to be known as a character within it.

Parish is also unique because it is a noun that holds within it a verb. It is a noun in the sense that it represents the church’s every­­day life and relationships within a particular place. But it also functions as an action word because it calls us to the telos, or purpose, of the church—living out God’s dream and caring for the place we are called. Proximity in the parish allows you to partici­­pate in God’s reconciling and renewing vision in ways you really can’t do as an individual. We are convinced that what may seem at first like a subtle shift actually has the capacity to transform your entire experience of what it means to be the church.

The Myth of Individualism and Living Above Place

The parish is beginning to subvert what may be the two most fragmenting forces of our day. The first can be called the “myth of the individual” and the second “living above place.”

When we talk about the myth of the individual, it’s not to say that people are not unique or that they do not have their own agency. It’s simply to say that the individual is not autonomous. Professor Eva Feder Kittay reminds us pertly that “the independent individual is always a fictive creation of those men sufficiently privileged to shift the concern for dependence on to others.”2 All of us are born dependent on others, and whether we recognize it or not, we rely on relationships throughout our lives. “Community is the essential form of reality,” writes educator Parker Palmer, “the matrix of all being.”3

“Living above place” names the tendency to develop structures that keep cause-and-effect relationships far apart in space and time where we cannot have firsthand experience of them. For example, you have probably experienced buying groceries without any idea where the food originated or who was involved in the production and delivery process. Living above place describes the process where this type of separation happens so frequently that we become disoriented to reality.

Most people believe they have some sense of how their actions affect others. But what happens when a society lives above place for generations? Over the course of time, whole populations can develop a cocooned way of life, unaware of how their lives really affect each other and the world at large.

Your parish is a relational microcosm that helps bring many cause-and-effect relationships back together again. Being in collaborative relationships in real life (where you live, work and play) awakens you to the effects of your actions both on people and on the place itself. It creates a context where your church can see whether its faith is more than just talk. The local place becomes the testing ground, revealing whether you have learned to love each other and the larger community around you. In essence, the parish is a dare to your faith.

As more systems encourage you to create your own online worlds and niche communities, the easier it becomes to spend time primarily with people who support your views. If people really get on your nerves you can just delete them—right? Of course, hanging out with affinity groups is not a problem in and of itself, but if you do this at the expense of practicing genuine, on-the-ground community life, serious problems can develop in nearly every dimension of life.

Social psychologist Christena Cleveland has observed that when the church left its historical focus within the neighborhood it ended up becoming homogeneous and consumer-oriented.

Today’s churchgoers . . . tend to shop for churches that express their individual values and are culturally similar. We often drive by dozens of churches en route to our church, the one that meets our cultural expectations. American society has engaged in an evangelical spiritual consumerism that some scholars pejoratively call “Burger King Christianity.”4

Not only does living above place disconnect you from the effects of your actions, it enables you to concoct visions regarding the welfare of others without ever being in relationship with them. As Shane Claiborne, cofounder of the Simple Way community in Philadelphia, often says, it’s not that we don’t care about the poor. It’s that we Christians don’t know the poor.5 Living above place makes it possible for you to imagine that if you just pay a tax, the government will take care of people. Or you might assume that each individual should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and make their own way without needing others. Either way, without a practice of being with diverse neighbors in real-life contexts, it is easy to forget that humans need reciprocal friendships and communities of genuine care if they are to flourish.

Diverse neighborhoods are growing exponentially in North America, but there are still plenty of places where extreme privacy or various types of exclusion rule the day. And there are still plenty of neighborhoods where everyone looks and acts in similar ways or makes about the same amount of money. In these contexts, it is not enough to be rooted together. As this book will make clear in several ways, healthy rooting together in the local parish requires good partnering connections across parishes as well.

The Nature of God: Dynamic Relationality and Radical Locatedness

Christians believe that God is revealed simultaneously as three persons in one being. The Trinity gives you an example of the paradox of individuality and community happening at the same time. This vision of uniqueness in the midst of relational unity pervades Scripture. For example, the apostle Paul gave the church in Corinth this urgent reminder regarding how they should fit together as a body:

We all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. . . . The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part. . . . You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. (1 Corinthians 12 The Message)

If the nature of God as Trinity models your relational calling, then the incarnation of God demonstrates your missional calling to live into time and place. When God chose to enter the world, it was not in some ethereal generic manner but in a particular family, in a particular town, in a particular country with particular socio-religious practices. Just as Christ “became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14 The Message), so also the people that comprise the local church in the parish are meant to be a tangible expression of God’s love in the everyday reality of life.

Shane finds it interesting that the gospel is filled with proper nouns, the names of real people and places, like Jesus of Nazareth.

The seeds of the gospel are really small. They’re really about meeting God at dinner tables and in living rooms and in little towns that may not be known by the rest of the world. But it seems like that’s exactly what happens when God moves into the neighborhood in Jesus. . . . It’s that which I think we’re invited into is to grow into a neighborhood, to plant ourselves somewhere and to get to know people there, and to see the seeds of the kingdom grow there.6

When parishioners long to share relationships together, in and for a particular place, it is because they desire to reflect the nature of God in their relationships. They believe this is God’s intention for what it means to be humans together in communion with the Spirit. At the end of the day, our aim is living into the fullness of life that Jesus calls us toward (John 10:10). While a relational and located perspective is at the heart of this book’s understanding of what it means to be the church, it’s also at the heart of what we think it means to be human.

We believe the notion of a new parish blends insights of contemporary culture, scriptural reflection and theological justification. However, being firsthand witnesses to the renewal in neighborhoods all over North America is what made our passion for these ideas take root. We’ve seen lives changed. We’ve seen communities transformed. Whole systems of brokenness and degradation have been renewed. From these real-life experiences we have become convinced that the new parish is worth our collective attention.

The Hidden Movement: The Return to Relationality and Place

Popular imagination holds that North American churches are dwindling away, frozen in irrelevance and dying from divisiveness. Many books on the church in recent years highlight statistics that speak of the church’s decline in the Western world. While it is certainly true that all is not well within popular Christianity, those collecting the data may be asking the wrong questions. The persistent questions regarding Sunday-morning attendance, program involvement or the building budget may not be the wisest measurements for discerning the health of the church.

The new parish introduces the possibility that something spectacular is brewing beneath the level of categorical definition. Indeed, there is an immense distributed population, often unrecognized by official figures, who are learning to love their neighbors in everyday ways. Within a single mile of wherever you are reading this book, it’s quite likely that there are dozens upon dozens of people who are loving their neighbor as an expression of their love of God. And here’s what we find most exciting: right now there are millions more migrating toward this relational way of being the church.

Over the course of the past few years we have walked the streets, eaten in the homes, and entered the shops, gardens and ghettos of over three hundred diverse neighborhoods across North America. We have been on an expedition to discover coalescing local bodies of believers sharing life together in particular places. Throughout the course of our explorations we have stumbled on a very surprising phenomenon. Contrary to all the clamor about dying churches, the closer we get to the everyday life of people in their neighborhoods, the more we find burgeoning expressions of reconc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Three Lives Transformed by Rooting and Linking Together
• PART ONE: Why Do We Need A New Parish?
• PART TWO: What Is The New Parish?
• PART THREE: How Do We Practice The New Parish?
• Conclusion: Presence in a Post-Everything Future
• Gratitudes
• Recommended Resources
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes
• Praise for The New Parish
• About the Authors
• About the Parish Collective
• About the Seattle School
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press