When
the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor nearly blew in 1979, I had this haunting
feeling I may never be able to go back home again. Although I hadn’t
lived there in years, I grew up in nearby Lancaster County, and there was
the danger that nuclear contamination could make the whole region uninhabitable.
I wondered what it would be like to never go back to the place of my upbringing,
the place I still called “home.”
To be human is to have a sense of place—and all too often the experience of being dis-placed. We have to situate ourselves somewhere, to inhabit some place. And it is in this place that we find a sense of belonging. We have memories that must be kept alive about our place in the world, stories to tell, even ceremonies to keep that we associate with our habitation.
When some native peoples in Western Canada were deprived of land they had held for centuries, they met with some officials from British Columbia to talk about their grievance. The native peoples were astonished to hear these officials claim this land for the government. One wise native elder asked the BC officials, “If this is your land, where are your stories?” Of course these officials had no stories to tell, only a legal claim to make.
To be human is to have a sense of place.
This issue of Leader encourages congregational leaders to think about the sense of “place” in congregational life. What stories do you share about the place in which you live and worship, the community or neighborhood where your church is located, even about the building and property where your church meets?
It is probably true that as Mennonites we have ambivalent feelings about a sense of place. After all, we have a history of migration from place to place, sometimes for economic reasons, but also for reasons having to do with finding a place where we can live our lives peaceably without coercion from governing authorities. Besides, we have a faith that challenges us to not be too comfortable with any one place. People of faith, after all, are a pilgrim people—not weighed down by too many things, ready to move as God calls. God called Abraham to leave his homeland and to head off to a place he knew not where. In exile, the Israelites wailed on the banks of the waters of Babylon, How can we sing the Lord’s song in strange land (or place)? And our Lord, it was said, had no place to lay his head.
I have at times tried to shock Mennonite congregations by asking them, “How big is your parish?” Of course, that is not a very Mennonite word. It belongs to the Christendom model where one’s sense of political place and religious place were one and the same. Given that perspective, our Anabaptist forebears didn’t really have a place—or their sense of place transcended any particular political or geographical boundaries. They probably could have agreed with John Wesley who said, “The whole world is my parish.”
Perhaps the same question could be asked in more missional terms: how big is your congregation’s mission field? What is the particular context to which your congregation is called? Where is your congregation’s sphere of influence?
My own congregation has decided we are not simply a community church. We don’t see ourselves serving just the city of Lombard where our building exists, since most of our members drive in from far and wide. For this reason, our mission statement says that we are “an Anabaptist-Mennonite congregation in the western Chicago suburbs.”
I once had a friendly discussion with another lay leader from my congregation who was suggesting that we don’t want to grow too big lest we lose our sense of tight-knit community, a refrain I’ve heard in Mennonite many congregations. It sounds like the sense of place we experience we want to keep for ourselves. I asked him, How many people do you suppose live in a 10-mile radius from our church who could benefit from what we have to offer here? This is just another way of asking about congregational context and mission.
In a mobile society, many of our congregations experience high levels of transience. People come, and people go. We welcome people, and then we send them forth, wishing them God’s blessing.
Is your congregation a welcoming place, a good place to be, as well as a good place from which to send people elsewhere?
Richard A. Kauffman