Does Place Matter?

by Jana Koh

This blog originally appeared on Jana Koh's blog www.withyoublog.com. Re-printed with permission.

What difference does your place make?

As of this June, I completed my first year of work toward starting a new church in Oshawa, Ontario, which we've named Ecclesia. In this season, I find myself thinking and praying and speaking often of our core values — our guiding ideas that will help us live into God's specific calling for our community of faith. We've included Place as one of those guiding ideas.

At first glance, this may be a strange word to use for a core value of a new church. Why would Place be an important value of any church? Well, because our place has a lot to say about how and why we scatter — how we love our neighbours in real, tangible ways.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but where we are matters. When we are, matters. The fact that Ecclesia is being planted in the North Oshawa, Ontario in 2017 has a lot to say about how we “do church.” We can’t engage with Oshawa the way that a church might engage with New York City or Vancouver or Uzbekistan or Uganda. We have to respond to our neighbourhood, to our community — and we have to recognize the beauty and the difficulty of the place where God has put us.

And what’s more, the incarnation is an essential part of our Christian faith. The Incarnation — God Himself putting on flesh and coming to live with and among and for people — is what we base our whole worldview around. The idea of the God of the Universe humbling himself to become human is inconceivable in many other religions, even blasphemous. But this is who Jesus was. And it’s a beautiful example of how we are to live. Jesus intentionally became a person and rooted himself among us. And now we can follow His example, rooting ourselves among our neighbours right where God has placed us.

But this is a difficult undertaking.

As Michael Frost wrote in his book, Incarnate, our world has become increasingly disconnected. Technology has changed the way we think and engage with each other. Advances in travel and connectivity have made the world smaller, making it easier to leave our homes and see the world — bringing with it both a beautiful availability of the rest of the world, as well as a lessened connection with our own homes. Our online personas make it all-too-easy to disengage with those who don’t agree with us, to objectify other people and other places, to experiment in virtual realities that connect more with our "personal brand" than with our actual lives. Frost calls all of these realities “excarnate living.” The remedy? The incarnation. Recognizing God’s example of John 1:1 (The Message): “The Word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood,” and finding ways to follow suit. To move into our neighbourhoods in the most profound sense, and truly, deeply connect within our own context. Our own place.

I was listening recently to The RePlacing Church Podcast, put together by my friend Ben Katt, in which he interviewed Ron Ruthruff, author of Closer to the Edge: Walking with Jesus for the World’s Sake. In the interview, Ron had the most beautiful insight on this idea of responding to our place, suggesting that our place informs how we understand our current realities. For example, if I say, “It’s raining,” we can all understand the basic meaning of those words. We all know what rain is. But, our place informs the real meaning of those words. If I’m in Seattle and say, “It’s raining,” you might say, “So what?” If I’m in New Orleans and I say, “It’s raining,” you might say, “Oh no.” If I’m in the Sudan and say, “It’s raining,” you might say, “Thank God.” Our place makes a huge difference in how we understand the realities around us.

In our new church, we want to respond to our place. We want to get to know the people and the places in North Oshawa, so that we can know what’s good about our place, as well as what’s difficult. In order to do this, I’ve been meeting with other church and neighbourhood leaders and hearing their stories of North Oshawa. And, the last few months, I’ve been leading a team in partnership with my calling church, Zion Christian Reformed Church, to do some community mapping, in which we’ve talked to a number of local non-profits, schools, churches, and civic leaders to hear what they do, how they experience Oshawa, and how we might work together. All of this has been an incredible learning experience as I get to know my neighbourhood of North Oshawa and how Ecclesia might weave into the fabric of our community.

God is already at work ahead of us in our neighbourhood. In Genesis 28:16-17, after Jacob dreamed of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven, filled with angels, he woke up and said, “Surely God is in this place and I was not aware of it. How awesome is this place!” God was there ahead of Jacob, and God is here ahead of us. God is already at work in our neighbourhoods, and we have the opportunity to partner with Him in that work. Imagine what a difference it would make in our own lives and in the lives of others if we allowed ourselves to recognize that God is here, already, in this place.

For us in our new community of faith, one way in which we hope to connect with and respond to our neighbourhood is through a community space. We hope to provide a space where gatherings can happen — whether they are worship gatherings, college and university student study sessions, business meetings, child play groups, yoga and exercise classes, art showcases, brown-bag lunches, etc. We want to open a space that feels and functions like the living room of North Oshawa, where the life of our neighbourhood can happen. This community space will be the heartbeat of our worshipping community — that regular space in which we are consistently gathered and scattered. And, as long as the space itself would hold us, we would hold our regular worship gatherings there, too.

What does it look like for you to live and work and serve in the specific context of your place?Your neighbourhood, your city, your province?What does it mean for you — for your church — to be Christians in Canada in 2017?

Our place matters. And I invite you to join me in seeking out God's mission in your place.