EVER for the reason that pandemic, I actually have been a part of a bunch of neighbours cultivating a small plot of land in our street. We grow fruit and vegetables, have a small wildflower meadow (“patch” may be more accurate — something you can walk round in lower than a minute might be not a meadow), and a community composting area.
The inspiration for this humble little project got here as lockdowns ceased and folks began to return to something like their normal lives. It appeared to a lot of us that we had discovered community and solidarity during lockdown in ways in which we had not experienced before, and that this was something price keeping. But how? In some small way, the community garden became a spot where the flame of that local, neighbourhood, solidarity was kept alive.
For most, if not all, of us, 2020 is just not a time that we might wish to return to. As the Covid inquiry hearings proceed, we also develop into more deeply aware of the pain of that point and its lasting consequences for many individuals. Yet what we glimpsed, briefly but powerfully, in those days was something of a world lost: a world of local connections and native support, care, and a focus to 1 one other and the neighbourhoods that we share. Many saw that, and saw that it was good.
What had brought that world to our attention again? A crisis, yes. A have to take care of each other until the crisis was averted, absolutely. But, more deeply, this world of solidarity flowered again within the space created by a pause within the march of modernity, as planes were grounded, stock markets were stilled, and shops were closed. The noise of worldwide capitalism ceased. In the silence, the local found its voice.
IN HIS most up-to-date book, Paul Kingsnorth calls the system of modernity “The Machine”. The logic of The Machine is: the aim of limitless economic growth, the Creation (including humanity) as fuel for economic growth, and science, technology, and company agency because the technique of advance. Furthermore, the expansion and efficiency of this global logic happens through the colonisation of the local. To smooth the passage of The Machine across the globe, the local — with its traditions, crafts, myths, stories, cultures, and native ties — should be uprooted.
Maybe, just possibly, nevertheless, there are signs of a disillusionment with The Machine. Perhaps the pandemic revealed The Machine for the spiritual desert that it’s. The Bible Society’s report The Quiet Revival alerts us to a movement of young people wandering into places of worship in search of meaning. Those swimming within the limitless fluidity of modernity are in search of something formed, something real, to cling to. Religion, tradition, communities of faithful people who find themselves still attempting to work out the right way to live lives of faithful obedience to Christ in a specific place — these are islands of refuge within the wild seas created by The Machine.
The witness of the Church in these times, then, should be to assist people develop into rooted again: rooted in God, rooted in each other, rooted in place — these three together and in dynamic with each other. This, nevertheless, would require churches also to find what it means to be rooted again. Machine pondering has influenced our own. The imperative of church growth, for the sake of the Church, turns the local right into a resource for our techniques and technologies (read “projects and programmes”), with all of the accompanying metrics and management that take a lot of our attention away from the true business of being in relationship with our communities.
THAT managerialism has been a theme within the conversation regarding the transition from one Archbishop of Canterbury to a different is, subsequently, significant. The degree to which managerialism — strategies, targets, outputs, and the remainder — has crept into our culture suggests a deeper colonisation with The Machine than a lot of us feel theologically relaxed with. Have we lost our roots? Not only with the gift of the local, but with our trust in a God whose work of salvation at all times begins within the unlikely and the actual.
In my research evaluating the work of pioneering parishes (PP), I saw churches inspired to develop into rooted again. PP helps parishes to rediscover the roots of their life in community, enabling parish priests and their congregations to increase the care of souls into all of the parish. PP is inspired not by the newest model or programme from elsewhere, but by the encouragement to place out roots into the community, to develop into entangled again within the soil of the parish, and to take heed to and to shape the church’s life around what’s heard.
In one parish, such a disposition has renewed the congregation whose church was near closure to develop into a vibrant worshipping community embodying the rhythms and seasons of its locality — and, yes, growing numerically, too.
SHIFTS within the imagination of mission are hard to quantify, and far of what then takes place is not going to lend itself to being registered neatly on a spreadsheet. This is the stuff of solidarity, relationship, the Kingdom, and love. This is the kind of thing that grows when The Machine — with its pondering — is dethroned: the kind of thing of which the Church is the taste and the sign.
Of course, when we predict of things rooted, we might also consider the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13.24-30). Seeing weeds among the many wheat, the servants ask whether or not they might uproot the weeds. But, no, the 2 must grow together: otherwise, uprooting one will uproot the opposite. We live entangled within the roots of modernity, and yet we must seek to show the Kingdom distinctively within the sight of the world.
Twenty years ago, Wendell Berry argued that “The next division of the world can be between individuals who want to live as creatures and folks who want to live as machines.” Fundamentally, we must live as creatures, for whom the world is a present, and our communities are the soil of our lives, not the resource for our ambitions. We should be rooted in God, each other, and places, and show to the world that to be rooted is to be human.
Canon Paul Bradbury is a contract author and researcher, and an associate tutor in pioneer ministry with Sarum College, CMS, and RCC Cuddesdon.
