I recently read Jayber Crow. This was my first Wendell Berry novel (I’ve read his essays previously). I think I’m supposed to now buy a straw hat and try to purchase a smallholding in rural Kentucky?
It’s a superlative novel, powerfully evoking a sense of place and the character of a community. The story itself is moving and worth your time. Many of the themes of Berry’s non-fiction writing are present but without the story existing simply to tell you about them. There’s no allegory here.
You don’t read nuakh for the reviews, but the book got me thinking about the importance of place. I’ve lived in this small Hampshire town for about a year as I write. Previously I lived in England’s second largest, youngest, and greenest city. Before that I lived for a good while in Robin Hood country. I grew up in another, quite different, small Hampshire town; my primary school had a flock of sheep. I haven’t moved that much: forty years in four places. Yet, compared to the rootedness of the Port William Membership in Berry’s novels, I’ve floated across the land. Most of my adult life has been in cities, which have a different relationship to the land around them. That first city, Nottingham, I’m deeply fond of and feel attached to the Trent Building and the Robin Hood statue, the Left Lion and the Mugging Bridge.
Nevertheless, I am part of the class that David Goodhart in his book The Road to Somewhere famously called ‘Anywheres.’ I’m in that quarter of the population who is highly educated, highly mobile, and used to significant change. The larger portion of the British population, according to Goodhart’s analysis, are much more rooted in particular places and communities, the ‘Somewheres.’ Goodhart’s analysis was an attempt to explain the Brexit vote, which ten years on isn’t a question anyone is particularly asking anymore, but his terms have entered the wider discourse as one of many ways of talking about what we used to call ‘class.’
I’m romantic about the idea of getting attached to a particular place and putting down long term roots. The reality is that the sort of roots Berry writes about take a lifetime, if not generations, to truly establish. The nature of pastoring a church in a small town is that I’ve both arrived in a new place that I’m trying to learn the culture (and cultural sins) of, and that of course it’s not a place that I’m rooted and established in, at least not in a meaningful way.
I’m not sure evangelicals have a great theology of place. That’s true regarding our sense of the built environment, but it’s also true in a wider sense of the importance of a particular place in our shared lives. That’s partly due to the dominance of a particular set of English cultures on our thinking together, but that’s also because those who write are highly likely—for structural reasons—to be University educated: University teaches you to be an ‘Anywhere.’
Whatever the reasons, we don’t think much about the importance of long-term work in a single place. We talk about moving to the place beyond to plant churches but not about staying put to craft something for three generations’ time. Planting churches is good, whether in the town beyond where you are, in the city across the nation, or in another nation. We should be developing and sending people. The early church was a mobile people for the sake of the gospel.
There’s something to be said, along with that, for attempting to put down roots. These are Biblical ideas too. The relationship of Old Testament Israel to the land is not necessarily our relationship to the land, but it is instructive to us to consider how important it was to keep land within the clan that the kinsman-redeemer was responsible for buying it back if it left the wider family (Leviticus 25). Place mattered, as did the means of economic success. We should consider that a rootedness to place in order to transform it for the gospel over generations is a worthy project.
What would it look like if a church decided to commit to their town for generations? I’m not sure I know, and I think we’re generally too short termist to think that way. It’s easy enough to have a five-year plan together, but a fifty year plan is unimaginable. Not least because a different team would be leading who may well choose to not deliver it.
Perhaps a plan isn’t the key thing, but rather rooted activity which can be built on by others. How might we encourage people to stay put in this place that we find ourselves planted? How might we encourage them to invest in businesses that serve this community while establishing kingdom values and kingdom approaches to employment and commerce? How might we encourage people to do that generationally?
To the last point, since the invention of the automobile there has been a slow disintegration of generational living. Easy travel changes our sense of place and our sense of the world: technologies do that to us. It may not be possible to return to a way of living where people passed things down to each other in a particular place; it may not even be desirable.
What is worthy of our thought and consideration, though, is what does it look like for a church and her people to be rooted in a place for the long term. What does involvement in the community look like over long periods of time. This doesn’t mean we have to keep a particular ‘ministry’ going because of its longevity, and probably has more to do with the lives of church members than anything we might brand as ‘ministry’ in a formal sense, but what might it look like to put down roots? How might we teach people to do that? I don’t know the answers, but I do know that the Bible uses the tree as the primary image to teach us what we’re like (e.g. Psalm 1). Trees grow well when they’re rooted. The Bible means in the community of the faithful, in the word of God and prayer, but what might it also look like to be rooted into a particular place for the long haul?
I’m not even in a position to say we’ll be in this small town for the rest of our lives. I simply don’t know and have already sold two ‘forever homes’ as the Lord called us to go onward for the sake of his church so would be wary about making pronouncements myself in any direction. We just need to consider what rootedness might look like in the place in which we find ourselves.
Friends, I’m going to just be posting weekly for the next however long. If you’re a regular reader you’ll have noticed that my posting has become slightly sporadic across the last couple of months. I’m hoping that slowing to one post a week will allow me to rebuild my buffer, continue my commitment to stone-cold takes, and commit to a regular schedule of posting again. I’m hoping its temporary, but it may prove not to be! My aim for now is to post on Mondays.
Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash
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nuakh 