The church is not merely a building made with bricks and mortar, but a people made of living stones (1 Peter 2:5), a Spirit-indwelt temple (1 Cor. 3:16). Furthermore, the Spirit empowers disciples to be Christ’s witnesses “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). These days, those at the end of the earth—people from all over the world—are often our neighbors. The line between local and global has become increasingly blurred.
This raises a couple questions. We reach out to gather in … but where, and to what? Surely a spiritual house has no street address, no rent to pay, no property tax?
Though not an official mark of the church—locality is missing from the Nicene belief in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church”—place is nevertheless an integral aspect of the church’s nature and mission.
The author of Hebrews exhorts his readers, “Let us not give up meeting together” (Heb. 10:25). Because we are embodied, we must gather in physical spaces. As Yi-Fu Tuan says in Space and Place, what transforms a bare space into a meaningful place is what people do and experience in it.
The Place of the Church
Like Jesus himself, the body of Christ becomes flesh at particular points in space and time: wherever and whenever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name (Matt. 18:20). The apostle Paul wrote his epistles not to an abstract church but to local assemblies For example, “To the church of God in Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:2).
Place matters. But what kind of place is the local church? Sociologist Ray Oldenburg introduced the term “third place” in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Home, where we live, is our “first place” while where we work or go to school is our “second place.” “Third places” are where we keep company with others and form informal communities. Oldenburg lists them in his subtitle: “cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community.” These are the “great good places” where he thinks community happens.
Sadly, the local church did not make the list. It isn’t one of the “great good places” because it doesn’t represent neutral ground where everyone, confessing Christian or not, is on equal footing. But perhaps the local church is not best viewed as a third place, for the church is not like other social venues. While it should welcome newcomers, what happens there—worship of the thrice holy God—isn’t peripheral but core to one’s individual and communal identity.
Gatherings of God’s people are never ad hoc or arbitrary. From the beginning, in Eden, God planted a couple in a land so their offspring could eventually bless people in all lands. Our blessed hope is a new earth, anticipated by God’s rule over people in particular places. Such was the (unfulfilled) promise that was Israel.
Every local church is the house of God, the Christian’s first place, a reminder that Jesus has gone ahead and is even now preparing a place for us in his Father’s house (John 14:2–3).
Placemaking and Discipleship
I love teaching Christian doctrine, but you don’t make disciples simply by assigning essays and administering exams. One cannot feed the hungry or reconcile the alienated in theory. Christian ministry and mission takes place on the ground, in homes, neighborhoods, city parks, prisons, hospitals and so on.
The local church is a workshop for the new humanity that is in Christ. It is not the site per se that is holy but what goes on there that consecrates it. The local church is the place where disciples learn to pray, to forgive, to encourage and, ultimately, to practice the unity of the body for which Jesus prayed: “That they may be one” (John 17:11).
Mission to Main Street
There is no one cultural template for what a local church should look like. Lamin Sanneh says in Translating the Message that Christianity is translatable (and thus transferable) precisely because Christians entered into new places and learned local languages.
Lesslie Newbigin similarly describes the church as a “hermeneutic of the gospel” in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Local churches render the gospel intelligible and credible by living it out in particular contexts.
No place is too godforsaken to plant a church. Tim Keller was right to think about how to place the church in New York City (see his Loving the City). Yet it is also right to engage in small-place ministry. Every church should be a theater of the gospel, regardless of the stage’s size. Bigger is not always better; sometimes it is just a bigger temptation.
In a fast-paced, media-rich cultural environment, it is easy to dismiss insignificant places (e.g., “that backwards Podunk town”). It’s easier to think that ministry is more successful if it’s happening in a glamorous locale or historic building with lots of people.
Some pastors need to learn to love the place to which they are called. In his book A Big Gospel in Small Places, Stephen Witmer gives a first-person account of how he came to love the small place where God sent him, with its unique opportunities and difficulties: “It’s important for us to recognize the features of small-place life and culture we can enthusiastically embrace as well as those we must necessarily challenge.”
Big or small, place matters. The moral for all local church pastors: Know thy place.
Embodied Presence
The local church does not simply occupy space. Rather, it makes place. Through its worship and witness, a congregation’s embodied presence inscribes meaningful practices into what would otherwise be a merely secular space, a space as empty and formless as the world before God spoke form and content into it.
To plant a local church is to create an embassy of the kingdom of God. Think about it: An embassy represents one nation inside another nation. The local church represents a “holy nation” (1 Pet. 2:9), the universal church, in 10,000 and more places. A local congregation is not simply a fragment or fraction of the church. It is rather a local instantiation of the whole church. No matter how far-flung its location, a local congregation is never just an outpost of the church. On the contrary: In occupying that space, it becomes a placemaking church.
God’s outreach to our world is all about placemaking—preparing a footstool for the exalted Son. It therefore follows that, in our outreach, we should go and do likewise. Pastors of local churches are placemakers, charged with the privilege and responsibility of forming local assemblies of Christ followers who know how to exhibit Christ—God’s will made flesh—in particular places. Indeed, the vocation of the local church is to sanctify everyday places.
So, next time we gather with the people of God, may we like Jacob awaken from our sleep, become alert to the presence of Christ in our midst, and exclaim, “Surely the Lord is in this place! … This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16–17).
May local churches learn to make their places. May each become a house of God, a place of outreach, a gate of heaven.