What can this commitment to place and community mean for those not living in an agrarian countryside? Are there institutions that can serve as substitutes? The authors think so: “the flourishing of placed and peopled churches within local cultures.”
By flourishing, they mean the opposite of the wild growth of placeless megachurches. They mean churches like the ones they belong to, ones rooted in particular spots for long periods, measuring faithfulness not by membership size but by their very rootedness and deep work. They suggest we name churches once more for places, not abstractions…
But the real power of their thinking is for those churches we have long thought in decline. Their chapter “Household and House of God” contains some of the most hopeful pages on the future of local churches I’ve read in years.”
Wendell Berry was, more than anyone else, the man who made me want to be a Christian. Bill McKibben is also a modern Christian prophet for our times.