Simon Carey-Holt writes from an Australian urban and suburban context. His purpose is to help his readers make the connection between the Great Commission (to go into all the world to make disciples) and the (second) Great Commandment (to love your neighbour as yourself). He sees the neighbourhood in which we live as a primary context of mission; he also stresses the importance of the neighbourhood for spirituality, arguing that "a spirituality that does not nurture our connections with the daily places of life fails to reflect the life-transforming nature of the Christian faith" (14).

This book is refreshing, timely and challenging. I found it timely and challenging personally as I have reflected on my own mobility, and as I have recently returned to parish ministry after twelve years' involvement in training others for ministry. His stress on the importance of the local neighbourhood as our primary context for mission is therefore one which resonates with me as I return to ministry in a local context. His book is also timely to the church as we think about what it means to be church in a fast-changing culture. In my last twelve years of training others I have read and taught about the Emerging Church. One of the things the Emerging Church movement is trying to address is the loss of local community; see for example the analysis of UK society in the Church of England report Mission-Shaped Church (Church House Publishing, 2004). In the week of writing this review I have had a conversation with our churchwarden who has lived in Deepcar for fifty years. She bemoans the loss of community here as theworkforce in the steelworks has been drastically reduced, and many now live in Deepcar but work elsewhere. Many in the Emerging Church movement emphasise the importance of social networks which are more important to people today than the places where they live. Carey-Holt's book is helpful in thinking afresh about the importance of local community.

In Part One of his book Carey-Holt analyses some issues facing the idea and reality of neighbourhood. He begins by describing the forces of urbanisation, the growth of suburbia and increased mobility which have had a huge impact on local communities. Urbanisation has created an environment so crowded that we seek the privacy and self-sufficiency of our homes; it is also in many places such a diverse environment that it breeds mistrust and suspicion of those around us. We long for a sense of community but find it increasingly difficult to connect with our neighbours. Our increased mobility makes it difficult for us to belong anywhere; we are "geographically promiscuous" (47). Carey-Holt recognises that faced with such pressures "choosing to engage with our neighbourhoods as places of community requires a level of creativity and purpose unequalled in the past" (31). However, he insists that abandoning neighbourhood is not an option.

In Part Two, Carey-Holt sets out his reasons for not abandoning the concept of neighbourhood. He believes that neighbourhood is important to being human. First, it is important as a source of identity and belonging. I found this very strongly amongst Maori people in New Zealand with their sense of place, and of their mountain and their river. Carey-Holt believes that with our mobility and transience we have come to see "place" as a commodity, and that this has marred our ability to dwell. Neighbourhood is also important to the way in which God is encountered. God is after all a God of place. Furthermore, the neighbourhood is important to the identity and mission of the church. God calls the church to embody the transformative presence of God in and for the world, and this can only be done meaningfully in a local context. Carey-Holt uses the model of the incarnation, which reminds us that "the greatest impact in Christian mission comes through the discipline of place" (88-89).

In Part Three, Carey-Holt discusses "Neighbourhood Disciplines" for engaging creatively with local neighbourhoods. These disciplines are naming, celebrating, nurturing and inviting. The first two are about recognising neighbourhoods as places where God is at work, and which need to encounter more of the grace of God. He recommends the "exegetical walk" of the neighbourhood (a similar idea to that of "listening to the mission context" in Mission-Shaped Church); he also advocates "neighbourhood liturgies" celebrating the beauty and goodness of what there is in the neighbourhood, no matter how plain, small or routine. He describes the discipline of nurturing local places as "inhabiting them, believing in them, investing in them and doing everything we can to make them fully human" (132). Inviting is the final step of hoping for encounters between the people who live around us and the God of grace who shares the neighbourhood with us and with them. This final part of the book is helpfully illustrated with stories from the author's local experience. I found the stories identifying the profound yet simple ministries of those who have lived most of their lives in one neighbourhood (those he identified as "farmers") particularly challenging as one whose call from God has involved going to many different places. The mission of God needs both sorts of call.

This is an important book; it has, I suspect, much more in common with Emerging Church than its author realises. Its examples of "church in the neighbourhood" resonate strongly with the Emerging Church emphasis on incarnational presence as seen, for example, in chapter three of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come (Hendrickson, 2003). It is, perhaps, more challenging to the idea of mega-church or city-wide church. Anglican Renewal Ministries in the UK had a slogan that "to be real, it must be local." Simon Carey-Holt has given us much to ponder in making that slogan a reality.