I’m sitting in my home office this morning looking out at some of my neighborhood as the day begins and wondering how to classify where I live (we all really do like definitions – figure out the kind of area, or categorize where I live and one immediately has a set of parameters around which to define a person). The house is about twelve minutes from downtown Vancouver (unless the bridge is jammed, in which case I avoid it until it’s clear). Twelve minutes in the opposite direction I go straight up Capilano Road to the gondola that has me on top of Grouse Mountain and the ski lifts in very little time.
Twelve minutes to the west and I’m on the boardwalk beside the sea amidst my favorite coffee shops. I’m creating a new category – I live in a twelve-minute neighbourhood.

This morning a huge raccoon ambles through the front yard, turns and comes right across the front steps. I check that our two dogs are in the house. Across the street the neighbors are cutting down three huge two hundred foot evergreens, the cutters are taking down what’s left of the trunks. In our neighborhood everyone is anxious about trees these days. In December we had huge windstorm. A two hundred foot tree from the extreme end of the next-door neighbour’s property fell right across our yard missing the house, and the bedroom, by about six feet and ending up just hitting the house in the opposite direction. The damage costs were high. Some houses in the area were badly damaged and Stanley Park – just across the bridge and only ten minutes away – had two thousand mature trees blown over. Trees growing when Descartes was a lad where blown over in the storm. We don’t want to increase our carbon footprint but we want to be around a while longer. A lot of trees are coming down across the neighbourhood.

Runners go by on their early morning jog. It’s a ritual for some. Almost everyday of the year a gang of some eight women is out running in all kinds of weather by 6.30 in the morning. It’s all so ritualized now that I can hear them coming a long way off all in conversation together as they breath like a gaggle of birds heading my way in the dark. This morning it’s a bit early for the coffee shop across the street to be open so I’ll need to wait some and attend to some emails.

What got me thinking about my neighbourhood is the wonderful little book I just finished by Simon Carey Holt called God Next Door: Spirituality and Mission in the Neighbourhood. Simon teaches at Whitley College in Melbourne, Australia where he’s lived with his family for many years. He’s a practicing pastor as well as college lecturer and has wonderful insights into what it means to move back into the neighourhood as God’s missionary people. Simon takes seriously the Biblical imagination of the Incarnation – God moved in right next door and settled into these amazing places called neighborhoods. He has no romantic notions about community or what people might be like in these places. This is refreshing. He’s got a realistic sense of people. His stories are about concrete men and women working at how they live their lives in the midst of atomizing and confusing social contexts. But neither is Simon a suburb basher with some naive reductionisms about what God can and can’t do in these places. Some helpful sections on the formation of the suburb as well as the problems and challenges of forming meaningful practices of Christian life reveal a theological maturity and pastoral wisdom rare in these days of ‘radical’ this and that.

I get the sense that Simon is no exile in his suburban neighborhood. He’s not trying to figure some grand set of plans or strategies. He’s digging in to the local and the particularity of the streets where he lives and in so doing discovering that God is up to something worth sticking with among all kinds of people.

Simon raises a lot of questions about churches and their preoccupations. He gives a wonderful vignette about a man who sat beside him at an airport. Simon was reading a book on the new urbanism and the man wanted to talk. Quickly it became clear that this man was also a Christian. Simon told him he was reading a book on the neighbourhood. The man’s response was that he didn’t have time for that kind of thing, he traveled all the time and got all he needed at his church. Or the story of a wonderful retired couple who were God’s missionaries in their community as they took care of people and walked with the lonely. When Simon suggested that this was a ministry of God in the neighborhood this couple had no capacity to understand what he meant. They were no longer doing ‘ministry’ because they now were too old to keep up with the church activities that had defined their lives.

This book doesn’t bash existing churches. It respects the challenges they face. At the same time it is a quiet plea for churches to rediscover neighborhood not as objects of outreach programs or social service good deeds but as the real, flesh and bone place were God takes up residence and meets us all. This is a plea for the rediscovery of the local, the next-doorness of Christian life in a culture that spins us apart in a thousand different directions so that we come home we want to close the gate, move the backyard and escape whatever might be happening on the street. The last section of the book offers a series of pointers for living the way of Jesus and being the church in the neighbourhood. Great book – hope it comes to North America very soon.