A Church Should Belong to a Neighbourhood

Growing by Staying in the Neighbourhood

In just a couple of weeks, Commons is going to embark on probably the most exciting thing, and certainly the most daring thing, that we have ever done in our twelve years. We are going to launch a second parish just south of Kensington, across the river in Marda Loop.

We’ve been hard at work on this all year. We acquired the facility and we spent a year renovating everything, getting it ready. In that time, we’ve been building the team, both the staff and the volunteers who are going to help Commons develop a presence and become part of that neighbourhood.

One of the important questions is why this way. Commons is a growing community. We run multiple services every Sunday, and the number of people who attend and move through our building on a Sunday is pretty remarkable. But why are we choosing to grow by launching a second parish instead of, let’s say, leveraging our inner city property in Kensington to find a bigger facility somewhere else in the city?

But this isn’t just a growth strategy for us. It’s an important part of how we see ourselves as part of the fabric of Calgary.

You see, one of the things that’s happened in the city over the past few decades is that when churches have found an audience and really connected, when they’ve grown, they’ve often done just what I suggested. They moved toward the suburbs to find bigger locations and bigger venues, larger auditoriums to seat more people. And that can be fantastic. But what’s also happened is we’ve kind of had a hollowing out of the spiritual presence in a lot of our core neighbourhoods. Churches have left those areas at the same time that our city is becoming more dense, which means more people are moving back into the core. More multifamily housing units are being built, and more population is living in these neighbourhoods.

Well, when you live in these neighbourhoods, like I do with my wife and my kids, we’ve traded a larger house for a smaller one. And in exchange, we ride our bikes to work and we walk to the grocery store. We find restaurants that we like within our neighbourhood. So then to pitch us on Sunday that we should get in the car and drive to the outskirts of the city for church is a tough sell. Particularly for people who may not be deeply invested in a religious story but are wanting to test it and see if it fits for them.

And so for us, moving back into those neighbourhoods, getting near to people and in their neighbourhood, investing ourselves in the life and the rhythms that those people already inhabit, becomes really important. Not just for Commons, but for us as a city.

Church is one of the few spaces where people brush up against people from different political backgrounds or different socioeconomic experiences. It’s one of the really important gathering points in society that we just don’t have enough of anymore. We’re too lost in our algorithmic trends of only speaking to people who think about the world like us. And church can be something different. But to do that, we have to be near to people. We have to be in their neighbourhoods. Church should, in our language, belong to a neighbourhood.

And we think that’s a vision that has relevance far into the future, long past my time here at Commons. Because a lot of these faith spaces in core neighbourhoods may not have been modernized in decades, but they hold a unique place in the neighbourhood. You see, once a church is turned over and redesignated to commercial or even residential space, it’s never really coming back as a church. Now, our city is not anti-church at all, but they are very pro property tax. And once a church is rezoned, getting it redesignated as religious use is incredibly difficult.

So jumping in, finding these spaces, and making sure that they stay faith space in the city becomes not just a growth strategy for us. It becomes an investment in the long-term well-being of these neighbourhoods for decades and hopefully even longer into the future.

There’s one more thing at stake here, and it’s harder to see because the looming lack of clergy on the horizon may not be obvious. Churches are declining but so are young people entering the pastorate. By focusing on larger church models we are perhaps accidentally reducing pastoral opportunities for people to develop the skills necessary to preach and teach and lead well in community. By growing through multiplication we are creating new opportunities for existing leaders like Bobbi who’s been with us for 10 years and is an incredible leader herself, to step into new roles, but we’re also creating more space for younger pastors to explore their vocation with us. That’s an investment in our future as we become less dependant on one personality or talent.

Bottom line, there’s more at stake than just how Commons will grow in the next ten years. There’s how our city will grow and change and evolve, and how our faith will be part of that conversation. To do that we think a church has to belong to a neighbourhood. We have belonged to Kensington for twelve years now. Starting September 20th, we will belong to Marda Loop as well.

jeremy

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