Street Signs - Parish Mentality
This book is a collection of the knowledge and the approach that Bakke and Sharpe have been espousing after years thinking about cities and how to help unfold the kingdom through the work of the church in those cities. Central to their approach is to recognize where God is already working in any given city to embrace, celebrate and come alongside that work. These signs of God’s working help to point a new direction in urban ministry.
One idea from this book that is particularly useful in my work here in San Diego is viewing the city as one’s parish. During the 2007 wildfires of San Diego, I noticed a difference in how our church, Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church (www.transformedlives.org) seems to approach our community, versus many evangelical churches. The parish mentality allows a church to see an entire geographical region as their area of responsibility. In contrast many evangelical churches see their audience as a subset of this region, namely those who have made a decision for Christ and joins our community to worship.
During the fires, our church identified 70 families from the church who lost their homes to the fire. Many of those 70 are people whose names have made it onto the attendance rolls of the church somehow over the years. Many of those we are seeking to be a blessing to are not involved in the same way we might expect from an evangelical church. Nonetheless, because of our church’s parish mentality, we view a much larger subset of people affected by the fire as our own. In fact, the number of families we are seeking to bless in our community is now 140, fully one-third of the 400 affected homes in our community.
I see firsthand how this parish mentality changed the boundaries of who gets ministered to in the church. The somewhat exclusive category of those who are “in†is much larger with the parish mentality. Those who are “marginally in†but ministered to in a parish mentality church, might be considered “out†in a non-parish mentality church. It seems that we should err on the side of ministering to those on the edges rather than only those clearly “in.†But need to be clear that the parish mentality that we are to develop must include both the immediate community as well as the whole city as the parish. The parish mentality must be coupled with broader sense of the church in the city.