The world is complex, our neighborhood engagement doesn’t need to be.

We live in an incredibly complex world. There’s no getting around that. When we look at some of the most pressing issues we face as a country this becomes abundantly clear. The climate crisis, policing and the prison industrial complex, and the endless patterns of poverty all seem to require more education and training to address than I could receive in a lifetime.

It may be the sheer complexity of these issues that draws most of our Mainline churches to focus so much attention on education in our efforts to address social change. It can often seem like our greatest tool for addressing inequity and injustice is the book group. We are clinging to this belief that if we just get the right information, then the right action will follow. Unfortunately, this has never been the case.

I often find that churches also conflate the neighborhood, or the neighbor, with the mass of complex and seemingly intractable problems we encounter in our previously referenced and most-beloved book group. We read about problems, get wildly overwhelmed and scared, and then convince ourselves that those problems are waiting to pounce on us the moment we step outside the safety of our church walls. It’s scary out there.

The trouble is, while we’ve been preparing ourselves in church basements to address the biggest systemic issues the world has to navigate, we are often missing the many invitations to practice the small, simple acts of neighborliness and care that build connected and resilient communities. Connected communities have the capacity, the trust, and the support to co-create a better world in their small corner of it, and in my opinion, that’s where many of our Mainline churches should be devoting their time and presence to.

This doesn’t mean that we give up on addressing the big problems, it just means that we take them on in the places where we actually have relationships and influence, and in ways that we can sustain. It also means that we attend to the simple practices of relationship building, mutuality, and connectedness, trusting that depth will lead us to greater capacity and a shared responsibility for the common good in our neighborhood.

Sometimes, we get caught up in how complex everything is (especially because the dominant narrative in our culture is that things are so broken, we can only pretend to every change them), that we miss out on all the ways we are being called to co-create an alternative right where God has placed us as faith communities. At its worst, the church’s complexity bias becomes an out, giving us permission to avoid doing the small relational work because it won’t adequately address the larger system. Systemic justice and community building are not mutually exclusive, nor at odds. The two build and inform one another.

I think many of our Mainline churches, as they follow the very well-intentioned call to love the neighbor and address inequity, will step past their next-door neighbor and the far less sexy neighborhood projects and relational work, in order to think big and pursue complexity. I wonder what might happen if we started asking ourselves questions like; How connected is my neighborhood? How is the climate crisis showing up uniquely in my neighborhood? What affordable housing options exist near my church and how can we support them? How well is my community prepared to face whatever comes together?

We might be surprised by what we can create together when we attend to the small and the simple as a community.

Questions to consider

• What are some of the complex problems your faith community is concerned about most? How do you see those big problems showing up in the neighborhood where your church is located?
• How do you know what’s happening in the neighborhood where your church worships? Are there neighbors who always know the latest news? Is there a local newsletter or paper you can read? Are there online forums where neighbors connect to talk about the community?
• Social movements are built on trust, and trust takes time and attention. How can your congregation build trust among your neighbors? What are some ways that you can devote time and attention to building meaningful relationships in the community?

Originally published at https://nicholastangen.com on December 21, 2022.