Ask where your church is. You will name an address. Ask where your church's members live, and the answer is a circle thirty miles across, with the building somewhere near the middle and the members scattered through a dozen towns, none of them near each other.

The modern congregation is gathered by choice and dispersed by geography, and as a community it is present nowhere.

How it happened

It happened for reasons that seemed good. Cars made distance cheap. Zoning separated where people live from where they gather. Suburbs spread the population thin. Growth strategies favored the church that could draw from the widest radius. And consumer choice meant that every believer selected the congregation that suited him best, wherever it was, rather than the one nearest.

Nobody decided to make the church absent from every neighborhood. The absence was what all those decisions about convenience, preference, and growth added up to.

What the design assumed

The New Testament church was local in a way that's hard to picture now. The church that is in their house (Romans 16:5). Breaking bread from house to house (Acts 2:46). Its members were neighbors, people who could walk to each other's homes after work, who saw each other in the market, whose children played together.

And the commands assume it. Exhort one another daily (Hebrews 3:13) requires proximity. Nobody can obey Bear ye one another's burdens (Galatians 6:2) without knowing the burden, and burdens are learned by being near. Use hospitality one to another (1 Peter 4:9) needs a house you can reach. As for Weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15), the weeping is done at the bedside, and the Sunday service comes two weeks later.

It understates the case to call these commands harder for a congregation dispersed across thirty miles, because they're structurally unavailable to it. When a member can't obey daily because the nearest brother is forty minutes away, the map has made the command impossible without anyone resisting it.

The crisis test

The dispersal shows itself in a crisis. When a member suffers a death, a diagnosis or a job lost, the test is who shows up.

In a local congregation, the people who live nearby show up, because they're nearby. Meals arrive. Children are collected. Someone sits in the kitchen.

In a dispersed congregation, the care is routed through the pastor, the one person paid to drive. He visits. He's really present. And he's the only one, because he's the only one whose schedule and fuel budget allow for it. The members care, but they aren't there, so the body's care for its members has been reduced to one professional's caseload.

The diagnostic question is whether, in a crisis, the care is distributed or routed. If it all goes through one man, the congregation is present nowhere.

Good works require visibility

The design's outward purpose depends on being seen:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid... Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5:14, 16)

That they may see. The good works are evidence, and evidence must be visible to the people it's meant to persuade. A congregation whose members' good works happen in a dozen scattered towns, invisible to each other and to any single neighborhood, has a thousand candles in a thousand houses where the text calls for a city on a hill. Each candle is too far from the next to be seen as one light.

Peter says the same: having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God (1 Peter 2:12). Which they shall behold. The Gentiles must be able to watch.

And Acts 2 records the effect of a visible common life: praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved (2:47). All the people saw them. The growth was a response to what a neighborhood could see.

The Samaritan's reversal

Jesus's answer to who is my neighbour? (Luke 10:29) is famous, though its structure is usually missed. The lawyer asked who counts as a neighbor, which is a question about categories. Jesus told a story about a man lying in a road and asked which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him? (10:36). He reversed the question so that who is my neighbor became to whom am I a neighbor. The answer is whoever is in the road you're actually traveling.

The priest and the Levite were on their way somewhere. The Samaritan was there. Neighborliness is a fact of location before it's a fact of intention. And the research on helping confirms the parable with uncomfortable precision. In a famous study, seminary students on their way to give a talk on the Good Samaritan walked past a slumped, groaning man. You might expect their theology to predict whether they stopped, but the predictor was whether they were in a hurry. Hurry beat conviction.

A congregation that commutes is a congregation of priests and Levites. They are good people on their way to the building, passing the roads where they actually live.

Jeremiah's instruction to exiles

The most useful text for a dispersed church is a letter to people who had been dispersed by force:

Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters... And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. (Jeremiah 29:5-7)

Build. Dwell. Plant. Seek the peace of the city. The exiles were told to put down roots where they were and to invest in the welfare of the place. Nobody told them to gather in a central location and commute back to Babylon on Sunday. Their faithfulness was to be local, visible, and long-term, since gardens take years.

The parish's one virtue

The one thing Christendom's parish got right was geography. Everyone within its bounds belonged to the same congregation, lived near each other, and couldn't commute away. Its fatal flaw was that nobody chose. The modern church has restored the choice and lost the geography. The design calls for a chosen community that is also present in a place.

Not every believer has to move, but the congregation must ask where its members actually live and begin to organize its common life there. That means in the neighborhoods, in houses, with the members who are within walking distance of each other, as well as at the building everyone drives to.

The homogeneity argument

One more benefit of place answers an objection. A congregation gathered by choice gathers people who chose the same thing and are similar in taste, class, age, and outlook. A congregation gathered by place gets whoever lives there.

The New Testament assumes the second. James's warning about the gold ring and the poor man (James 2:2) assumes both are in the same assembly. Paul's body of many members (1 Corinthians 12) assumes a range. Do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10) assumes the household of faith is embedded among all men. A place-based church has the mixture the design calls for. A choice-based church has been sorted the way a market sorts.

What to do

Take a map. Plot where your members live. Find the clusters, such as three families within a mile of each other, or five within two. Start there, with a weekly table in one of those houses for the members who can walk to it. Let the one-anothers happen where the people are.

And ask the house-hunting question, the next time anyone in the congregation moves: is there a brother within walking distance? That question, asked consistently for a decade, rebuilds the parish without the compulsion.

The church is the light of the world. A light has to be somewhere, so be somewhere.