Everywhere You Look: a conversation with Tim Soerens
The first thing that grabbed me about Tim Soerens’ new book, Everywhere You Look, was the title. The full title is Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are. The title suggests that church planters and pastors looking around in their context need not just to see differently, but to see more. This expansive view is God’s-eye view.
Books about about church growth and development are plentiful now, as always. But Tim Soerens, co-founder of The Parish Collective, brings to the subject a level of commitment and depth that goes beyond many others who experiment with connecting church and neighbors and live to write about it. His work with the Parish Collective has taken him all over the United States and beyond, teaching and learning about being community and practicing hospitality. His very demeanor is hospitable and invitational.
I wanted to talk with Tim because of my work developing a small parish in the context of its growing and changing neighborhood. This work that involves a deep dive into radical hospitality, particularly during a global pandemic. I was curious about the intersection of Tim’s work with the Christian tradition of hospitality.
When Tim and I spoke recently, the subject of seeing came up more than once. “The seeing comes first,” he said in a recent conversation. “Seeing comes before the doing, and the seeing requires new lenses.”
This part of our conversation reminded me of the earliest days of Rahab’s Sisters, when, before going out into the dark streets, we would pray to see people who are usually invisible. Tim and I talked about how when you re-see a person or a neighborhood or a church (or—better still—the purpose of a church), it opens up. Once seeing is done without preconceived ideas, without strings attached, it becomes a hospitality of seeing.
“This new way of seeing goes hand in hand with opening up, with beginning to live in a different world” Tim says. “You have to see things differently, otherwise of course you’re only going to see the status quo. There are big forces—dominant stories—that don’t want us to see things differently.”
Speaking of dominant stories, one of the things that struck me while reading Everywhere You Look was how prescient it was, of the enduring pandemic moment that began after the book went to press. Early on, Tim writes: “I’m convinced that God is asking us to embrace this season as an unprecedented opportunity.” Later he writes “If the only place our neighbors can experience the body of Christ is during our worship services, we have failed.”
While these statements speak to every moment in the life of the Church, they also speak in particular to this moment, where church leaders everywhere have spent the past six months figuring out how to reach people beyond traditional Sunday morning gatherings. Most church leaders are asking the hard question: what, if anything, do we have to offer people in time of crisis, when we cannot gather?
Tim Soerens addresses this by saying that we are living in apocalyptic times. “I mean that in the Greek sense of the word: something is being unveiled and revealed. What is being unveiled and revealed is our ecclesiology: we’re being confronted with a mirror of what we actually think the church is. Of course, there is much to lament about. But to feel that not being able to gather on a Sunday morning is an existential ending, as if that’s all we are, needs to be a bit of a wake-up call.”
I asked Tim to reflect a bit on the intersection of community development and the radical hospitality that is at the root of Christian tradition.
“Ministry needs to begin with listening: to the person in front of you, to what God is doing, to the actual context and land itself. If we begin that way, we realize that we are actually hosted by creation. One of the profound gifts of a parish or geographic area is that we are also being hosted by that place, by its history, by the many gifts and skills that are present there, by the animals, the landscape, all of it.
“If our posture begins with listening and gratitude, the obvious expression back of gratitude would be an expression of hospitality. I think that radical hospitality can be quite powerful, particularly at the neighborhood level where we’re all longing for a space to belong. Not necessarily a space to all be the same or even to be with people that we like, but a space to belong...Hospitality needs to be one of the most critical markers of a healthy church, and a healthy neighborhood.”
One of the most interesting pieces of Everywhere You Look is the application of a marriage therapy to community groups both within and among parishes. “The more ways we can be appreciative of each other,” Tim says, “curious of each other, affirming, protecting, careful…these are all things to think about as we relate to each other as neighbors.”
I told Tim about underlining once bit of the book several times in multiple colors: As more and more everyday people struggle to hope, those of us following Jesus must ask, How do we embody news that is so good it draws the attention and longing of our neighbors? “So,” I asked Tim: “What’s the answer?”
“That question needs to be put out in front of us day after day,” said Tim. “It’s a question that we need to ask ourselves our whole lives, as individuals and as a community. It’s a question that I’m convinced more now than ever that until there can be some really truly, hopefully scandalously good news, it’s going to be difficult to turn the tide for a culture with no reason to trust the Church. The only true apologetic for the church is a reconciled and reconciling community. It’s befuddling. Even that needs to be received as gift; you can’t just crank on it and make it a product. But I do think it needs to be our vision. And I think that’s what God is doing, what the Holy Spirit is in the business of doing. Those are the kinds of stories I want to be a part of. When my knees are creaking, I want to sit on my front porch and tell stories about what God was doing in these days and how I got to be a part of it.”
You can find these stories in Everywhere You Look, as well as a framework for creating your own stories of scandalously good news. I hope you will.