How to Learn to Love a Place

Slow down enough to embrace the little things.

If you want to learn to love a place, pay attention to the birds.

Last year, our family bought a bird feeder that’s now attached to our front window. This feeder gives us a front-row seat to the comings and goings of the birds in our neighborhood.

I had never really paid much attention to birds before. They’re so common that they mostly just existed in my mind as background noise.

This feeder has given me reason to notice.

The birds would bankrupt me if I let them. Within hours of filling up the feeder with a mix of various seeds, it’s empty again. I tell myself that I stagger feedings to protect our budget. The truth is that most days, I’m too busy to slow down enough to pay attention to the creatures.

Sometimes we catch an earful of all the latest birdie drama on Jaybird Street. With our blinds still closed, the early-morning crowd of robins arrives with loud tweets and scuffles as they argue over who crashed their rockin’ party last night. As the sun shines through the blinds, their shadows become a kind of birdie theater. Our family has been known to give them voices.

All is well until the Cardinal shows up. These crimson beauties are particularly fowl creatures. They bite and shove until they have the feeder to themselves. Their presence reminds us of those investors and “leaders” in our neighborhood who arrive with a smile but intend to devour.

Any slight movement near the window is enough to scatter the flock. Most of the birds jump from their perch on our house to the top of our fence, several feet away. Others glide to the power lines just above the street. They sit and wait patiently, wondering if the buffet will reopen when the noisy kids go away.

When I step outside, the birds decide they’ve had enough and fly off to their next stop. I wonder whose house they’ll visit next. What juicy gossip will they take from our family to pass along to the birds down the street?

I look down and realize that, once again, my front steps are covered in specks of bird poop. Like giddy teenagers, I’m sure the birds are laughing at me. “How many times did you poop this morning? SIX!? We sure got him.”

Yeah, you did, Robin. See you tomorrow.

The Bible has a lot to say about birds. Several passages in Scripture show God’s concern for them. The Psalmist declared that God cares about even the smallest creatures on earth; he knows all the birds and insects because they belong to him (Psalm 50:11). The prophet Hosea spoke of a day when God would make a covenant with the birds and other creatures so they can lie down in safety (Hosea 2:18).

Remarkably, a consistent sign of God’s judgment in Scripture is the absence of birds. When judgment arrives, Jeremiah warned, every bird in the sky will fly away (Jeremiah 4:25). It is right to lament for a place when the creatures have been driven from the land (Jeremiah 9:10).¹

The sound of birds signals that God’s light and life are present. Perhaps this is why Jesus told us that when we feel anxious and overwhelmed, we should pause and notice the birds (Matthew 6:25-33). We see evidence of God’s goodness not through the sights and sounds of our material age, but in his care for things we tend to overlook as background noise.

If you want to learn to love a place, you have to slow down enough to embrace the little things. In our capitalist and individualist society, we are conditioned to use place as a means to serve our own interests. Christians in the West, having tied their theological imagination to the American Dream, are no less guilty of this exploitation.

But if we could recover God’s vision for the renewal of the places we inhabit, churches could become institutions that teach people how to love their neighborhoods the way he does.

The Suburbanization of Christianity

Forty-two percent of White evangelicals in the United States live in the suburbs, nearly double that of those who live in cities.² This preference for the suburbs among White evangelicals stems from their fear of cities in the early twentieth century. The Reformed missiologist Harvie Conn has documented how the suburbs enabled White Christians to isolate themselves from the ethnic and economic groups they considered incompatible with their way of life. For White Evangelicals, the suburbs offered the chance to establish a “white haven” that would safeguard their vision of the good life and their Christian faith.³

In Sanctifying Suburbia, Brian J. Miller explores the influence of American suburbs on White evangelical spiritual development. He writes:

In a suburban setting marked by a racial homogeneity, pursuing a middle-class lifestyle, and the ideal of a nuclear family living in single-family homes, the cultural toolkits of evangelicalism emphasizing individualism and anti-structuralism found a home…. To understand American evangelicalism today is to also engage with the American suburbs and the way these places have shaped religious identity and practice.⁴

It’s not just that White evangelical families and churches prefer the suburbs; their dominant institutions, including non-profits, seminaries, and publishers, do as well. Miller identified several suburbs where White evangelicals tend to cluster their institutions, with the most influential being Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, East Los Angeles and Orange County, and Wheaton.⁵

Through these institutions, White evangelicals have promoted their vision of the Christian life, a vision which is curiously intertwined with the good life promised in the suburbs. The rise of the Megachurch and seeker-sensitive Christianity grew from promises of middle-class comfort. White evangelical politics, which tend to emphasize priorities like the nuclear family and free markets, have flourished in an environment of upward mobility and affordable single-family homes. The privatization of White evangelical faith, with its focus on personal piety, has thrived in communities where neighbors are geographically encouraged to keep their distance. Racial homogeneity has influenced White evangelical perspectives on racism, including their hesitance to acknowledge systemic sin and injustice.⁶

White evangelicalism, as a kind of suburban colonialism, has learned to exploit place to gain influence, wealth, size, and power. In doing so, they have confused prosperity with blessing, creating communities centered on taking and distancing instead of mutual giving and receiving.

The connection between the suburbs and evangelical faith is significant. Many recent critics, in a flurry of books written for and about Christians in the suburbs, have presented their case. Ashley Hales, the author of Finding Holy in the Suburbs, states that the suburbs “seek to fill good hungers by offering us the suburban gods of consumerism, individualism, busyness, and safety.”⁷ She suggests several disciplines Christians should practice to resist the dangers of the suburbs, including hospitality, generosity, vulnerability, and rest.

However, if the Christian view of place is limited to resistance, then our theological perspective on life will still be influenced by distance and separation rather than embrace and renewal.

(Re)implacement

Neo-Calvinist theologian Craig Bartholomew has argued that the redemptive story, when viewed through the lens of place, takes the form of implacement, displacement, and (re)implacement.⁸

Genesis 1-2 presents the story of creation and the purpose for humans to live with God in an embodied place. The Hebrew word for humans in Genesis 1:26-28, ʾādām, is closely associated with the stuff we are made from, which is the ʾădâmâh, the earth. Because we are embodied beings, our connection to specific places is inevitable. We were created to dwell with God in a place full of life.

To be human is to belong to a place. Genesis 3 shows us that life under God’s judgment involves being displaced, driven from the place where we are meant to belong. Since the fall, God’s people have struggled with their relationship to the land. Place, which was once a source of blessing, has turned into a curse marked by toil, abuse, and exploitation.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann explained how our flawed relationship with land and place has distorted our spirituality and churches. We get sidetracked by false divisions, “as though the issue was liberal/conservative,” when the real issue is “the agenda of land which undercuts all postures.” Christians have “so interpreted the Bible away from its agenda” that they have, “perhaps unwittingly, embraced the status quo inequities of landlessness and landedness.” He concluded:

It is likely that our theological problem in the church is that our gospel is a story believed, shaped, and transmitted by the dispossessed; and we are now a church of possessions for whom the rhetoric of the dispossessed is offensive and their promise is irrelevant.⁹

The places we inhabit were intended to bless. In our displacement, we use them for selfish ends. But our displacement is not the end of the story.

Jesus described his redeeming work as “the renewal of all things” (Matthew 19:28), indicating his restoration not only of souls and beings but also of places, land, and creatures. The biblical narrative concludes with a vision of a “new heavens and new earth,” a “Holy City” where God plans to dwell forever with his creation (Revelation 21). The story of redemption is about (re)implacement, where we will one day live in harmony with God, and everything we have used for greed and exploitation will be restored to blessing and peace.

Just as God intended.

The Church and the Love of Place

Jesus did not come to make a new world but to make the world new.¹⁰ As theologian Abraham Kuyper declared in Rooted and Grounded, “a glorious life will germinate from this world,” because Christ will develop the new creation from the seed of this creation.¹¹ The Christian’s attitude toward this world is not avoidance and separation, but to live toward the world as it will one day be, as it is renewed by Christ.

Our local churches should have a similar attitude. “Ours cannot be a colorless Christianity,” as if churches should be replicating models of success and growth from one suburb to the next. Instead, anchored in the organic life of a particular people and place, the calling for local churches “in every place” is to be a unique “congregation with its own hallmark.”¹²

How can churches cultivate a love for the places they inhabit? I’ll offer two suggestions that have been key to our young church in the Haughville Neighborhood of Indianapolis.

First, churches should act as keepers of local history. This is crucial for urban church planters, who are often seen as threats that might change the neighborhood. During the first few years of my ministry in the neighborhood, I dedicated myself to learning as much as I could about the people who have called my neighborhood home. I Googled. I visited multiple libraries to read from special collections. I sat with specialists at the Indiana History Museum, who pulled out numerous folders of newspaper clippings for me to review. I took residents out to lunch to listen to their stories.

This history has shaped our church’s ministry priorities, but more importantly, it has influenced how I view the neighborhood. This place is not primarily meant to be changed by me, but to be embraced as a community where Jesus is already working out his redemption. The neighborhood has needs, but it also displays unique aspects of God’s beauty that should be celebrated.

Any invitation to minister with us begins with a call to love this place as God does.

Second, local churches should think about how to embrace the arts. Artists have a special gift for capturing beauty, telling stories, and creating a sense of belonging. Through the arts, congregations are discipled into slowing down and noticing God’s blessings in small, everyday moments.

Our Creative Arts Resident, Rome Herbert, recently released an album inspired by his experiences living in our neighborhood. Through this project, Rome highlights both the beauty and struggles of people of color in Haughville. His music encourages me to slow down and notice how others experience my community. Rome’s art creates space for people to be heard and remembered, fostering beauty and dignity in a place often overlooked by the rest of the city.

American Christians have been conditioned to embrace speed, size, and influence as the measurement of God’s blessing. This theology has led to a distorted view of Christianity that uses place as a tool for cursing rather than blessing. If only we could learn to see the places we inhabit as God does, our neighborhoods might become spaces of embrace, not resistance.

And our neighbors may discover that Christianity isn’t about ignoring this world for one that is to come, but about learning to follow Jesus as he is coming into the world.

If you want to learn to love a place, slow down and notice the little things.

Just watch out for bird poop. It’s everywhere.

1. Craig Bartholomew brought this point to my attention. See Where Mortals Dwell, 20.

2. “2023 PRRI Census of American Religion: County-Level Data on Religious Identity and Diversity.” https://prri.org/research/census-2023-american-religion/

3. Harvie Conn, The American City and the Evangelical Church, 75-87.

4. Brian J. Miller, Sanctifying Suburbia, 15.

5. Miller, 122-141.

6. Divided by Faith by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith remains one of the best books on this subject.

7. Ashley Hales, Finding Holy in the Suburbs, “Introduction.”

8. This section summarizes Bartholomew’s argument in Where Mortals Dwell, 23-31.

9. Walter Brueggemann, The Land, 193-194.

10. Herman Bavinck, “Common Grace,” 61-62. https://bavinckinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Herman-Bavinck-Common-Grace.pdf

11. Abraham Kuyper, “Rooted and Grounded” in On the Church, 53.

12. Kuyper, 68.