By John Cole

What do we mean by 'local'?

What people understand by ‘local’ in relation to themselves is changing all the time.

‘Local’ could now mean no further than the nearest pillar box (or public house!). Very often it means not the village where people have their home, but the nearest main town - very likely the centre of ‘local’ government - the broad area within which people do their shopping, enjoy leisure pursuits and, if they are not part of the growing army of long-distance commuters, find employment.

But local could be bigger again. Local radio and local newspapers encourage us to identify with an even bigger area, the size of a large city or a shire county.

Yet most local churches cling to a picture of a residential area of a certain size inherited largely from the highly-developed and self-sufficient English village life of the 19th century.

It may well be that, working through this chapter, you will find that your local church bears little relation to what non-churchgoers would recognise as their ‘locality’. Perhaps it never has.

We cannot claim to be an effective local church if we refuse to face the changes in people’s perception of what is local.

But equally, can we then face the far-reaching changes that may be implied if we are to respond to God’s call to be his local church in this new and fast-moving situation?

Can we really define anything as 'local'?

. . or if we can, it may well be very small, maybe no bigger in some places than the nuclear family living behind its privet hedge.

It follows that the local church is always dealing with a multiplicity of ‘localities’. Your situation probably has not been precisely described on these last two pages. Important features have probably been left out - certainly the nuances won't be there.

One possible solution to the complexity might be to give up trying to be local and simply enjoy being a congregation ..

The advice in one American church publication was very simple: "If your congregation doesn't attract new members in one location, sell up and move to an area where it does."

Such an idea shocks most English Christians for reasons which are both historical and theological.

The parochial system, universal across Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox Churches, defines the local church by reference to a geographical area. It involves a commitment to all the people in that area. Even though in the New Testament the Apostles moved from place to place proclaiming the good news, the churches they founded bore witness in their localities.

Parishes, however, have their weaknesses as well as their strengths, and the tensions involved in maintaining a commitment to the ‘local’ will keep us busy for the greater part of this book.

So in today's fragmented and mobile society we need more than history to answer the question, "Why local?" No use just saying that it has always been so.