Philip Amerson [00:00:01]:

Hello again, this is Philip Amerson with the To Be and Do podcast where being and doing are seen as equally important and they. They reinforce the gifts that God has out there for us. And so we have been really fortunate to visit with Tim Soerens, executive director of the Parish Collective. We're going to put the website that you can check more about their work and Tim's. I first knew of his writing in the book the New Parish. I should have asked you more about that. I love the story about waiting at the bus stop for people to get off the bus. That was terrific as.

Philip Amerson [00:00:48]:

As an example of evangelism. But I also know you've got a new book, Everywhere You Look. And why don't you tell us a bit about what the Parish Collective is up to, Tim, and maybe some ways people can participate in the future.

Tim Soerens [00:01:09]:

Sure. Well, the parish collective has a mission to connect people to be and become the church in the neighborhood. We really feel like our task is to try and reimagine and honestly, by God's grace, try and help to reorganize the church around relationships that are pursuing God's shalom. So that's kind of a mouthful, but that we really feel like the body of Christ in many ways is still the hope of the world. And that that doesn't necessarily mean that we just get bigger and bigger churches. It means the whole point is to see flourishing in our neighborhoods, in, with and across all of our neighborhoods. And so what we do is essentially three things. We, we tell stories of where God is active, which we know is everywhere.

Tim Soerens [00:02:03]:

But we create resources and stories which people can go to on the website and just the hope there is to whether they're everday Christians or pastors or even denominational leaders, to see like, I am not alone in my desire to see the church thrive and grow and like, be a meaningful neighbor in what can feel like a pretty polarizing moment right now. And then we also do all kinds of convenings. So we do learning communities, usually in cities. We have a conference that basically when this comes out, is May 1st and 2nd in terms of 2026 in Chicago. And that's a big flagship gathering that brings together all kinds of incredible people. We've had regional conferences as well and are increasingly thinking that it might be a profound gift to offer environments of like, pastoral peer meetups again at the city level. And then finally we do increasingly work with denominations and seminaries and philanthropies, larger systems, who are asking in some ways yet a different question, which is how are we creating the systems and structures for flourishing neighborhoods through the life of the church. And so that can look like ongoing, essentially conversations, consultations, environments that we're trying to create, but at its base, if you're listening and you're like, yeah, I.

Tim Soerens [00:03:33]:

I want to be and become a part of the church in my neighborhood or my faith matters to me a lot. But I'm kind of confused about the church right now. I think read some of these stories, see what some of our friends are writing about or creating. I think it might give you hope and some fun adjacent ideas.

Philip Amerson [00:03:51]:

Yeah, well, I did a tease with the bus stop story. Do you want to share more?

Tim Soerens [00:04:04]:

Oh, it's frozen on my.

Speaker C [00:04:06]:

Yeah, Phil froze here. Okay, I'm going to fill X fill out. We'll pick up the conversation when he comes back. Hopefully sometimes this happens, but we'll come back here when he trusts back in. Are you hearing me, Tim in the background?

Tim Soerens [00:04:26]:

Yep, yep, I gotcha.

Speaker C [00:04:28]:

All right, he's coming back in now. All right, Phil, you're. You're back. Are you hearing me? Are you?

Philip Amerson [00:04:36]:

Yeah.

Speaker C [00:04:38]:

All right. Sorry this happened. We'll just do the best we can to make it work here, you guys. I think we can just pick it up, you know, and I'll just. On post production. I'll fix it best I can, but basically you can pick up. Basically you're getting ready to start your story, Tim, I believe, about the bus stuff stop. So however you guys want to do that.

Speaker C [00:04:58]:

I don't know if you want to reintroduce that, Philip, or if you just want to jump into the story, Tim,

Philip Amerson [00:05:02]:

but why don't you pick it up, Tim, if you're comfortable with that.

Tim Soerens [00:05:07]:

Yeah.

Speaker C [00:05:07]:

All right, let's do it. And I'll just do another quick mark for myself. Three, two, one, and Mark.

Tim Soerens [00:05:16]:

Yeah, Philip, that story is pretty hilarious. It's. I actually, it's my co author Paul Sparks's story. He, as they were trying to figure out how to not just create environments, but like, show that it was possible to relationally be the church in the neighborhood, he, at one point he would essentially like hide in some bushes nearby a local coffee shop that lots of people that were part of the congregation would. Would often go to. And he would wait. He would bring a book and he would wait until he saw two people who wouldn't normally see each other. And then he would jump out of the bush and then say, hey, look, we're being the church together.

Tim Soerens [00:06:01]:

Look, it's every. It's like Tuesday morning and here we

Speaker C [00:06:03]:

are

Tim Soerens [00:06:05]:

kind of a genius in that. In that regard. But, yeah, I mean, it goes to something that we think about all the time, which is, you know, if obviously none of us have the power to do this, but if you could just, like a. A DVD or like, if you're. If you're streaming something, you press pause, you know, it all stops. I sometimes wonder about that as it relates to everyday followers of Jesus in neighborhoods and how if we could just pause the. The movie for a second and then shine a light on every follower of Jesus whose faith mattered to them, who wanted to be about the renewal of the neighborhood and yet don't know one another at all. I think that's actually one of the great challenges that we face that we're not always talking about.

Tim Soerens [00:06:58]:

You know, one of the. We just had Ash Wednesday. That's one of the reasons I love that holiday is our liturgical day, is you can kind of get a sense of that there actually are more followers of Jesus than usually. You think it's like the only way. It's the only day of the year that we kind of like make a visible mark. And I've often thought, oh, yeah, how do we. I don't think that we should probably all wear T shirts or collars or, you know, weird things, but I do wish that there was a way that we could be a little bit more confident, public, curious about our common faith and then what our common faith brings up in our everyday lives.

Philip Amerson [00:07:39]:

Yeah, you know, I. I am going to go somewhere that I didn't intend to go, but it's really just to thank you and thank you for being in Chicago and doing your work. I'm enough older than you, you maybe never knew about Scoop. The Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education. A number of us taught there, and it actually came out of the evangelical group in. In Chicago. Good friends Bud Ipama and Bill, Leslie and Ray Bakke. And the great story, and it's why I love the coffee shop bus stop story, is Tony Van Zanten was a pastor down near where you are now at an RCA church.

Philip Amerson [00:08:28]:

And he used to go to the. To the train station, to the subway station and do exactly the same thing. He would wait and connect up people there. And Tony was a great pastor. His legacy continues to this day. So thank you. It makes me. Scoop is no longer functioning, but I don't have to worry.

Philip Amerson [00:08:50]:

The parish collective is now alive and well.

Tim Soerens [00:08:53]:

I'm glad you bring that up, Phil. There are so many incredible ministries and stories in the city of Chicago. It's also one of the largest cities that is very distinctly a city of neighborhoods. And so it's an. I just. I love it here so much. I'm so grateful to be here.

Philip Amerson [00:09:13]:

Yeah. Yeah. So how did you choose to be there or what. What brought you from the west coast to the Midwest to the Third coast? Is some of us the Third Coast?

Tim Soerens [00:09:24]:

Yes, that's. That's right. Well, I grew up in Wisconsin and then lived for 20 years in Seattle. And if you. I grew up in a small town of Wisconsin, and I would say that most people who grew up in small towns in the Midwest either really love Chicago or they really, really don't. I always really did. So the reason that we moved back, the primary reason is that my parents are getting older and needed. Needed help, and I was just too far away to try and help care for especially my dad.

Tim Soerens [00:10:02]:

And. And also it was one of those. It was a difficult discernment, more for me, actually, than my wife. But yeah, we moved here about two and a half years ago, and overall it's been wonderful. And ironically, even though all of my work is about neighborhoods in place because it's kind of grown national, I can. I can work with our team, which is also national anywhere.

Philip Amerson [00:10:30]:

So that's terrific. That's terrific. So do I dare ask White Sox or Cubs?

Tim Soerens [00:10:36]:

Oh, you can absolutely ask Cubs. I. Here's a little fun fact. I'm pretty sure, Phil, even though I lived in Seattle for 20 years, that there has never been a year since I was about 16, I'm 46, that I have not been to Wrigley Field. I'm a very faithful Cubs fan, and one of the great, great joys of my life is I can ride my bike to Wrigley Field from where I live, which is just the cathedral of baseball. We could talk about the podcast.

Philip Amerson [00:11:14]:

Absolutely. You've just won my heart. I've been a Cubs fan for a long time.

Tim Soerens [00:11:19]:

We need to go. We need to go Wrigley together, I think this season. And they're looking good.

Philip Amerson [00:11:24]:

Well, as. And as we used to say before 2016, any team can have a bad century.

Tim Soerens [00:11:36]:

Oh, yeah. I have a uncle in Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee. He used to take this. I credit him. He would take me when I was, you know, 8, 9, 10 years old. I think this is still happens where the Cubs and the White Sox, like once or twice a year, they'll play on the same day, the Cubs in the day and White Sox at night. And that was like you put a nine year old in the bleachers and if they love it, oh, my goodness, then we drive down Lakeshore Drive and go to the old Comiskey. Sometimes get dinner in Chinatown.

Tim Soerens [00:12:06]:

I was just completely enraptured. So I love baseball.

Philip Amerson [00:12:09]:

It's great. That's great. Well, Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and. And it's also a city of parishes. In terms of the Catholic community. I mean, when I was. I. I've been in and out and around and lived in Chicago several times.

Philip Amerson [00:12:30]:

And I can still remember if you asked someone where they were from and they were Catholic, they would say St. Rita's or a holy family. Or in many of those parishes, there was still that kind of identity. Talk a bit about that and the identity of neighborhoods and parish and how. How we may be rediscovering the importance of that.

Tim Soerens [00:12:58]:

Absolutely. Well, from a. From a church perspective, one of the many reasons that I am so passionate about neighborhoods is that it allows us to ask the questions not only of what God is doing, but in a very particular place with very particular people and stories and histories and structures, and so we can have a very particular imagination. And when congregations are asking that question, that is inherently collaborative, it is. It is almost never competitive to ask, what does the dream of God look like in. With and for this place? I mean, you want more people, more friends, more assets, more characters. When you're asking that question, which is different essentially, than how do we get people to come to our church on Sunday? That is honestly, if we're real honest, that is a competitive question. It's like, who's winning market share on Sunday morning? And so from a church perspective, I think the neighborhood provides such a powerful platform of collaboration in the.

Tim Soerens [00:14:02]:

You could say the game we're supposed to be playing or the one that matters the most. I also think that the neighborhood matters so much because if you look across almost every sector, I'd say the majority of sectors, whether that be economics, politics, education, health, things like food and farming, even things like policing, there are really hopeful movements within each of those sectors who are saying we need to get back to a more local, relational kind of neighborhood way of life. That's one of the ways that we heal and renew even our sector, that the kind of hegemonic, globalizing forces have gotten out of hand. And what's really interesting about that, Phil, is there is, to my understanding, no other institution or organism quite like the church, whose mission and goal is the integration, the affirmation to be the connective tissue amongst all of them. So we're not just the quote unquote religious people. We're the people that are pursuing the repair, the renewal, the reimagination of maximum flourishing because we believe that's what God is doing. And so the neighborhood then becomes the most powerful place where you could say it's like a human scale environment where we can try and practice our faith together. And I just think, I honestly think that that possibility is upstream of almost everything that ails us.

Tim Soerens [00:15:46]:

We spend all of our time focused on global and national politics. And understandably, things are crazy. Doesn't matter. Your. That's not a partisan statement, by the way, it's just crazy. But we all know, like, upstream of politics is economics and money. Upstream of money is culture. Upstream of culture, I would argue, is a set of values.

Tim Soerens [00:16:09]:

It's the stories that we believe. It's religion, I would argue, like we human beings are religious, whether you're of a particular religious tradition or not. We bet on stories that give us meaning and none of us really know. That's my take anyway. And so to be able to practice a coherent faith in an actual place, I think is one of the most powerful, subversive things that we can possibly do together. Especially if you're concerned about the current state of things.

Philip Amerson [00:16:40]:

Wow, powerful summary. We need to write that and put it in brochures and pass it out in the neighborhood. That's true. Yeah.

Tim Soerens [00:16:48]:

We need to go down the subway and just pass it out and recruit some people.

Philip Amerson [00:16:55]:

You know, one of the things that strikes me is social scientists for a long time have talked about the strength of, of weak relationships. Then some other researchers at Michigan State and other places built on that and talked about it's better maybe to call those bridging relationships. It seems to me that that's part of the power of the neighborhood. And the story is that there is that person you see at the store. And the first 20 times, you may not say hello, but you begin to know who's your neighbor. And the practices that emerge, at least in my experience, and oftentimes because I'm not as extroverted as my spouse, she generally knows their name by the second time. Takes me four or five times. But it's that building of cohesive tissue, connective tissue, that's part of it.

Philip Amerson [00:18:00]:

To use the language that I find you using, that's so helpful to see what God is about, what God is doing here already.

Tim Soerens [00:18:08]:

Yeah. And Phil, that is really important at the neighborhood level. It's also profoundly important between neighborhoods. The great urbanist Jane Jacobs essentially said that great cities are simply a federation of great neighborhoods. And you can extrapolate that out between cities as well. And so, yeah, the weak links or the kind of the bridging relationships is really, really powerful. And the leadership that's required to cultivate weak links and the environments that need to be created, I also don't think we give enough time and attention to. We literally do need some common ground, I think, to begin with, with a kind of a common story or a frame.

Tim Soerens [00:18:54]:

But once that's there, I think the literal, you know, sky's the limit as far as possibilities, especially if there's a sense that neighborhoods themselves are interdependent, which I think most people would agree with. And then cities are as well. One of my favorite books of the last couple years is a book called When Mayors Rule the World by Benjamin Barber. And it makes this case quite powerfully that nation states. Again, we put a lot of attention into nation states, and for some good reason. But his. His perspective is that we have eclipsed our. Our potential to truly function in interdependent ways.

Tim Soerens [00:19:37]:

That if you look at, whether it be climate change or any kind of trafficking, human trafficking, gun trafficking, drug trafficking, anything that's truly interdependent, a problem. Nations coming together at a big, long table is increasingly less likely to happen. But if you contrast that with mayors, and not just the United States around the world, they arguably have the most. The highest amount of, you could say, political power that's most accountable to real people and voters in, quote, unquote, Western democracies. And so I think that's a powerful, again, platform for our theological missiological imagination, not necessarily to just get whoever we want elected, but to say, no, no, we can affect change through our relationships, particularly if we're focused on the holistic flourishing from neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city.

Philip Amerson [00:20:31]:

Okay, so I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to tee one up for you and we'll see. Maybe I'm way off base, but there was a movie several years ago, Isaac Stern Goes to China. The great violinist Isaac Stern goes to China. And he listens to these Chinese musicians who are technically extraordinary. And Stern says they have all the techniques down. But then he says, but is the instrument made for the music or the music made for the instrument? And whether it's the mayor or the pastor or the denominational leader, I think part of our challenge has been that we've somehow thought the instrument was made to play without knowing the music.

Tim Soerens [00:21:34]:

Yes.

Philip Amerson [00:21:35]:

Or without. Yes. Appreciating that the instrument is just There for the music. What are you. What. What does that elicit from you? That Phil is just a weird guy or.

Tim Soerens [00:21:52]:

Well, we're. I'm thinking when you. I haven't seen that movie, but when you described it, I. When you talk about, like, the technical proficiency, it feels to me at one point kind of impressive, like, from a technical way. But what most of us love the most about music and the arts in general is that it helps us to feel it. It, like, reminds us, what does it mean to be human?

Philip Amerson [00:22:23]:

And

Tim Soerens [00:22:26]:

that's one of the big questions of our day right now. What does it mean not just to be human, but to be and become. To do and be more whole, more healthy people? And I can't fathom doing that outside of some sense of common mission or purpose. I can't think of how we could do that as isolated individuals. And I also can't think of how we could do that if we don't have a path where we can continually become. To grow and mature and look at blind spots and tell the truth and literally grow up. You could say those are Christian ideas, like mission and formation, relationship. And I would say they are, but at a deeper level, they're just human.

Tim Soerens [00:23:18]:

And so, yeah, where I take that is what is Jesus all about? He wants us to become more and more truly human. Kind of looks at our. Like C.S. Lewis talked about. He looks at our small desires and set aside.

Philip Amerson [00:23:33]:

Very nice. Very nice. It takes me back to the beginning of our first conversation to John McKnight, and many years ago. I've got to be careful how I tell this story. I deliberately took a leader of an educational institution to lunch with John, and this educational leader, quite appropriately, I think, bragged on all the leadership programs they had at that school and the leadership for this and leadership for that, leadership for that. And John was typical John, very polite and listened to. And as we were leaving, John said to this person, you know, leadership is good, but you might want to think a little bit about connectorship.

Tim Soerens [00:24:25]:

Wow.

Philip Amerson [00:24:27]:

And for me, that's. That's the difference between having high technical skills or leadership training. But have you missed the music? Yes, as you say, the humanity, the humanness.

Tim Soerens [00:24:46]:

Phil, that reminds me of another mutual friend who was, of course, a very dear friend of John's as well, Peter Block. And he has this short three words which I think are revolutionary, which is that leadership is convening. That's what it is. And that can turn the world upside down, if that's taken seriously. That creates all kinds of metaphors and imaginations and practices postures. If that is our primary. You could say imagination for what leadership is. But yeah, Peter and John have taught and modeled that really beautifully.

Speaker C [00:25:31]:

Yeah.

Philip Amerson [00:25:32]:

Well, Tim, we've got to do this again. This has been fun. I would love to. And thank you so much for your time and for reminding us from Pete of Peter Block and Leadership is convening. This is Philip Amerson and Tim Soerens saying so long for Belonging and Exchange Podcast. God bless.

Tim Soerens [00:25:57]:

God bless you.