Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

Abstract

response is to call the church to foster sacred space and offer hospitality with conversational space about civic values, nurturing local connections for its 18,000 largely vertical neighbours, and practical inclusion of those who are marginalized, including transient international students. Structurally, Stephen Burn’s Chapter 7 could have made a neat concluding chapter. It explores the missional possibilities of public worship, churches taking a pastoral interest in their whole parish, and engaging with people’s longing for the sacred aspects of life including special services like baptisms and national rituals such as Anzac day. It underlines the importance of developing ministry approaches that accept and express hospitality to people outside the church where they are at, rather than where we hope they would be. My other favourite chapter, because it was the most challenging, is Susanna Snyder’s ‘Displacing Theology: God-Talk in an ‘‘Age of Migration’’’. An assumption is that all people have a postcode, but Snyder reminds us that refugees and asylum seekers are desperately in search of a place and home that a postcode represents. As much as we need the local interest of postcode theology, we also need to reflect theologically on the implications of life for people who are ‘postcode-less’. Perhaps more than any other time in history, it is imperative to listen to and learn from the refugee, the vagabond, the other, and what they can teach about hope and suffering, catholicity and communion, consumerism and the importance of finding and knowing our local place in the world. Home and Away is a good volume on contextual theology and local practice. It offers a broad cross-section of reflection by grassroots practitioners and thoughtful theologians who are developing local worship, working for the welfare of their neighbourhoods, and reimagining how to communicate the gospel in what are often post-church contexts. It will be of interest to those interested in its themes – including church and society, communication media, mission in postChristendom, mental illness, migration, gender issues – and those who are open for inspiration to similarly engage the task of local theologizing in their postcode.