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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
This article examines the significance of ‘place’ as a theme in ecclesiology in the interests of developing an ecclesial sense of place within my own context of Australian Anglicanism. To talk about ecclesiology is to talk about place, about God’s place, about our placement in the world, about how and why our social life operates as it does, about what engenders optimal life enhancing community. From this perspective, place can be a critical concept through which theology, ecclesiology, mission and ministry can be organized and better understood. The primary discipline that has deployed the concept of place is geography. Accordingly, in this article, I consider the theme of place as it is discussed in professional geography and briefly examine some implications for being church and the Anglican Church in particular. This provides the framework for consideration of place within an Australian cultural and ecclesial context. In doing so, I examine the motif of verandah as a depiction of ecclesial place down-under. The key concept of the ‘in-between place’ to depict a post-colonial way of being church is deployed in order to recover an ecclesial sense of place down-under. Underpinning such an approach is the theological concept of the in-between God.
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3. An example from my own context is pertinent. At the Adelaide Diocesan Synod (October 2008) the consideration of place proved to be quite central on a number of fronts: to sell or not to sell Bishop’s Court; whether parish boundaries made any sense with regard to church planting in various places in the diocese; whether the diocese could envisage itself as a place within which all manner of Anglican species might happily co-exist or whether our places were quite sharply delineated; in other words, whether place is a strongly bounded matter or is it osmotic in form and function. It has to do with how we organize our life and behave towards others, about ethics and finally our understanding of the God of all places.Google Scholar
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