I enjoy looking out the windows on one side of my house and seeing a pond. It was created during housing development in the early 1970s and likely helps with water drainage and stormwater issues. It also is home to fish and hosts numerous birds, including egrets, cormorants, and ducks.

If I had a concern about the pond behind my house, who would I contact? I could get in the touch with the homeowner’s association that owns the property. I might connect with my municipality. Perhaps there is a communityy group interested in local water and wildlife concerns.

Many decisions about the immediate land and places around us are made at the local level in the United States. National issues and politics often dominate discussions. It can be hard today to find information about local matters given changes in media. Yet, local politicians, government staff, and local organizations all regularly address our local built environments. They often have oversight of the land and places we interact with every day.

Some people know about this at the local level and get involved. Loud and resourced voices at the local can often get the results they want. Some others may not know about the local effects on land and places and other may know and not respond. For example, social scientists have argued that in recent decades people in the United States are less involved in civic organizations compared to the past. These may be national groups but they act at the local level, bringing people together to address local issues. Or, there are elected local officials who working with property tax money and other revenues see to address local concerns. Where I live, voter turnout for these local elections is quite low.

As Ben Norquist and I write in Every Somewhere Sacred, God cares about and has plans for land and places. And he invites humans to participate in and help carry out these plans. We can do things as individuals but we can and should also act collectively, working in communities to care for land and places. This work should extend beyond our own interests – such as common NIMBY responses – to consider how people and places can flourish together.

For Christians, this should involve churches caring for land and places, developing and acting on their imaginations within their communities and with other nearby groups. Why not get involved with local concerns? Address local issues? Collectively work to help Creation flourish? Connect theology and practice, worship and service, people and land.

Back to the pond just beyond my property line. If there was a major concern, I would hope I would do something constructive for the good of the community and not just for my own property interests. One common solution in our world – let others take care of it – should not be the option Christians take. May we work together to see and act on land as gift, kin, sacrament, and/or home.