The Five Signs of the Parish Movement offer a vision of a church deeply rooted in place, where faith is lived out through presence, friendship, and shared hope. Each sign invites us to embody the love of God in our everyday contexts, joining Christ in the healing and renewal of our neighborhoods and the flourishing of all creation.
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What are the 5 Signs of the Parish Movement?
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At the heart of the Parish Movement is a shared longing to live with Christ at the center. Allowing His love to shape how we see, serve, and show up in our everyday lives.
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In love, Jesus the Christ moved into the neighborhood and inhabited an obscure village called Nazareth. As an Afro-Asiatic, first century Palestinian Jew, he embedded his life in the sacred ordinary of his place, growing in wisdom and truth as he accompanied the displaced, dined with the disinherited and taught his friends and followers how to look again at those invisibilized by society. Christ through the Holy Spirit invites us to be an extension of this heavenly love, an embodied presence to work for the repair, healing and flourishing of all things. Inhabiting zip codes all over the globe, we seek to center our daily lives around the life and love of Christ, joining together with people and places through the transformative work of God’s Kin-dom.
By José Humphreys III & Christiana Rice
Faith becomes real when it’s rooted in place. We learn to slow down, pay attention, and grow alongside our neighbors, discovering God’s presence right where we live.
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Becoming rooted people in the same proximity, we seek to join the liberating story of God in, with, and for our place, its inhabitants, and those who stewarded the land before us. All of us are made in the image of God, which means our worth is imbued with gifts and abilities. However, we recognize there will be systems and structures that devalue some inhabitants because of their identity or heritage. We will stay alert and engaged against injustices around us that might exist. Rather than seeking power or wielding control, we begin with an intentional effort to know and be known by our actual neighbors - to actively participate in listening, loving, and caring for the land and people where we live. Learning together how to faithfully embody kinship and equity at street level gives us wisdom to discern our limits, strengths, and responsibilities elsewhere.
By Michael Mata & Shannan Martin
When we gather, we remember who we are and whose story we’re part of. Together, we make space to listen, to worship, and to be renewed for the work ahead.
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We gather to weave our parish into the larger story of our faith. Trusting that God has always been at work we draw together in worship to encourage one another in love and discernment to be present to the Spirit’s activity all around us. This discernment leads us to engage in our communities. We have discovered that the more active we are in our neighborhoods joining in God’s renewal, the more crucial it is for us to step back together and remember the massive story of God. We so easily forget. We come together to name the brokenness around us, bear our collective burden, celebrate our common hope, and be transformed together in the neighborhood.
By Cote Soerens & Jonathan Brooks
In every neighborhood, God is already at work. We’re invited to join in — building trust, nurturing relationships, and working together for the good of our communities.
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We trust God will invite us to weave new relationships and projects for the common good in our shared common ground. It’s never been more important to foster unity between all the diverse followers of Christ within our local contexts. Joining God’s renewal within the broken systems of our world, we seek to reconcile fractured relationships and celebrate differences by collaborating across cultural barriers and learning to live in solidarity with those in need. If ever there was going to be a robust movement of unity in the 21st century church it will likely be lay-led, local, and in the neighborhood. When unity and trust grows between us, it is amazing how we can work together and build peace for the common good.
By Majora Carter & Tim Soerens
The movement doesn’t end with our own parish. As we connect across places and stories, we glimpse the beautiful diversity of God’s people and learn from one another along the way.
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This is the most interconnected moment the world has ever experienced. While this reveals Divine diversity, the dominant stories of our time often unravel local cultures and diminish our differences, producing false homogeny and erasure. We must produce an alternative by reimagining our connections. As we intentionally build relationships across contexts, we are seeking a spacious gospel that illuminates and confronts our biases, convinces us of generous inclusion, and honors the unique way the Good News manifests itself in places different from our own. The practice of linking across parishes exposes our inequities, expands our creativity, and weaves together a church across time and place that can manifest the multi-faceted beauty of God.
By Paul Sparks & Sunia Gibbs