What is the Parish Movement? Sign 1: Centering on Christ

The mission of the Church is up for grabs.

We know what hospitals are for. They heal.

We know what schools are for. They teach.

Gas stations fill your tank. Grocery stores sell food. Libraries offer learning.

But what about the Church? What is it for?

That question may sound simple, but in this moment, it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Ask ten people inside or outside the Church and you’ll get a wide range of responses. Maybe, like many of us right now, you are wrestling with this yourself.

Rediscovering Our Purpose by Centering on Christ

As Parish Collective, we’ve been asking this question for years alongside pastors, neighbors, and everyday people who want to live their faith in real, local ways.

For too long, we’ve defaulted to Church answers that center on growth: more people, more programs, more Sundays. Functionally, many churches are set up to attract a crowd, measure attendance, and keep things running smoothly. But for what?

And yet… beneath the confusion, there’s a deeper hunger. A longing to recover a sense of purpose that’s rooted, real, and good news for the world, not just good feelings for Sunday.

But what do we do? If we don’t know why we exist, no amount of strategy will keep us from drifting into consumption, production, and burnout.

Through this journey, we have come to believe

that the Church exists to join God’s dreams in the neighborhood for the flourishing of everyone and everything in our places.

And if we want to live into that kind of purpose, we have to ask: Where are we starting from? What are we centered on?

Because without a center, it’s easy to drift into busyness, consumption, or apathy.

Recovering our purpose starts with recovering our center. And for us and the Parish Movement, that center is Christ.

Not just in belief. Not just in worship songs. But in daily life, in shared presence, in the neighborhood.

This is the first Sign of the Parish Movement:

Centering on Christ: We seek to center our lives on Christ as a collective expression of the love of God in our place.

It might sound obvious. But is it?

What does it really mean to center your life on Christ? 

What does that look like on a Tuesday afternoon? What does it mean for the person you interact with at the grocery store?

In this video, Christiana Rice and José Humphreys III share how centering on Christ has shaped their neighborhoods, their leadership, and their daily lives.

They talk about walking with intention. Eating with awareness. Praying with their feet.

They reflect on embodiment, identity, and the deep connection between Christ and the streets we live on.

Christ doesn’t need to be brought to your block. He’s already there in the people, the stories, the soil, the sidewalk cracks. Your role? To notice. To walk like it’s sacred ground. Because it is.

If you’re feeling spiritually disconnected, weary of church-as-consumption, or longing for a deeper, more rooted expression of faith, this is where we begin:

Not with answers. With presence. With Christ.

SIGN 1: Centering on Christ: We seek to center our lives on Christ as a collective expression of the love of God in our place.

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.

Written by José Humphreys III and Christiana Rice

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