The Residency in Place

A Parish Collective program for people rooted in a specific neighborhood, doing the work of being the church in a specific place.

Some of the most significant work in the church today isn't happening in big institutions or on national platforms. It's happening in specific neighborhoods — in Little Portugal and Appalachia, in the Georgia Piedmont and Durham's West End, in Milwaukee and San Diego. It's the slow, faithful work of people who have planted their lives somewhere and let that somewhere shape everything.

The Residency in Place is a new Parish Collective program designed to find those people, resource them, and put them in conversation with each other.

Meet the 2026-2027 Residents

Amar D. Peterman

Bluemound Heights | Milwaukee, Wisconsin
amarpeterman.com

Amar D. Peterman is an author and constructive theologian working at the intersection of faith and public life. He holds an MDiv from Princeton Seminary, where he studied American religious history and public theology and is a current PhD student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Amar is also the founder of Scholarship for Religion and Society LLC, a research and consulting firm working with some of the leading philanthropic and civic institutions, religious organizations, and faith leaders in America today. His first book, Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local, was published in March 2026 with Eerdmans.

Shannan Martin

Fellowship Member
Goshen, IN
shannanmartin.com

Shannan Martin, best-selling author of Start with Hello, The Ministry of Ordinary Places and Falling Free: Rescued from the Life I Always Wanted, is a speaker and writer who found her voice in the country and her story in the city. She believes beauty and justice intersect at street-level, and strives to live with “neighbor” as an embodied part of her spiritual DNA. Shannan works as a cook at The Window, a local non-profit dedicated to feeding its community. Her husband, Cory, works as the chaplain of the Elkhart County jail, focusing on the spiritual and emotional health, practical needs, and robust re-entry support for men and women who have been incarcerated. Shannan lives in the Chamberlain neighborhood of Goshen, Indiana with Cory and their teenagers.

Majora Carter

Board Member • Fellowship Member
South Bronx | NYC

Majora Carter is a member of the Parish Collective Fellowship and our board. She is an American urban revitalization strategist and broadcast producer/host from the South Bronx in New York. Carter’s career has spanned environment, economy, social mobility, and real estate development, and her work has won major awards in each sector including a MacArthur ‘genius’ Grant, a Peabody Award, the Rudy Bruner Award Silver Medal, nine honorary doctorates, and accolades from various professional groups. Her consulting clients benefit from her ability to disrupt outdated assumptions in order to uncover better solutions to vexing and persistent problems.
Carter is quoted on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture: “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one.” She applies this talent-retention lens to all of her work. Carter combines her corporate consulting insights to reducing Brain Drain in American low-status communities. Her firsthand experience pioneering sustainable economic development in the South Bronx, has enabled her to harness capital flows resulting from re-urbanization across age, race, and income levels, to help increase wealth building opportunities across demographics left out of this historic financial tide change. Her work produces long term fiscal benefits for government and leading private real estate developments through innovative economic diversity structures.
Her ability to shepherd teams through difficult socio-economic conflict has garnered a very long list of awards and honorary PhD’s, including: 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs, Silicon Alley 100 by Business Insider, Liberty Medal for Lifetime Achievement by News Corp, and other honors from the National Building Museum, International Interior Design Association, Center for American Progress, as well as her TEDtalk which was one of six to launch that site in 2006. At Sustainable South Bronx, Carter deployed MIT’s first ever Mobile Fab-Lab(digital fabrication laboratory) to the South Bronx – where it served as an early iteration of the “Maker-Spaces” found elsewhere today. The project drew residents and visitors together for guided and creative collaborations. After establishing Sustainable South Bronx and Green For All (among other organizations) to carry on that work, she opened a private consulting firm to help spread the message and success of social enterprise and economic development in low-status communities – which was named Best for the World by B-Corp in 2014. Majora has helped connect tech industry pioneers such as Etsy, Gust, FreshDirect, Google, and Cisco to diverse communities at all levels. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science.

Michael Mata

Board Member • Fellowship Member
Koreatown | Los Angeles, CA

Michael Mata is a member of the Parish Collective Fellowship and our board. He began his ministry career 40 years ago by moving into his Los Angeles neighborhood to work with youth. In recent years, he has focused, through formal and informal training, on enhancing the capacity of faith-rooted leaders to effect positive change in marginal and distressed urban communities — locally, nationally and globally. He brings into the Parish Collective his extensive experience in urban pastoral work, background in theological education and urban planning, and engagement in community transformation.

Rev. José Humphreys

Fellowship Member
East Harlem | NYC

Rev. José Humphreys is is a member of the Parish Collective Fellowship. He is a native New Yorker, ordained minister and Co-founder of Metro Hope Church, a multiethnic and multicultural church in East Harlem, New York City. He is also a social worker, consultant and author of the award winning book Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens when Churches Show Up & Stay Put. Rev. José continues to participate in shalom-making and trauma-informed healing work through coaching and facilitation with churches and organizations.
As Co-lead Pastor of Metro Hope Church, Rev. José has cultivated partnerships with East Harlem churches to provide whole-life mentoring circles with people impacted by the criminal justice system. The church is also locally engaged in economic justice through mobilizing church members, churches and residents in collaboration with the Buy Local Initiative, to support locally owned small businesses in a gentrifying East Harlem. Rev. José currently resides in East Harlem with his wife, Mayra and fourteen year-old son, Javier.

Tim Soerens

Executive Director • Fellowship Member
Ravenswood | Chicago, IL
timsoerens.com

Tim Soerens is the co-founding Executive Director of the Parish Collective and a member of the Fellowship. His latest book is Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church, Right Where You Are.
He co-authored his first book The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Transform Mission, Discipleship, and Community.
Tim lives in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago with his wife Maria-Jose and their sons Lukas, Joaquín, and Benjamín.

Drew Jackson

Fellowship Member
East Village | NYC
drewejackson.com

Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on The Way. His work has appeared in Oneing from the Center for Action and Contemplation, The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad, Made for Pax, The Journal from the Centre for Public Christianity, Fathom Magazine, and other publications.
Drew received his B.A. in Political Science from the Univ. of Chicago and his M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. He currently works as the Director of Mission Integration for the Center for Action and Contemplation, and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and daughters.

Amar is an author and constructive theologian working at the intersection of faith and public life. His first book, Becoming Neighbors, was published in March 2026 with Eerdmans.

Amar D. Peterman

Angel is a storyteller, educator, and neighborhood steward whose work centers children, families, and the people closest to the ground. She has served her home church, CityWell UMC, for over ten years.

Angel Brown

Nathan is a writer, storyteller, and community builder. He is the lead facilitator at Seven Story Studio and Abbot of the Appalachian Order — a dispersed new monastic community drawing on Celtic, contemplative, and place-based Christian spirituality.

Nathan Daniel Blake

Jennifer is a theologian, placemaking scholar, and visual artist. She is Professor of Theology and Humanities at Point University and author of Placemaking and the Arts (IVP Academic, 2018).

Jennifer Allen Craft

Chelsea is a writer, lay theologian, and lead convener of the Residency in Place. She coleads an intentional neighborhood faith community in San Diego and is the author of the forthcoming Faithfully Dissident Daughters (Westminster John Knox Press, September 2026).

Chelsea Kim Long

Steve is a writer, pastor, professor, and co-founder of Good City Co., a civic organization that helps citizens invest in the places they call home.