Here’s a list of questions to help you as you go:
1. As you stand just outside your house or apartment—by the front gate or on the footpath—what do you see as you look in each direction? What do you hear or sense? What activity do you notice?
2. As you walk the neighbourhood, what do you notice about the architecture of the houses or apartment complexes? On average, how old do you think the houses or apartments are in this area? How much renovation or rebuilding is going on?
3. What do you notice about the front gardens or entrance ways to each of the houses or apartments? Does you neighbourhood feel like a cared-for place?
4. How many houses or apartments for sale do you see? What indicators of transience do you observe? Does the neighbourhood have a feeling of permanence or change?
5. Is there a freeway or major highway close by? If so, try and imagine this area before it existed.
Who has gained and lost by its introduction?
6. Stop—sit if you can—in a tree-lined street or quieter spot and also at a busy intersection. What are the smells and sounds of the neighbourhood? How quiet or noisy is it?
7. How many community or civic buildings do you see? What are their purposes? Do they look inviting? Well used? Deserted?
8. What public spaces are provided for children, teenagers or s? Are they being used? If so, in what ways?
9. If there a local park, what do you notice about it? Does it feel like an inviting place? Who is there? How is it used?
10. Do you pass any churches or religious buildings? What does their design or appearance communicate to you?
11. What kinds of commercial buildings are there? Walk around a supermarket or local store and identify who makes up the clientele.
12. If your neighbourhood includes a shopping area, is there provision made for people to sit, relax, or relate?
13. Excluding the areas of business, how many people did you pass walking? What age, race, and gender are they? How pedestrian-friendly is the neighbourhood?
14. Imagine yourself as an old, infirm person with no car, or as a young child living in the middle of this neighbourhood. How disadvantaged or advantaged would you be with respect to shops, churches, parks or schools?
15. What evidence is there of public transport? Who uses it?
16. Are there places in your neighbourhood that you wouldn’t go? Why?
17. Where are the places of life, hope, beauty or community in this neighbourhood?
18. What evidence of struggle, despair, neglect and alienation do you see?
19. What sense of connection do you feel to your neighbourhood as you walk though it?
20. In what ways do you sense God’s presence where you live?
An exercise from Simon Carey Holt, God Next Door: Spirituality and Mission in the Neighbourhood. Brunswick: Acorn Press, 2007, 103-104.
Good stuff. Probably a good House Church and/or Leadership Team exercise to engage in.
