Community isn't a "Product"

Putting down roots is hard, especially if you grew up like I did.

I was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1980. By the time I was thirteen, we had moved to North Dakota, Kansas, Indiana, and Virginia. I had gotten used to being the new kid at school. In those early years, I went to five different school districts in Indiana, so the longest I stayed in any one district was about a year and a half.

I wasn’t a military brat. My dad was just searching for Mayberry, which is ironic, given that where we finally landed was next to a bar across from a whiskey plant in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. That is where I finished eighth grade and all four years of high school.

I know every nook and cranny of Lawrenceburg. This was before the internet really took over, so we spent all our time outside. Functionally speaking, that is my hometown. It sits right on the edge of the greater Cincinnati area. This is where I went to college, entered the workforce, got married, and had my first two sons. This region is home.

Place matters a hundred times more than most people give it credit for these days, and it is the people who make it.

In 2009, I went on a vision quest of sorts and moved my family three hours west to Bloomington, Indiana, for what was supposed to be three years. It turned into five. And while I knew we needed to end up back in Cincinnati, we decided to add another leg to the journey and relocate to Spartanburg, South Carolina, for another five years.

At one point, I casually suggested to my wife that maybe this was where we belonged. She disagreed, and she wasn’t wrong.

There are good people everywhere, but we didn’t quite fit in. They had their own history, and we shared very little of it. We were Midwesterners from north of the Mason-Dixon and west of the Appalachians, and those are two very significant divides. As a side note, I would say the same thing is true of being west of the Mississippi or west of the Rockies, though by degrees.

We did not belong there. We did not have family there. My mother had moved to be close to us, but she had no history there either. She just wanted to be close to her people.

So in late 2018, Emily and I decided it was time to make preparations to go back home. After a little over a decade away, we moved into the apartment above my father-in-law’s former dental practice in Hyde Park. It was the very place where I used to pick Emily up when we were dating in high school after she got done working as a dental assistant.

We had friends here. Emily still had her aunt and uncles here, along with her mother. My family was scattered out west in Colorado, Arizona, and Montana. They, too, had a bit of the wanderer in them.

We had to pick somewhere, and I picked the place where I had the most roots, the most history, the most connections, and at least a little head start on building something deeper.

During the pandemic years, people didn’t just move. They scattered with a purpose. Some were chasing political alignment. Some wanted space, land, and a feeling of control if things went wrong. And a noticeable slice were looking for strong church communities.

Our little town of Batavia ended up on the radar for more than a few of those people. Between my online presence and the early growth of East River, we became, at least in their minds, a kind of destination.

And I remember those conversations. Some of them were… something.

People asking what our plans were to influence the local sheriff. Others telling me I needed to be building out serious food storage systems for supply chain collapse. One guy insisted my deacons should be leading that effort.

We didn’t even have deacons or elders. We were a year or so into a church plant with an advisory board and a sending church.

A lot of people who reached out weren’t just looking for a church. They were looking for a finished product, something already built that they could step into without having to do the hard, slow work of building anything themselves.

I wasn’t offended those folks didn’t come. Honestly, I was relieved. We couldn’t have handled it.

But what stuck with me, especially in 2021 and 2022, was the mindset. Church had become something to shop for. Like a truck with a checklist. It needs four-wheel drive. It needs to be this color. It needs to have this feature and that feature.

Underneath that was a deeper assumption that real community could be acquired fully formed, and it can’t be.

Even if you walk into a mature, healthy church, you still have to build relationships, and real relationships take time. You still have to learn the weather and the history, the traditions and the people.

Otherwise, you stay what a lot of people have quietly become: a kind of refugee, always evaluating, never settling.

I’ve talked to pastors in some of those destination communities, the ones that pulled people in during the pandemic, and what they’re seeing now is telling. A number of those transplants are restless again, unsatisfied, already looking for the next place.

That’s a good thing. Disillusionment is reality breaking through a bad picture in your head.

My dad went looking for Mayberry, and a lot of people did something similar in 2020. But Mayberry doesn’t exist; it’s a projection, and you can’t move there.

Communities are not products to be purchased. They have to be joined and, over time, built.

Sometimes the right move is going back: back to family, back to history, back to somewhere you already have roots.

That’s essentially what we did.

I’m grateful for our years in the South, but we were always something like temporary missionaries there: helpful, involved, invested to a degree, but not from there and not ultimately staying.

We were always coming back here.

Even with our history here, it hasn’t been automatic. We’ve had to work at it: building friendships, reestablishing rhythms, plugging in. I’ve invested deeply in local business and civic life. Our kids have gotten involved in trade school and local sports. Making a generational home takes time… generations even.

Wherever you go, you’re going to have to live the rest of your life there, and there are no shortcuts through that.