“For 15 years she has driven 150km to get her haircut.”

It’s a true story. A friend of a friend has been travelling 150km 4-5 times each year (and sometimes more) for 15 years to get her haircut. A cursory bit of research tells me there are at least 150 hairdressers closer to her – and no doubt many are cheaper, some are better.

Why does she do it?

She is known there. She belongs there. She is loved there. They do a good job and she feels like she is a part of the family there. For her, going elsewhere is not even a question!

Of course, people do this all the time. My wife much prefers the Coles three suburbs over and drives past several supermarkets to get there. Parents choose schools for their children thirty suburbs over and they commute past scores of others. And let’s not even begin to talk about how many coffee shops you walk past to get to your coffee shop. The one where they know your order and your name.

So why is church different?

I often hear stories of people who have moved 15-30 minutes away from their church and immediately begin the hunt for a new church. Why is it that some people will drive 15-30 mins to shop, 60 minutes to school, even 2 hours for a haircut but not drive to their church.

I am sure you could come up with a thousand reasons. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts in the comments. I want to just mention two of mine.

Sometimes the reason is missional. Praise God. People want to get stuck into their local community and invite people from their local community to their local church. (This is often the case for families with little kids who are going to the local primary school.) If that’s why you are leaving your church to go local, make sure you have a plan for how you are going to do that, not just a vibe. It’s way harder to break into a community than you think and it takes time and investment in people and activities.

Other times, I suspect the reason people “go local” is that they did not feel a sense of connection, belonging or ownership to the vision and ministry in their previous church.

Results from the 2021 NCLS show that church attenders were keen to prioritise a strong sense of community and belonging to their church. Whether this is because they missed community in Covid or Covid helped people realise they did not have the sense of belonging they thought they had, we cannot know.

But it is clear that prioritising belonging and ownership will build believers and establish them long term in the life of the church. People who have that connection are more likely to remain part of their church even if there are personal benefits to “going local”. And when such people remain in your church, committed to the work, they are a blessing to the church, the ministry and all who will follow you into the pulpit.

Being a pastor is hard. There are a thousand things you need to do. Teaching the word must remain our priority but just like the Apostles had to fix belonging and community issues in Acts 6, so we need to be attentive to these issues and make sure people are known by and belong to the household of God. It is easy to ignore it. It is easy to assume it is all going well. It is easy to assume your cracking sermons will keep people in your pews. Truth is, belonging matters to people, sometimes more than the quality of your sermon.