In this episode, we talk with Kyle Morris who is the Lead Pastor of Revive Church in Arvada, CO. We hear about his church's decision to stay where they were and seek the shalom of their neighborhood rather than move to a different (and wealthier) part of the city. This decision forced the church to deal with a problem of too much space through the …

In this episode, we talk with Matt Busby who is the Senior Associate Pastor at Mission Chattanooga. Matt describes for us the evolution of a relationship between a specific church (Mission Chattanooga) and a coffee shop/restaurant/event space (The Camp House) in three different neighborhoods in downtown Chattanooga. Mission Chattanooga and Camp Hou…

Stained glass, digital photos, or a pile of rocks. Today, we join the co-hosts of the Device & Virtue podcast to talk about how the church builds memories and the role of technology in this space. It’s a podcast inside a podcast. Memories help people establish identities and build communities, and physical places are fertile ground where memories t…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy listen to the story of Kevin Finch, the Executive Director of Big Table and a former pastor who was moonlighting as restaurant critic. During his days as a pastor and a restaurant critic, Kevin was exposed to the high levels of need that existed among workers in the hospitality industry. As he sought a way to prov…

In this episode, Sara Joy and Eric talk with Pastor Dwayne Cline about James North Baptist Church and their journey towards providing affordable housing in their neighborhood in the north end Hamilton, Ontario. With a vision for incarnational ministry, James North has been serving their neighborhood for over 130 years. As one of the most economical…

In this episode, Sara Joy and Eric talk with Pastor Gabe Coyle about the fruition of Four Chapter Gallery, an art space developed, curated, and managed by Christ Community Church in downtown Kansas City. As an artist himself, Gabe discusses how his passions and dreams have taken on new shape by planting a church with the intention of connecting wit…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy chat with Pastor Scott Woller about the model of building both a church and a coffee shop. While Pastor Scott does not say it directly, in essence, he aimed to develop a "third place." Third place is a term coined by Ray Oldenburg to describe those places that we find ourselves visiting on a fairly regular basis t…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy talk with Pastor Scott Pontier about how Jamestown Harbor Church has explored the needs and opportunities for creating a "center" in their suburban community. After a few years of conversation with the local township board and other organizations, they landed on partnering with a local sports program to design a f…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy talk with Pastor Cynthia Wallace about how the Oasis Farm and Fishery was implemented and is operating out of Bible Center Church in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Originally begun as an educational initiative to help families learn how to eat and cook healthier, the program has evolved into growing food…

We're kicking off Season 5 in just a few short weeks! Tune in to the trailer to hear more about this season's theme - "Outside the Box: Placemaking & gospel mission beyond the church walls" along with the ways we're changing up the format a bit.By Eric O. Jacobsen, Sara Joy Proppe, Chris Elisara

We want to learn more about who is out there listening! Please take this short survey to tell us more about who you are, why you listen, and how we can make the podcast better for you! In this final episode of Season 4, Sara Joy and Eric, along with Josh Yates and Chris Elisara from Ormond Center, unpack some of the common themes and fresh discover…

In this episode Sara Joy and Eric interview Jonathan Brooks of Chicago, currently co-pastor at Lawndale Community Church and the former pastor of Caanan Community Church in Englewood and author of Church Forsaken: Practicing Presence in Neglected Neighborhoods. Jonathan tells how his attempt to get out of Englewood by pursuing a career in architect…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy talk with Pete Kelly, the CEO of Apartment Life. For many reasons, Eric and Sara Joy are really excited to share with listeners this timely conversation. (Side note, Pete Kelly did visit Tacoma just two weeks after the episode was recorded and confirmed that Tacoma is way cooler than most cities in Texas -- this i…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy interview Cynthia Wallace, Executive Pastor and Executive Director, about the providential birth of The Oasis Project, a community and economic development initiative led by Bible Center Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When their pastor in Michigan prayed over Cynthia and her husband, John, saying they would g…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy interview Rob Kaple of Grace Midtown Atlanta. The church came on their radar when they noticed in Public Square, an online publication of the Congress for the New Urbanism, that the church had won a merit award for good design in the Block, Street, and Building category of CNU's 2021 Charter Awards. It is somewhat…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy talk with Adam Ward about his podcast, For Columbus, based in Columbus, Ohio. Unlike other podcast hosts who aspire to expand their audience as far as possible, Adam is happy to limit his reach to those who love and serve Columbus. In this podcast, Adam shares stories about leaders serving God’s kingdom in a local…

In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy interview Dr. Amy Sherman, Senior Fellow and Director of Center on Faith in Communities (CFIC) at the Sagamore Institute to gain her thoughtful insight on the nuance and meaning of the word shalom. In particular, Amy shares about her forthcoming book, Agents of Flourishing, which centers around six endowments of f…

In this episode, Sara Joy and Eric continue their conversation about place with Chris Elisara at Ormond Center to consider the various ways we impact the places we live, work, play, and worship. Placemaking can sound like an abstract concept, but it is essentially helping our places become places worth caring about. Anyone or any church can engage …

Place is a key element of shalom because our identities are rooted in place and we connect to one another through place. In this episode, Eric and Sara Joy discuss the difference between place and space (and why place isn’t always good and space isn’t always bad), while framing both within a biblical understanding. They trace the theme of place fro…

In this episode Eric and Sara Joy build a more robust understanding of shalom, reflecting on the meaning of the term beyond the standard definition of peace to include a proactive seeking of flourishing and right relationships with each other, with God, and with our whole community. They even note that shalom can and should be sought and reflected …

Jeremiah 29:7 calls us to seek the welfare (shalom) of the specific places to which we have been called. During Season 4, we will be exploring what this means for pastors and other leaders as they seek to be faithful to this challenging mandate. In this trailer, we introduce our theme and we introduce our listeners to our new partners from Ormond C…

In this episode, Eric takes the lead in expounding on the book Palaces for the People written by Eric Klinenberg in 2018. Klinenberg is a sociologist at NYU who coined the term "social infrastructure" to capture the idea that shared physical places shape the way people act and the relationships people develop. He has studied how the presence of soc…

In this episode Eric interviews Sara Joy about Jane Jacobs’ pioneering book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Written in 1961 this book represented a scathing critique of orthodox city planning from an unexpected source. Jane Jacobs was neither an architect nor a trained planner, but she was a keen observer of how cities and neighborhoo…

In this episode, Sara Joy interviews Eric about the book Home From Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler. Published in 1996, this book remains incredibly relevant for the place where we find ourselves today as we confront a rising decline of shared, civic life. In fact, Eric has referred to Kunstler as a "lawless prophet." This prophetic voice of Kunstl…

In this episode, Eric interviews Sara Joy about Jan Gehl’s masterful book, Cities for People. Jan Gehl is an architect who believes that paying attention to how actual humans interact with buildings and public spaces is the most important factor to consider when building or developing these spaces. This seemingly obvious approach actually makes Geh…

Why is walking so important for our health, wealth, and the environment? Are there particular conditions in a city that encourage (or discourage) people to walk? Does promoting walkability mean we get rid of all the cars? In this episode, Sara Joy interviews Eric about why he likes the book Walkable City by Jeff Speck so much. And, on a personal no…

What makes a city a 'happy city'? Is there a correlation between the wealth of a city and its happiness? According to Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City, happiness is about having meaningful connections with the people who are proximate to us. People often think that things like houses, cars, and toys will make us happy. But whatever happines…

On The Embedded Church podcast, we often make references to terms, books, and urban thinkers that might be unfamiliar to our audience. We decided to address that concern in Season 3, by introducing our listeners to the books and authors who have had a major impact on our understanding of neighborhood design. Welcome to an entire season dedicated to…

In this episode, Sara Joy interviews Eric about his most recent book, Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens. Released in May of 2020, Eric's book dives into our current crisis of loneliness citing it as partly resulting from a lack of belonging we feel in regard to the places and the people who most often inhabit …

In this episode, we talk with Rev. David Wright who is the Assistant to the Pastor of the Peoples Baptist Church (PBC) in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, MA. David is also the Executive Director of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston. We learn from David about the long-standing history of community engagement for the Peoples Baptis…

In this episode we talk with Jamison Galt, who is the Pastor of Resurrection Church Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, New York. In its relatively new existence as a church plant, Resurrection Church has already occupied five different buildings in the same neighborhood. Access to space in each location has been birthed through relationships that Jamison ha…

In this episode, we interview Nathan and Kristi Ivey about the work they have done and continue to do through Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, KY. With backgrounds in finance and government, they bring a unique lens to their former and current roles as Pastor and Director of Mercy Ministry. They have come to recognize that an important part of…

In this episode we interview Pastor Thurman Williams, who is the lead pastor of New City Fellowship: West End in St. Louis, MO. Growing up as a son of a Methodist pastor in the suburbs of Baltimore, he felt the call to explore leading ministry in urban Baltimore. Through his experiences in Baltimore, he was called to co-pastor a church in St. Louis…

In this episode, we bring Keith Case back to our show to talk about how his church Providencia WPB in West Palm Beach, FL, is pursuing their mission in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. Their church includes a lot of young adults working in industries that have been hit hard by the pandemic, so the church has helped incubate a new ministry to aid p…

In this episode, I talk with my co-host Sara Joy Proppe about her work with Proximity Project. Proximity Project offers educational and consulting services for church leaders who want to leverage their church property to better engage with their neighbors. In addition to talking with Sara Joy about some of the ways she has helped churches better se…

In this episode we talk with Karen Wilk who is the pastor of NEW (Neighbourhood Engagement Workers’) Community, a missional community in her neighborhood in Edmonton, Alberta. She shares with us about her transition from pastoring a large, traditional church to engaging a new paradigm of 'go and be' in the neighborhood. This has led to her work in …

In this episode we talk with Matt Canlis who is the Pastor of Trinity Church in Wenatchee, Washington. A few years ago, Matt was a Pastoral Assistant in Scotland and discovered the parish model of pastoral ministry. He learned how to engage the people of his parish by walking around and visiting with them in their homes, schools, businesses, and pu…

In this episode, we talk with Renee and James B Notkin who are co-Pastors of Union Church in Seattle. Union Church is a church plant located in the South Lake Union Neighborhood in Seattle. In planting Union Church, the Notkins were looking to develop a missional church model that would provide weekly opportunities for three basic discipleship comm…

In this episode Chris Barras, the Lead Pastor of Area 10 Faith Community shares about the entrepreneurial heart and spirit that drives how his church has taken shape in their neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Coming from a background in management at Starbucks, Chris has an ethos for developing "third places," a term coined by sociologist Ray Old…

In Episode 7, we talk with Nathan Carter who is a pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Chicago, Illinois. When the church chose to relocate to an urban neighborhood in Chicago, the leadership asked the 30 original members to move into the neighborhood where the church was locating. There were 20 members who were willing, so effectively the church s…

In this episode, we talk with Keith Case who is the Lead Pastor / Church Planter at Providencia in West Palm Beach, Florida. West Palm Beach is a fairly walkable community that also includes a couple of significant barriers to walkability – namely the existence of a four lane arterial that cuts the downtown off from the waterfront as well as a nota…

In this episode, we talk with Andy Metzger who is a Pastor at The Summit Church in Denver, CO. What makes Summit’s story interesting is that Andy lives 975 steps from the church. And in fact, all of the Pastors on Staff at Summit live within a mile of the church. The Summit Church is located in the Five Points (or RiNo) neighborhood of Denver which…

On this episode, Eric O. Jacobsen, Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church Tacoma and our very own co-host of The Embedded Church Podcast and author of Sidewalks in the Kingdom and The Space Between, shares with us about the small steps his church is taking in Tacoma, Washington, to care for their neighborhood. By identifying the 99 buildings an…

On this episode, Stephanie Williams O’Brien, Co-lead Pastor of Mill City Church in Minneapolis, MN, tells about being a church that meets in a local school and the creative partnerships they’ve formed to address the needs of local students. The non-profit, The Sheridan Story, formed by the church has now grown from an individual church initiative t…

In this episode, Corey Widmer, Pastor of Third Church in Richmond, Virginia, talks to us about his church’s efforts to encourage flourishing in their neighborhood by hosting a community-wide conversation called a charrette. Some time ago, Third Church lost a lot of trust with their neighbors by putting together a plan to expand their building witho…

In this episode, we talk with Chris Ganski who is a pastor at City Reformed Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chris talks about City Reformed Church’s decision to purchase a commercial building in the heart of a walkable neighborhood and convert it into a church. He notes how that decision really shaped and clarified the mission of the church. While …

Access more Show Notes with pictures and resources. More information about this podcast and helpful church and urbanism resources can be found on The Embedded Church website. Show Credits Hosted and Produced by Eric O. Jacobsen and Sara Joy Proppe Edited by Adam Higgins | Odd Dad Out Voice Productions Theme Music by Jacob Shaffer Artwork by Lance K…