My new book, At the Scent of Water: Growing faith, community and flourishing where you live, gathers what I have learned, often the hard way, about how local renewal actually happens.
It is full of stories from ordinary people doing patient work in hard places, including some of my own mistakes. I wrote it for the tired, the hopeful, and the quietly convinced. It is for anyone done with meetings about meetings and ready to grow something real, right where they live.
Shane Claiborne writes the foreword and puts it this way:
“Ash is calling us to what Jesus modelled: to pitch your tent among the people, to let your address be your theology, to discover that flourishing is not a private achievement but a communal gift.”
Your neighbourhood does not need another programme. It needs you, planted, present, and awake to what God is already doing.
Local community life shouldn’t die. If you grow local leaders, then it won’t. Watch this short video:
Local leaders
There is a lot of talk about why local people and places matter. However, when local leaders are missing, neighbourhoods come to depend on outside professionals, good people burn out, and resources run dry. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The title for the book comes from the ancient book of Job. He has lost so much and is sitting in the ashes of his ruined life, and yet he still saw something resilient in an old tree stump:
“Though its roots have grown old in the earth and its stump decays, at the scent of water it will bud and sprout again like a new seedling.” (Job 14:8-9, NLT)
I have spent 35 years in urban communities, from Melbourne to Bangkok to Birmingham, watching that verse come true. I have seen tired churches with six people in the pews and neighbourhoods written off by every agency in town begin to sprout again.
It rarely started with a strategy or a grant. It started at the scent of water.
A pathway, not a programme
The book walks through a pathway we have tested personally on our own streets and through Seedbeds with thousands of local leaders around the world. It has three movements.
Find the hidden catalysts with their gifts, talents and resources, already on your doorstep. Look past the usual professionals and the people with the right CVs, and pay attention to who your neighbours already trust. Those people carry local agency that no outside expert can bring in. The leaders are already there.
Form them through practices rather than programmes. Build rhythms of prayer, listening, eating together, and small experiments that people can sustain on a Tuesday afternoon with little budget. Practices grow roots, while programmes tend to grow dependence. Formation grows trust at walking pace.
Release them into flourishing together. Step back, back people with real trust and real resources, and let local leaders shape what comes next. Some of what grows will surprise us, and some of it will outlast us. That sustainability in local community life is crucial right now.
This book is anyone who carries responsibility for a place: the vicar of a small congregation, the head teacher who sees families struggling, the community worker stretched thin, the funder wondering why projects collapse when the money ends. The local resident not sure what to do next.
Come and celebrate with us
We are launching the book in our community of Winson Green in Birmingham. It is in Windsor Olympus Academy, this new state of the art school was built on what many used to call a wasteland. This schools now sit at the heart of our neighbourhood.
Friday 13 November, 6pm to 8pm. Windsor Olympus Academy, Perrott Street, Birmingham B18 4LX
Bishop Mike Royal will host the evening, with music from Tim Hughes, steel pan drums from Owen Clarke, stories of hope, a Q&A, light refreshments, and signed books for sale. Entry is free, but for catering please book a ticket.
Bring a neighbour. Bring the person on your street who leads without a title, and let them hear that they matter. Your neighbourhood is not finished, and your church is not done. The stump is not dead.
Rev Dr Ash Barker, is the Founder of Seedbeds
“Ash Barker combines the urgency of an Old Testament prophet with the tenderness of Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet. He gathers a cloud of witnesses to say not ‘You should follow Jesus as seriously as us’ but ‘We’re having fun – why wouldn’t you want to join us?’
You will finish this book feeling holy envy, just as the scoffers looked on the first disciples, realising what ‘not far from God’s realm’ really means. If you want a definition of incarnation, don’t look in a theological dictionary – read this book.”
Samuel Wells, Vicar, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
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