When electing which football team to support there is a simple formula to be followed. You either support the team your Dad follows or the local team where you grew up. This is the law of the Medes and Persians.

For me, that meant we were a Liverpool supporting family. It is the team my scouse grandfather followed, my scouse dad and all his scouse siblings followed, and so it was the team we followed in our house too. Given where I mainly grew up was equidistant between three towns all with their own team – Swindon, Reading and Oxford – we didn’t have a specific ‘local team’ so I just stuck with Liverpool. My brother decided to throw local support behind Reading.

For my children, their options are neatly boiled down to either Liverpool or Oldham Athletic. We are not in Manchester so we will not be entertaining any talk of City or Utd in this house! As it happens, we have opted to be supporters of both Liverpool and Oldham. Quite who we would support in an FA cup tie waits to be seen as they haven’t faced each other since Oldham has been our home. But I remember an old family friend telling me that he thought it was good and proper to support your local team. So whilst he was ostensibly a Preston North End fan, he was also an Oxford Utd fan too because they were the local team to which he and his family could go. My brother – having been out the country for some 20 years – decided upon his return to throw support behind his new local team, Marine FC.

There is something important about throwing your lot in with your geographical locale. There is a reason why local football teams, on the verge of going bankrupt, become big news and huge efforts get underway to save them. These clubs are very important for local areas; not just economically, but for their identity, heritage and pride. Just think of the furore when Bury Football Club were about to go under and the effort expended to save it. It was a big deal because locality matters, place matters, identity matters and there is little that more neatly encapsulates it for an area than their football team.

I think something of this lies behind most of the fevered discussions around immigration. If you can get away from the unhelpful cries of marxism, open borders or woolly liberalism on the one side and the similarly unhelpful shrieks of racist, bigot and xenophobe on the other, there is a sensible discussion to be had here between the benefits of mass immigration over and against the costs. And make no mistake, there are without question both benefits and cost. Whilst from a national and economic perspective, the benefits (in my view) vastly outstrip the costs, locally the same cannot so easily be said. In areas of high immigrant population, there are discussions to be had around cultural diversity and enrichment vs local issues, shared cultural assumptions and values, and civic identity. It is all too easy to tell the town whose civic identity and makeup has changed beyond recognition about the national benefits of immigration (which are real) from the comfort of an area whose identity has remained unchanged. Such people reap the benefits of immigration without bearing any of the costs while others bear the costs without so readily reaping as many of the benefits. This is not to give a view on these things, just to highlight that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of local identity and feeling.

Which leads me to my actual point. Churches are, like it or not, geographically bound. The gathering of God’s people happens in a time and place to which this specific people can go and with which they, to some degree, identify. Whether you are a gathered church of people coming into the community or a bounded church of people all living within the community in which you also gather, you meet in a local place. It is also the case that the unbelievers living in the vicinity of where the church gathers will also have a local view of that church. Whether you bus in from outside or you live in that community, local people will form a view of the church which is always present in the community for them because the building in which you meet never goes anywhere. For churches, we underestimate local feeling and identity and our peril.

All of that is to say, whatever kind of church you might be, you need to pay attention to local feeling. You need to have an eye on what the locals think about the local area in which your local church operates. You need to understand local identity, you need to understand local concerns, you need to understand what makes locals tick and you need to then operate in such a way that is most likely to endear you to locals rather than in such ways as will unnecessarily get their backs up. If you want to have any hope of reaching local people you need to think carefully about how local people think and what constitutes local identity.

If even the loss of a local football team can have a catastrophic effect on local morale, it pays for churches to be conscious of local feeling and how locals operate so they can best engage them with the gospel of Jesus Christ.