First of all, yes, there is a grand narrative of place in the Bible. What’s more, this grand story of place becomes the controlling narrative that contextualizes all other narratives, missions, and themes that are in the Bible. In other words, God created people to be placemakers. Placemaking is in our human DNA, and it connects imago Dei with the human mission in Genesis 1:26–28. As long as people are people, we will be placemakers

At the risk of sounding circular with my answer, “placemaking” is the making of place. Or, as more than one philosopher has implied, it is the production of place. Naturally, we cannot produce new locations or even adjust old locations. Location cannot be changed by us, only by God. GPS coordinates of place will always be what they are, no matter what’s in the place or how the place is experienced by others.

Placemaking is important for everyone, since we’re all part of a human mission that we all share. But, in this post, I’ll consider why placemaking is especially important for every Christian. The answer to the question gets to the heart of the most basic role that God envisioned behind the creation and continuation of humanity. As one might expect, many elaborations and explanations can and should be listed, but I’ll be brief in this post.

The process that we will follow in The Placial Project (TPP) analyzes each place consciously and intentionally in order to tease out the place’s placiality that lies embedded in its three components. To do this, we will analyze a place according to each of its components (location, locale, and sense of place), with each component being analyzed from four perspectives. While this may not exhaust the full placiality of a place, it certainly is a big step in the right direction.

To highlight how serious we are about the topic, we are claiming that place and placemaking are extremely important, comparable to other, more familiar, biblical categories such as kingdom or Trinity or justification. But unlike these other familiar topics, place and placemaking are actually one of the two grand narratives that the Bible presents to us, its readers. The other grand narrative, of course, is the Bible’s story about human sin and God’s provision of salvation.