What keeps the soul of a community alive?

During the funeral services for a member of the congregation I serve, I had a pleasant conversation with L. Martin Sauls III. We talked about the history of his funeral home and life during the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly race relations and the concept of belonging. Perhaps it is strange for a young pastor in his 40s to participate in a conversation largely rooted in historical perspective rather than lived experience.

I shared that my upbringing in rural Warsaw, North Carolina, afforded me a unique perspective on what he described. Raised on a hog and chicken farm, I experienced much of what my grandparents, aunts and uncles talked about.

Life had not changed much, and when change came, we saw it coming.

Still, our conversation drifted back to Bluffton. Something Sauls said reminded me of a book given to me by a member of my church, Mother Mattie: “Back Home Roots: A Missing Chapter in the Story of Pinckney Colony,” by Mary Pinckney Easterling Powell. Mary quotes her father about life in the late 19th and 20th centuries, when people were concerned with “keeping body and soul alive.” Within this community, despite the racial and pedagogical differences that existed in this formerly antebellum retreat area, there remained a divine and sacred understanding called community.

All of this caused me to think existentially: What happened to belonging? This is deeper than nostalgia. It is about comprehending what happens when a place grows faster than people’s capacity to belong. Bluffton was never a racial utopia, and it isn’t one today.

Yet history speaks to the nature of humanity that sought to relate, coexist, work and share life as best it could. It was a communal effort to keep body and soul alive. That necessity produced relationships, dependencies, familiarity and a consciousness of place. People knew who lived down the road. They knew families and histories. They knew who had died, who was sick, whose children belonged to whom and which families had been here for generations.

Today, Bluffton faces an unspoken fragmentation amid rapid growth: the paradox of having more residents with fewer relationships. We have become remarkably successful at building neighborhoods, but amid social displacement and disparities, we have not always been equally successful at building the kind of community we need.

The town of Bluffton identifies affordable housing, infrastructure and the May River among its priorities. We spend enormous amounts of time talking about what Bluffton is building. But are we spending enough time asking what Bluffton is becoming? This isn’t primarily political. It’s cultural. A person can buy a house in Bluffton without knowing Bluffton. A developer can construct a neighborhood without creating community. A town can gain all of the amenities of rapid growth and still lose the stories, relationships and peculiarities that made this place distinctive.

My upbringing in rural Warsaw allows me to recognize something in old Bluffton because I experienced remnants of something similar: a place carried by memory, and that memory created belonging. Our ancestors worried about “keeping body and soul alive.” We are the fruition of dreams they could scarcely have imagined. Bluffton has become increasingly capable of constructing what sustains the body of a growing community: roads, houses, businesses, infrastructure and services.

But what keeps the soul of a community alive? Perhaps it is our willingness to reach across political and ideological boundaries and social and economic differences and intentionally build tangible relationships, not ignoring our differences but refusing to allow them to prevent us from belonging to one another. Community is marked by its past, shaped by its future but ultimately sustained by the people willing to call it home.

Dr. Brandon A. A. J. Davis is the 30th Senior Pastor of Historic Campbell Chapel AME Church, Bluffton, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion at Simmons College, Louisville, KY. He is married, a lover of books, and enjoys a great conversation.