Travis Norvell had been a pastor for many years when one winter day in Minnesota a decade ago the heater in his old Volkswagen decided to give up the ghost. He had been pondering a question posed by his daughter, who asked innocently about a sermon he gave in which he had asked his congregation what they were willing to give up to serve others. His daughter wanted to know what he would give up.

And in a flash, there it was. He would give up his car.

The pastor didn’t realize until many months later how profound his decision would be. Giving up his car to serve others ended up being a fundamental pivot point for his career as leader at the Judson Church, a Minneapolis neighborhood church whose congregation peaked during WWII at 1,200 members, but had since declined to 250 members with only 110 regularly attending services on Sundays.

His wife and kids kept the other family car, but to fulfill his commitment Norvell found himself taking buses, riding his bike, getting rides with congregation members, and walking in the neighborhood—instead of driving by himself in his car.

He began to see his church, the streets, and neighborhoods around it, and, in fact, the people of his community in a brand new light. In his book due out March 15, Church on the Move: A Practical Guide for Ministry in the Community, Norvell writes about how getting out of his car opened his eyes to solving a pernicious problem.

Throughout my twenty years of being a pastor, I have focused on the problem: The Church is dying and it is happening on my watch! No matter how clever, spiritual, or original my ideas were, they all focused on the problem. Then I began to see anew that my focus as a pastor was not to solve the problem but to see the blessing. Judson Church’s original orientation was a city-neighborhood church—walkable, bikeable, public transit-able; that was its original blessing. It is my job as pastor in this parish to find God already at work within it and discover ways for Judson to partner with others to lift up the original blessing as it lived in the 2020s.

If you have ever tried to do public outreach as an elected official, community builder, teacher, or church leader—or perhaps as a Strong Towns member and Local Conversations leader—then this book is for you. It doesn’t matter if you follow a traditional spiritual practice or if you’re nonreligious, this is 85 pages of perfect advice organized along Strong Towns themes. It’s a primer for transforming your community to be a healthier, more resilient, and better-connected place: a Strong Town.

“The publisher asked (me to write this book) for multiple audiences,” Norvel wrote to me in a recent email. “(T)he main audience is pastors and engaged lay leaders of faith communities. But I had in mind also people involved in urban planning, placemaking, and transit advocates.”

Norvell has come to be known as the “Pedalling Pastor,” since he recently began a very popular collaboration with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). In the segment, he works with other non-motorized commuters to present a sidewalk and trails report to walkers and bicyclists for MPR’s Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer each weekday morning. It has become enormously popular and has served to focus attention on the ways we can change our communities to be less car dependent and more people oriented.

Since people in North America began moving out to the suburbs after World War II, the transformation of our cities and urban areas has created countless cultural changes, as well—much of it to our detriment, and maybe the most harmful (and immeasurable) impact being the many walls that have gone up between us.

I don’t mean the physical ones like you might find in a gated community or along some parts of the border with Mexico. I mean the cultural, socioeconomic, and lifestyle walls precipitated by the Suburban Experiment. A lot of us can drive out of a garage, pick up lunch at the drive-through, open a locker at the superstore and get out our grocery bags (packed from an online order by a store employee), then wait in a car line to pick up our children from school. We can drive back into the very same garage we left with not so much as 25 words spoken to anyone outside our family.

If you lack the means for this lifestyle—or don’t choose it—you’re still separated from neighbors by thousands of invisible walls. I can stand in line at the Post Office and not say a word to the 14 people in line with me for 15 minutes. It’s easy. We just don’t interact like we used to 100 years ago.

If you are a church leader or an elected official trying to parse your way into the fears and hopes of a community through social media or other attempts to bring people to you, you will struggle, Norvell argues in his book. The answer is to bring your meeting to the people.

A prominent and long-serving leader of Judson Church before Norvell tried for decades to compete with growing suburban congregations by seeking out land in the neighborhood to construct a large parking lot. If people only had a place to park, they would flock to the old city neighborhood church, he argued. For his last sermon as leader of the church, the elder reverend told the congregation “the essence of their future hung one one word. That word was PARKING.”

He argued that if only Judson could acquire enough space for parking, then folks would drive in for miles around and easily park, and the church’s future would be secured.” Two very successful churches nearby had parking, but Norvell decided to see that lack of parking at Judson as a blessing instead of a problem. After all, he told himself, Christian churches like his flourished for 1,900 years before parking lots ever existed. The need for parking lots came about only after members moved to the suburbs, away from his city-neighborhood church and into an auto-centric lifestyle.

“Before they drove and parked,” Norvell writes, “most congregations walked, biked, or took public transit to church.”

A property next to Judson became available at one point and the congregation considered buying it to convert it to a parking lot, but they realized they would need to buy and tear down eight similar units of housing to accommodate just Sunday school attendance: a non-starter.

Norvell suggests transforming existing parking spaces into plazas, hosting Saturday farmer’s markets, impromptu wood-fired pizza parties, or pop-up play spaces for local children.

He took his ministry to a local coffee shop, where he held weekly meetings asking folks in the neighborhood questions about their needs, the fears, their hopes, and also about their perception of Judson Church. He discovered people didn’t know much about the building which had been there 100 years. Norvell felt the cultural barriers between him and the community begin to fall away, and he credits these revelations to getting out of his car.

He noticed people in their backyards, folks who wouldn’t answer a front door bell, and he struck up conversations. He had deep conversations about fundamental questions of faith while bumming a ride to church events.

“(W)hen we walk, bicycle, and travel on public transit, we become more hopeful and more trusting of others because we engage with them face-to-face and see them at a ‘human speed’…we tend to trust more,” Norvell writes.

Observing humbly how people struggle, is the first step in the Strong Towns approach to public investments. Norvell shares this playbook and even quotes writings in the book from Strong Towns staff, including Charles Marohn, Daniel Herriges, and John Pattison.

*Travis Norvell, aka the Pedalling Pastor. (Source:* *The Pedalling Pastor*.)

During winter these days, Norvell rides a fat-tire bike outfitted with studs and pogies (oversized mittens attached to the bars of your bike).

“I was reluctant to get one because when we first moved here I took my daughter to a park and a dude was riding a fat tire bike; he was drunk, wearing cut-off shorts and cursing at everyone,” Norvell told me in an email. “In my mind I said, ‘everyone who rides a fat bike is a jackass.’ Then I tried a fat bike out and loved it.”

Norvell’s career as the Pedaling Pastor is taking off. He will be presenting at the upcoming National Bike Summit on the intersection of faith communities and bicycle advocacy. One of the most important bits of advice Norvell has for people doing the work of transforming deeply seated systems is to have fun.

“Fun is primary,” he told me in an email. “I always ask people to compare the faces of drivers and the faces of bicyclists. The only time I have ever seen a person riding a bike with a scowl on their face was a couple of years ago. Lori, my wife, said, ‘I think they have to go to the bathroom.’ If change is nothing but pain and suffering, then who wants that? But if it can be some pain and suffering partnered with lots of fun, then the odds of change happening are better. Plus there is so much gloom and suffering right now in our world, any avenue of fun or joy seems like a gift from beyond.”

At many points during my reading of Church on the Move, I substituted the words work, school, doctor’s office, restaurant, etc. for “church.” It’s easy to see a broader Strong Towns vision in Pastor Norvell’s mission. Whether you plan to revive a church or start a Local Conversation with other Strong Towns members about eliminating parking minimums or fixing a dangerous stroad, you will find guidance, wit, and passion from the Pedalling Pastor of Minneapolis.

The Pedalling Pastor

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