Seeding Christianity and Growing Urban Sociality: Church-Based Community Gardening in Inner-Urban Sydney

This paper investigates the significance of an urban nature project – a community garden - in how one Christian parish in inner Sydney, Australia responds to their rapidly changing social and political context of secularisation and gentrification. The project is part of a broader ethnography with community gardens and bush regeneration groups in inner-urban Sydney that explores the expanding and changing notions of the social – particularly relating to religion, spirituality, and meaning making - in the Anthropocene. I draw upon the work of both Burchardt on ‘infrastructuring religion’ and Bennett on ‘vital materiality’ to reflect upon the ways in which the materiality of the garden and practices undertaken within it were (or were not) productive of urban religious and political life, and the efficacy of the parish’s efforts to use the community garden to maintain their salience to their urban neighbourhood in a context of rapid religious decline.