Sense Walk

This deck of sensory walking prompts is designed to help ministry leaders and practitioners develop the discipline of attentive presence in the city. Rooted in the conviction that paying attention is a spiritual and pastoral practice, the Sense Walk offers participants a set of sensory prompts — cards organized around sight, sound, smell, touch, and feeling — to unsettle habitual ways of moving through urban neighborhoods.

For your own facilitation, define a neighborhood for participants to walk and modify the framing to suit your learning community’s aims and context. The cards are set up to be printed front/back; with a prompt adapted from Robert Walker’s Art of Noticing one one side, and grounding in Manny Ortiz’s call for pastors to read their communities the way they read Scripture or Rowan Williams’s image of seeing God at work as birdwatching on the back. Participants may keep these business card-sized prompts as a personal reminder to return to this practice of sensory walking.

Participants select a card and follow its instructions as they walk a defined area. Allow 10-20 minutes for participants to follow the instructions on their selected card and become absorbed in the act attention. Allow participants to debrief in pairs, or as a whole group. What do people notice, that they hadn’t attended to before? How do we learn to pay attention to God in the city?