There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” These now-iconic words defined Dorothy Gale’s ultimate quest in The Wizard of Oz.
In every song and with everyone she met, Dorothy articulated her heart’s desire to return to a place of familiarity, love, and belonging.
We all long for a place to call home. We yearn for what the prophet Isaiah saw, a future where people live in “peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest” (Isa. 32:18). This sense of home involves more than just a physical location. These peaceful dwelling places are also the relationships that stabilize, the communities that shape, and the structures that speak to who we long to be. While we yearn for places that satisfy our core need to belong, the global reality of displacement often keeps literal home and safety out of reach.
All of us can ask: How can we experience God in the tension of our earthly places and our heavenly home? What do we do if our current places actually detract from a more magnificent vision of our eternal home to come? You hold in your hands an issue that wrestles with these questions.
At Christianity Today, we are navigating the balance between earthly displacement and the promise of our ultimate home with Christ. We are pilgrims on the way. We embrace this in-between space through stories and ideas that elevate the kingdom of God, whose fulfillment and shalom we so desperately desire now.
With your continued support, we will not only learn to thrive as sojourners and pilgrims for our time here but also raise a new generation with the necessary resilience to find home wherever God’s presence may lead them.
Through The Next Gen Initiative, which is part of The One Kingdom Campaign, CT partners are helping us equip and inspire the next generation of the church with a compelling vision of what it looks like to follow Jesus. Together, we’re also creating a sense of home, a place to belong in a world that often divides and isolates.
There is an urgent cry for the church to redeem and reclaim the places and spaces around us. Like Dorothy, we can find ourselves following yellow brick roads, wondering if we’ll ever reach the answers we seek. But with Jesus as our focal point, we can walk together in our communal calling until we arrive at the place Christ has already prepared: our divine home in glory.
Nicole Massie Martin is chief operating officer at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "No Place Like Home".
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