Certeau was a thinker of displacement, shifts and multiple trajectories, but, equally, of specific, circumscribed places from which these very displacements and shifts emerged, in which they occurred and became effective. His study of various spiritual paths, but also of marginal, repressed or dissenting realities, nourished his thinking. On the basis of Certeau’s insights, this article inquires into the possible forms and shape, today, of religious communities, including the church, asking how we may rethink them and their effectivity, in a broad social horizon – against a growing, secular eschatology, into which our world is collapsing, of a “seeing all things” and a “seeing everything”.