The Suburbs

The Suburbs have been on my mind a lot. I listened to Garrison Keillor read a story about his first kiss, hanging out with a young girl on fresh cut grass. Keillor noted that men spend endless time manicuring grass that boys enjoy. The Arcade Fire album The Suburbs, seems constantly victim of projection by former suburbanite indie lemmings. They crave an indictment of suburban life so they can sign the warrant and declare themselves severed from the sanitary environment of their youth that threatens their urban credibility (sorry kids, there is some subtle romanticism in the album).

I had a friend recently ask me if intentional living and mission could be done in the Suburbs? Urban gentrification is the new white flight. Yuppies are moving into neighborhoods (we might be part of the problem) of lower income, saving some money, all the while displacing the culture which preceded. In our city its happening on the southwest side.

And so goes the church. We want to "reach the city." Therefore, we often hate the suburbs, which is really a defense mechanism. Might we reveal that we grew up without a coming of age story, but a story of a picture book? So the young idealists, like myself, would say, "NO, you can't do mission in the Suburbs!!!"

The truth is far more complicated. Here is a great quote from Richard Lovelace's Dynamics of Spiritual Life

the American straight culture, with its characteristic pattern of sin--pride, ambition, avarice, envy, self-righteousness, conformity, respectability, was confronted by the Dionysian youth culture, with another distribution of sin...the differing centers of gravity in the sin of two cultures permitted a complimentary distribution of virtues so that the two could be prophetic toward one another. When straight Americans began to upbraid the hippies for their disorder and licentiousness, they found themselves confronted by prophets from Gomorrah who lashed out at their materialism and their subservience to the child-devouring Molocha of the capitalist-success system.

When you move into the city to transform it through missional living, you choose to integrate yourself with the market, the people, the lifestyle. As a Christian, a resident alien, you choose to reject the sinful zeitgeist of the world you reside in but are not a citizen of. We live in a neighborhood whose sin is a sense of hostility and privacy. Guard dogs, no trespassing signs, and a general grimace from porch sitters. We choose to subvert and transform this culture, not accept it and that is not easy. Privacy is one of the few luxuries people can afford here and we choose not to indulge in it.

So suburban mission, can it be done? Yes, but the zeitgeist must be rejected. The counter culture asks the question, "what is the normalcy dominating here and what is suspect about it?" The counter culture for a Christian is Romans 12, to not conform to the ways of this world. Living in the 'burbs is not a bad thing. The problem is, a lot of Christians make mission fields out of places with wonderful tertiary benefits and convince themselves they are reaching a corner of the turf of the Great Commission, but they are really justifying a lifestyle of indulgence. We are citizens of another world, so if we blend well, we might want to inspect our passports. Fitting into anywhere as a Christian is a bit suspicious, suburbs included. Just like the city and the country, we are there to serve our master and resist the sin...which in some places means avoiding anger and privacy...for others, its the manicured lawn and materialistic carousel.