Posted 487 days ago

Missional in Suburbia?

by Joy Schroeder, Emerging Desert Cohort














Just a few years ago, I could not imagine being asked to contribute to a discussion on the issues and struggles facing suburban missional communities. I would have been completely in the dark concerning such far-out ambiguous ideas. Back then, I was still content within the walls of my evangelical mega-church that was home for twenty-five years. But all that has changed. The quest to find a faith community that embodied more of my best dreams for what church could be became on-going, everyday conversation for me.

Living in exile outside the evangelical mega-church model, I wondered if I’d ever find a place to reconnect to the body of Christ in a literal sense. Where would I find people who had similar experiences and dreams? A more uncomfortable thought for me was, would these people really be any different? And, did I actually want that? After a few months of searching, the web provided a surprising option—the Emerging Desert Cohort (EmDes), an emerging/missional community five miles south of my neighborhood directly in the middle of Suburbia. Who knew?

Birthed out of a conversation between a few friends, EmDes has doubled, or maybe tripled, in size since its inception a year ago, yet has remained deeply rooted, for better or for worse, in the suburbs. EmDes exceeds expectations on many levels; it is casual, hospitable, spiritually challenging, open, and safe. It is refreshing how the presence of such grace makes possible a level of honesty I rarely, if ever, experienced in church before.

Many of us in the community have come to recognize that the art of living missionally in the suburbs is not easily accomplished. Living missionally is our best collective dream, but we are still fleshing out how to actualize it. With so much honest conversation and healing happening every week, it’s taken a while to recognize where our deficits and weak spots exist. In the beginning, I was fearful that the individuals committed to gathering weekly with EmDes would be too different from me in too many ways. However, now I’m more concerned that suburban missional communities, like mine, as exotic as the label may sound, are most often homogenous groups of people that look just like me. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” And I agree

Lack of diversity continues to be problematic for most communities of faith existing in Suburbia. Mega-churches in my neighborhood (and beyond), as well as smaller faith communities, manifest the same issue whether they acknowledge it or not. EmDes is no exception. I am excited to report that we are egalitarian and our gatherings are almost equally male and female, but in terms of age diversity, we are notably lacking those in retirement and older. In addition, the most discouraging thing is that we are less than one percent ethnically mixed. We are predominately white and predominately middle-class, and truthfully, there are no economically poor among us. This composite isn’t intentional; it’s simply the way things are living in the suburbs.

David Fitch at reclaimingthemission.com wrote a brilliant blog entry recently lamenting this issue and trying to explain what may be fueling it:

I think it is fairly well accepted that the emerging movement/ missional movement is populated largely with young white people of both genders. There are older white people like myself involved. And there is say 10 to 20% of the movement populated with various ethnicities. But by and large, the overwhelmingly large proportion of the missional and emerging movements is white and young…
…the emerging church and missional church continue to be stubbornly young and white. Missional church represents the sons and daughters (largely) of evangelicals who are fed up with modernity, its programmed church, its dualistic rationalistic version of salvation, its capitulation to monetary success and the way it has distanced itself from the poor. This group has passed through modernity, free market capitalism as a social doctrine (tied to the fall), and seen its effects upon the church. They do not aspire to the goods inherent here because they have walked through the desolation of it all.¹

What David Fitch writes echoes my own experience in the context of suburban missional community to a T, but it’s not easy to know how to respond to this revelation. Lack of diversity isn’t just a problem for suburban missional/emerging faith communities, it’s innate to suburban living period. The suburbs of metropolitan Phoenix, where I reside, continue to remain largely racially, economically, and even age segregated.

Beyond diversity, I believe there is another obstacle in the way of fully recognizing vibrant suburban missional community and that is proximity, which seems to be inextricably connected to the other. Living in various different suburbs of Phoenix, as most of us in EmDes community do, we are separated from each other for most of the week. EmDes’s web presence exposes us to people living all over the Valley of the Sun who are seeking the type of unique spiritual community we embody. Therefore, many who participate drive up to an hour each way to join us each week. Connecting people living forty-five miles away from each other becomes a logistical nightmare mid-week so the Sunday gathering is often the only touch point for many in our community. How can we truly live missionally as a community when we are separated from those with whom we desire to love and serve as Christ?

These issues are likely redundant and familiar to many who are already active in the suburban missional community at large. Like other communities of faith, EmDes is vibrant and thriving on many levels and certainly hopeful about our future together. Yet, we are unintentionally missing out on what our best dreams for community are simply by the nature of where we are situated geographically and socially. Living missionally is a challenge. Living out authentic missional community in the ‘burbs carries with it unique struggles that will not be easily eliminated. But we can continue to explore our options and enjoy our community and hope that God has a plan for us.

Notes

1. Read David’s whole post here.

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