Posted 350 days ago

Rethinking the Evils of Suburbia

by Todd Hiestand, The Well

I pastor a church community in Feasterville. Yes, Feasterville. That’s actually the name of our township. Yep, township. Not town. Not city. Rather, it’s unincorporated Suburbia. We have no mayor, we have no town center, and we really have no identity.

In fact, our town center is the corner of Street Road (yes, that’s really the name) and Bustleton Pike. On that corner, which serves as the center of our community, is a Walgreens, a Ford dealership, the Suburban Diner, and some kind of watch repair shop. My wife and I live about ten minutes away from our church’s meeting place, and I have to drive through three other towns to get there. You might say that we live in Suburbia at its worst.

Many good people, including myself, have been critical of Suburbia for being isolated, individualized, and consumer-driven. We’re critical for the way we hide the poor in low-income apartment complexes and pretend they don’t exist. We’re critical about how we bow to the gods of busyness and comfort. We’re critical about how we are typically more passionate about our television shows than we are issues of Jesus, worship, justice, and the mission of God.

This has been the typical critique of the suburban landscape. I’m a believer that this critique is dead-on accurate. So, you might wonder who would want to live here. You might think there is nothing good that can come out of Suburbia.

That’s why it was so shocking to see the reaction of our homeless friends from Philadelphia when we brought them into our community to share Thanksgiving dinner together. We came over the small hill that leads into the “heart” of Feasterville (keep in mind the heart of Feasterville consists of the aforementioned town center in addition to three fairly ugly strip malls and one of those oversized Brunswick Zone bowling alleys), and these men and women said, “Holy cow! This place is awesome! This is where you live? You are so lucky!”

Those of us from Feasterville looked at each other just dumb-founded. Really? You think this is great? Really? Feasterville? Really?

All of a sudden, we were able to see Suburbia with a whole new set of eyes. Yes, Suburbia is all that we usually describe it as. Yes, it’s a hard place in which to figure out what the heck it means to be “missional.” But it is not totally evil. As our homeless friends noticed, there is so much here that we can be thankful for.

It’s fairly easy to be cynical of Suburbia. But being cynical doesn’t take us very far. Being cynical is actually the easy and cheap thing to do. In the past, when I’ve talked about the challenges of being missional in Suburbia, I’ve found that deconstruction is only so helpful. In fact, complete deconstruction is fairly damaging to any kind of action whatsoever.

Here’s how the conversation usually goes down:

Me: Suburbia is a hard place to be a Christian who cares about a Kingdom agenda.
You: “Yes!”
Me: “We need to radically live different lives.”
You: “Yes!”
Me: “We need to stop bowing to the gods of comfort, individualism, and consumerism and start living more intentionally!”
You: “Yes!”
Us: “Wait, I’ve still got to pay my rent/mortgage, pay off my credit cards. I’ve got kids starting school, and my stress level is through the roof.”
You: “Now what?”
Us: “I’ll think about it tomorrow, “Lost” is on tonight.”

So, where do we go from here? If you are a normal human being, the thought of changing your whole lifestyle at once just doesn’t compute. In fact, if you are like me, you likely get so overwhelmed with the amount that you need to change that you get that “deer in headlights” feeling and before you know it a year has gone by and you are still living the same way.

Since this anti-suburban approach has garnered such little fruit in my life, I’m taking a different approach that our homeless friends from the city taught us. I’m learning to ask myself, “What are the positive aspects of Suburbia, and how can I learn to advance these strengths for the sake of mission?”

After all, any good leader knows that focusing on your weaknesses isn’t the most helpful place to start. It’s far more effective to focus on advancing your strengths and allowing your weaknesses to catch up in due time. Often, when we put all our effort into our weaknesses, we end up losing or forgetting about the strengths that were so valuable.

So, what are the strengths that the suburban world offers? I was leading a seminar on this topic recently and we were lucky to have a city planner as part of our meeting. He pointed out that the biggest gift that people have in Suburbia is housing. I was struck by how right he was. I don’t care if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment or a single-family home in a cul-de-sac with a white picket fence around the yard. The fact is, you have a warm place to lay your head each night and there are millions of people in this world who don’t. So, as much as some of us like to rip the single-family home that promotes individualism and isolation, it is this very home that makes us some of the luckiest people in the world.

So, the question that therefore stands in front of us is this: “How will we take this amazing gift of housing and use it for the sake of the Kingdom?” After all, owning a home is not evil. Owning a home is not sinful. The problem is in when we end up serving this gift rather than letting it serve us.

As good churchgoing Christians, we love to talk about stewardship. It’s about time we stop thinking about stewardship only in terms of our money. And for starters, we need to discover what it means to be good stewards of our homes.

Perhaps the easiest answer lies in rediscovering the simple practice of hospitality. It is in this practice that our greatest strength has the opportunity to meet one of Suburbia’s greatest needs. That need? Isolation.

The fact is, people are longing for community. In most neighborhoods in suburban America (there are exceptions), we have lost our sense of what it means to be a neighbor. But I’m convinced this isn’t because people aren’t longing for it. I believe most people really do want to know their neighbors. But we’ve somehow created a culture where it doesn’t naturally happen anymore. You can blame it on the back porch, television or air conditioning. The simple fact is that most people lack real connection with their neighbors.

I believe that as Christians, we must rediscover the simple practice of hospitality. I believe it is vital to our witness. And, I believe that it is this simple practice that actually allows me to get my mind around what I can practically do to live more intentionally as a witness to the risen Messiah.

It is very natural that my wife and I would want to get to know the parents of our kids’ schoolmates. It is very natural that we would want to get to know the parents of my kids’ little league teammates. It’s about time we simply invite them into our home, fire up the grill, share stories, and love well.

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