The Power of the 'burbs

My wife and I have been married nearly 30 years and in that time we've owned five houses.  If you factor in the places we've rented, that's another seven or eight.  Every one has been in the suburbs.  In fact, every time Terry and I have moved, making a choice about where to live, it has been suburbia.

Partly, no doubt, this has been because Terry and I are both products of suburbia, born and raised therein because our parents, too, in making choices about where to live, chose suburbia.  Suburbs are what we know.  Partly, too, it has been a function of the cities where we've lived: not Boston or New York City or Philadelphia, cities where there are a lot of options for living in a downtown neighborhood should you so choose, but Ft. Worth and Austin and Columbia, Missouri, cities where downtown is for working, not living, and the vast majority of housing options are elsewhere.

Whatever the reason, living in the 'burbs has had a significant impact on shaping our lives.  Duh.  Hardly a profound observation but one, now that we're trying to lead more missional lives, we're coming to understand in new ways.  A missional life is also to be an incarnational life, your daily decisions and actions bearing witness to the Good News right where you are...a life necessarily lived in community, in the midst of the people with whom you share your slice of the suburban landscape.  Yet, despite all the marketing developers do to try to paint a particular suburb as a community, life in the suburbs can so easily be an escape from community.  Just walking down the street where I live, it's hard for me to avoid the feeling this is not a community so much as an assemblage of houses, autonomous entities where families just like mine retreat from the demands of middle class life.  I don't know these people; in some cases, I've never even seen these people.  Granted, my family is relatively new to the neighborhood, but I've made little real effort on my own to meet my neighbors.

Truth be told, my neighbors have made little real effort to meet me.  But my guess is that for them, like for me, this isn't the result of a conscious decision to be un-neighborly.  It is, instead, a consequence of lives that take us one place to work or go to school, another place to shop, another place to visit friends, another place (tellingly) to go to church (assuming, of course, that we do church), and yet another place--home--to eat and sleep and do laundry.  It is a consequence of lives full of demands: once we're home, the most neighborliness we can muster is a wave hello across the street.

Living missionally in the 'burbs, therefore, means confronting the power of the 'burbs...a power to define ourselves first and foremost as single families in single family homes, places of privacy and (hopefully) comfort where we can keep the demands of middle class life at bay, if only for awhile...a power that makes any real sense of community, especially as we'd understand it in a Scriptural sense, hard to find.  But if it's in suburbia that we find ourselves, it's in suburbia that we are called to serve the Risen Lord, beginning with
acknowledging that, here, community likely will not arise merely because people live in the same place, but because we have proactively chosen to create it.

I continue to discover that faithfully living a missional life means rethinking some of the most basic realities of daily living--"defamiliarizing" them, as it were.  But that's because missional living must follow from missional thinking, a re-making of how we make sense of the world and our place in it, whether that be downtown, uptown, or in the 'burbs.