Tag Archive - suburbs

Suburban Spirituality: Guidance from a Liberation Theology Hermeneutic

June 2, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 4 Comments

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[image source]


I’m going to begin this post by saying, I’m not an expert in liberation theology.  I’ve been drawn to it ever since I lived and served in Guatemala for 3 months in 2001, and I am continually learning from it as I have spent time studying it on various trips to Brazil and Mexico City.  I’ve done my fair share of reading Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff and others, and I’m currently working my way through Ched Myers (large) book, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus.

You might ask yourself, what does a theology that is based in a “preferential option for the poor” have to do with suburban life?

Great question. But I have been drawn to the liberation theology hermeneutic that was taught to me during my time serving with Partners in Hope, Amextra and some of the lectures from professors at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Hermeneutic of Transformation
Based on Romans 12:1-2, the question/challenge becomes for us…what does it look like to offer our lives as sacrifices to God, not conforming to the world, therefore being transformed and renewed in the process? This is the question that many in the Mexican communities I worked with based their work on. The process of being transformed and renewed by God, and therefore helping transform the communities they were a part of by example. There is a lot of praxis to this hermeneutic that I can’t do justice to in one post, but here is my question for us living in the suburbs.

How do we sacrifice our lives to God, in order to be transformed and renewed…while living in the suburbs? What does that look like for your context?

Hermeneutic of Liberation
There are various aspects of this hermeneutic and it often depends on who you read. But what I was taught was the following:

  1. ver (see): to open your eyes…look around you…see the needs, hurts, joys, etc.
  2. juzgar (judge): based on what is seen, then determine (judge) what action must be taken.
  3. actuar (act): to do something…intervene.
  4. celebrar (celebrate): celebrate as a people, community, family.

Living in the suburbs, I wonder if we can use this hermeneutic?

Can we open our eyes to the needs, wants, pains and happiness around us, and not become numb to the consumerism, instant gratification, etc.?

Living in the suburbs, can we judge/determine how we can intervene in the lives of others, based on what we are seeing?

Living in the suburbs, based on what we see, and the judgment we make, are we able to intervene?  Or is suburban life often too comfortable that it is more difficult to itnervene?

Living in the suburbs, can we then celebrate as a community, family, couple for the renewing work and transformation of God in our lives and the lives of those around us?

Conclusion
Like I said in the beginning of this post. I’m not an expert on liberation theology, and I know that just the mention of those words scares many away who have come to equate it more with political movements, and anti-American ideals. But I think that we as Americans, those living in wealth, often with little need, are able to learn from a hermeneutic that has it’s preference in an option for the poor. And I think we can, because though those of us living in the cities and suburbs of America many not be poor financially, but we are poor in many other ways.

We have more in common with those around us than we think, and I think liberation theology has some aspects of its hermeneutic that can be helpful to us as we live in the suburbs…and not just live, but be agents of transformation and renewal through the work of Jesus Christ.

Suburban Spirituality: Don’t Knock the Suburbs

May 27, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

I’ve been reading the blogs of Joe Thorn and Steve McCoy for several years now…but in the midst of so many blogs, I just never kept up with all that they have going on. So just this week John Dyer pointed me toward their collaborative site subtext. And yeah, I know, they launched it almost a year ago. So I’m late to the conversation. But nonetheless, perfect timing considering that my last five posts have been on the topic of the suburbs. This is what they write about subtext:

sub•text is a discussion on the preaching and practice of the gospel in the suburban context. Here on the blog we’re sharing out throughts and experiences of living life and ministering in the ‘burbs. We do some interviews as well.

That being said, I love Joe Thorn’s latest thoughts in his post Love and Hate in Suburbia:

I have said all this before, but it bears repeating: I both love and hate the suburbs – and I think this is healthy and necessary. Finding stuff to love and embrace in one’s culture can be difficult, at least for some. Some are so focused on the present evil and corruption that any good has been pushed beyond their peripheral vision. On the other hand some are so in love with (idolize) their culture they ignore all that is wrong with it.

Right now it’s cool to love the city and loathe the suburbs, but I do not believe this reflects the heart of God. I believe God has a love/hate relationship with this culture. My culture. And I’m working hard to maintain that balance in my own heart.

I needed to read this post, and I’m thankful that Joe posted it, as this is something that I have really been wrestling with. I love his line, “Right now it’s cool to love the city and loathe the suburbs, but I do not believe this reflects the heart of God.” So, so true. Lots of people bashing on the suburbs these days…and always talking about needing to live in the city, in the hip, cool, urban lofts and other areas. Thanks for the reminder Joe.

Stay tuned, cause my next post will look at a hermeneutic for the suburbs. A hermeneutic I learned in the city of Mexico.

Suburban Spirituality: Church Shopping

May 22, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

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[image from wearitdotcom]



When someone says it better than I can, then my philosophy is…let them say it. So the following is a long quote from the article Suburban Spirituality: The land of SUV’s and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn’t have to.

For all of its foibles—which at its worst include lousy preaching, political infighting, self-centeredness, stagnation, a gaggle of special-interest groups—the poky local church (C. S. Lewis referred to the pokey little church in the Four Loves) in suburbia is still the most fertile environment for spiritual development there. Genuine spiritual progress doesn’t happen without a long-term attachment to a poky local church. I’m all for improving the organization of a local church to make it more biblically effective, but the maddening frustration that prompts someone to leave one church for another may be the precise thing that holds great potential for spiritual progress—if one stays. “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote. “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.”

Disillusionment with one’s church, then, is not a reason to leave but a reason to stay and see what God will create in one’s life and in the local church. What I perceive to be my needs—”I need a church with a more biblical preacher who uses specific examples from real life”—may not correspond to my true spiritual needs. Often I am not attuned to my true spiritual needs. Thinking that I know my true needs is arrogant and narcissistic. Staying put as a life practice allows God’s grace to work on the unsanded surfaces of my inner life. Seventeenth-century French Catholic mystic François Fénelon wrote, “Slowly you will learn that all the troubles in your life—your job, your health, your inward failings—are really cures to the poison of your old nature.”

I would add “your church” to his list; that is, all the troubles in one’s church are really cures to the poison of one’s old nature, or, as the Apostle Paul put it in Romans 7, the “sinful nature.” The biggest problem in any church I attend is myself—and my love of self and my penchant to roam when I sense my needs aren’t being met.

Staying put and immersing oneself in the life of a gathered community forces one into eventual conflict with other church members, with church leadership, or with both. Frustration and conflict are the raw materials of spiritual development. All the popular reasons given for shopping for another church are actually spiritual reasons for staying put. They are a means of grace, preventing talk of spirituality from becoming sentimental or philosophical. Biblical spirituality is earthy, face-to-face, and often messy.

Comments?

Suburban Spirituality: What Is Your Mission?

May 20, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

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[image by e453753]



Over the last couple of posts I have looked at the primacy of finances and family as to reasons why people often move to the suburbs. Those are two of the reasons we consider very important as well. And let me remind my readers that suburban life is not the only place this happens…it can happen in urban areas, hipster loft living, etc.

One of the questions my wife and I asked ourselves when we were first married and purchased our first home in the suburban neighborhood Pasadena…was, what is our mission in this neighborhood? Or how could we help transform the community we were living in? When we first moved in we had lofty aspirations, but dual incomes, graduate school, 3 hour work commutes, and a new baby…slowly killed the dreams we had to live more missionally in our community.

What happened? Was our desire for freedom and autonomy battling with our desire for community and service? We don’t know. But we hope to continue to learn, ask questions, and experiment with how to have more of a mission for our neighborhood and community that we settle down in.

In an Out of Ur blog post from April of 2006, The Brutal Burbs: how the suburban lifestyle undermines our mission, the writer quotes Matzko McCarthy from his book, Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household.

The dream of the suburbs is a self-sufficient home, inhabited by affable kin and grace with plenty of yard to provide a buffer between neighbors. The aim of suburban life is to choose a home and neighborhood where we can be happy, where people work hard and respect the ways of others, and where families get along on their own and come together for recreation and leisure….The great pleasure of home ownership is freedom and autonomy.

So as you think about moving, where to settle down, or thinking about life where you currently live…my question for you would be:

Do you and your family have a mission for your neighborhood and community? What is it?

David Fitch finishes his blog post by saying the following:

… evangelical Christians must consistently invite our neighbors into our homes for dinner, sitting around laughing, talking, listening and asking questions of each other. The home is where we live, where we converse and settle conflict, where we raise children. We arrange our furniture and set forth our priorities in the home. We pray for each other there. We share hospitality out of His blessings there. In our homes then, strangers get full view of the message of our life. Inviting someone into our home for dinner says “here, take a look, I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” By inviting strangers over for dinner, we resist the fragmenting isolating forces of late capitalism in America. It is so exceedingly rare, that just doing it speaks volumes as to what it means to be a Christian in a world of strangers.

Suburban Spirituality: Church Before Family

May 18, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 14 Comments

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[image by Pink Sherbert]



I mentioned earlier last week that my wife and I are thinking through where we want to move in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex when our lease is up in August.  And I stated that as we contemplate this move all sorts of questions have arisen in our mind (stewardship, finances, mission, family, vocation, etc.)…put those all in the mix and they will help determine where we want to settle down.

On Thursday I took a look at the issue of financial stewardship as a reason for why people often make a move to the suburbs.  For all the jokes and criticism suburban life gets, there are legit reasons why families move there and often finances is one of the top reasons. That’s one of the reasons why we are possibly thinking about settling down there.

Another reason for why families often make the transition to the suburbs is because of family. They are trying to keep the family life intact, and hoping that life in the suburbs can guarantee that with its good schools, convenient ball fields, central shopping and lots of churches to choose from…family life will remain central.

That seems like a great thing…so you might be surprised to find critiques regarding that value. As a Marriage and Family Therapist, family life is obviously very important to my work, and what I believe as important. That’s why I struggled with my reading through the really great book, Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options by Rodney Clapp.  He says this:

In the postmodern world the market and its ways have swallowed our lives whole, so that living in genuinely Christian family is almost a lost art.  Recovering the purpose of Christian family, on the distinctive terms of the Christian story, requires two declarations–one negative and one positive.

The negative declaration: The famly is not God’s most important institution on earth.  The family is not the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians.  The family is not the primary vehicle of God’s grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.

And the positive declaration: The church is God’s most important institution on earth.  The church is the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians.  And the church is the primary vehicle of God’s grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.  Putting the church first, of course, runs counter to the interpretation of many evangelical traditionalists.  They put the biological family first.  They emphatically place family at the center of God’s purposes and work on behalf of the world…..

Yet, we cannot put Jesus first and still put family first. (pp. 67-68)

So as my family and I ponder our move, one of the questions we have been asking ourselves is, “Is our desire for a certain way of family life taken the primary importance of God’s mission or call on our lives?

What do you think about what Clapp says?

How do you wrestle between call and family in your own life, and where you choose to live?

Suburban Spirituality: Being a Good Steward of Your Finances

May 14, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 6 Comments

After college and their roaring 20s, many Americans find themselves in a subdivision with a lawn and a mortgage and a couple kids. Hip twentysomethings may mock the suburbs and its bourgeois values, but when their first child arrives the nesting instinct sets in. A neighbor and her husband lived on the north side of Chicago until the kids came; then they moved to a western ‘burb for safety and quiet. “I miss the energy of the city,” she says five years later. “In fact, when we moved to the suburbs, we had a hard time sleeping at night because the neighborhood was so quiet.”

That quote has always caught my eye. When I first read the article I was single…not even dating. At each new reading I have found myself in a new place (dating, engaged, married, parent, changing vocations, etc). So I read that quote with different eyes than before.

I think Goetz is dead on. Many twentysomethings, hipsters, etc. do tend to mock the values of the suburbs. I did a little. I couldn’t stand the cookie cutter houses, the strip mall (you know the one w/a Barnes and Nobles, Starbucks, Macaroni Grill, etc.) that is planted in different places all over the country. Even though I mocked at some points, I grew up in the suburbs. And I loved where I grew up. It was not the kind that has their own built in walking trails, parks and pools, but it was the suburbs nonetheless. Honestly, isn’t anything that is not out in the wild, the suburbs. I mean, can’t you picture the early settlers in the cities mocking those who moved out into the country…or maybe it was vice-versa…mocking those who left the outskirts for the comfort of the city.

Since my post college years I have primarily been living in locations within walking distance to the mountains, oceans, grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants and downtown areas…places like Pasadena and Brentwood. But now my wife and I are living in a leased house in the North part of Dallas, contemplating where we want to settle down. And new questions have arisen for us during this journey.

Let me begin with one question we have been asking:

What does it mean to be a good steward of our finances? Continue Reading…