I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the importance (i.e. necessity) of community to our formation and mission. I just finished up spending a week in Guatemala with Lemonade International. In the evenings we would naturally debrief all the things that happened that day and all the thoughts that were passing through our heads as we struggled with wrapping our minds around the poverty that we were experiencing. At one point our conversation turned to our individualized, isolated society here in North America and how we struggle to really connect with people well. In the midst of this conversation, something interesting happened. Instead of talking about all that we had that the people in the ghetto didn’t, it was flipped. All the sudden we were...Read More →
Category: Suburbia
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July 27, 2011
Normalizing Individualism and Isolation
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December 13, 2010
Missional In Suburbia: Moving On, But Not Moving Out.
For the last few years, my blog has proudly displayed the subtitle “Living Missionally in Suburban America.” I’ve been a big proponent of the fact that we must be thinking intentionally about living missionally in our suburban context. Far too often suburbia has been seen as antithetical to being missional. The assumption seemed to be that if you wanted to be a legit missional voice or person you had to be talking about and living in the city. Now, I get the importance of the city, especially from a cultural standpoint. But the suburbs are home to millions and millions of Christians. We can’t afford to ignore the challenges that they face when it comes to responding to the call of the gospel. A few...Read More →
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August 16, 2010
The Cost of Family Time?
I just wrote a post on our Missional in Suburbia website about how we spend money as family when we are going out in the evenings. Would love to hear your feedback there. Do We Have to Spend Money to Have Fun?
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June 3, 2010
Short Survey on Missional in Suburbia
I’ve stated another blog, resource catalog website that will be focusing on the challenges and opportunities about being missional in suburbia. It’s a joint venture with a friend of mine and I’m excited about. This isn’t going to be a your typical blog but really it will be a place we categorize and collect thoughts, quotes and resources. We’d love to have you participate in the dialog. But even more importantly we’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Could you take 5 minutes to fill out our short survey on being missional in suburbia? If so, you can do so here: http://missionalinsuburbia.com/survey
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May 11, 2010
White Flight? (and the call of the suburban church)
A few friends sent me the link to this article that points out that white, young males are fleeing the suburbs and that, while the burbs still “tilt white…for the first time, a majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas live outside the city. Suburban Asians and Hispanics already had topped 50 percent in 2000, and blacks joined them by 2008, rising from 43 percent in those eight years.” I believe this has major ramifications for how the church in suburbia sees its calling. A year ago as I was taking part in a prayer walk in my local town (Hatboro, PA). In this small suburban town with a main street. On the outskirts of this suburb there is a growing...Read More →
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October 20, 2009
What Story Are You Living? Reflections on Don Miller’s Book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”
Like many others, I read Donald Miller’s book, “Blue Like Jazz” in about three sittings. That’s not only cause it’s an easy read, but mostly because he’s a great story teller. I enjoyed Don’s first book a lot (I can call him Don, after all, like everyone else who reads his book, I feel like I know him). But, I’ll admit I mostly enjoyed Blue Like Jazz, it wasn’t too life changing or transforming for me. But in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he really struck a chord with me. In fact, I was hooked on the first page where he wrote, If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for a few years to get it,...Read More →
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September 2, 2009
On Being Sub-Contextual
Sub-contextual. I am pretty sure I just made that word up. I may have stolen it from someone smarter, but I don’t remember doing so, so I am claiming it as my own. But, I think that’s the best way to describe our church, The Well. You see, we are a church in the heart of suburbia and, well, we aren’t very contextual for this culture. We’re not really very refined. We meet in an ugly warehouse (at least on the outside). We don’t cater to consumer mentality very well (we somehow miss the church-shopper circuit in Bucks County). We don’t have a super polished worship service (though it is awesome) and we certainly don’t have slick bulletins. You see, people who find a home...Read More →
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July 2, 2009
The Suburban Mob: A Year Later
It has been exactly a year since I put some of the most significant lessons that God had taught me in the last few years to words. It was called, “Are You Rioting with the Suburban Mob.” I’ve been reflecting on these thoughts and where we are as a family now, a year later. I can say that we have put some great effort into refocusing our lives and being aware of the culture we are living in and how it is offering a way of life that has some major roadblocks to a distinctly christian life. This has expressed itself in different ways. Some ways we have been successful and other ways have been harder. For example we’ve made great progress on living more...Read More →
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June 26, 2009
Revolutionary Road & Suburbia
Last night my wife and I watched the movie Revolutionary Road. I really didn’t know much about it other than it was a critique on suburbia. Wow, this is a movie that one needs to sit with for a while. Have you see it? What were your reactions to it? I loved the voice of the “mentally ill” friend who called out the suburban bluff. Interesting that he’s the one who is considered “insane.” The movie reminded me of my reactions to coming back to suburbia after being in Zambia last summer in this blog post here.
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May 12, 2009
The Next Steps for The Well
May 12, 2009 Dear Church Family, During our worship gathering on Sunday we took a break from our regular sermon series in order to look back at the early dreams and passions of The Well and to celebrate how God is making these dreams a reality. (You can listen to the audio on the church website here: http://church.thewellpa.com/podcast/the-history-next-steps-for-the-well/) The Well has four foundational values: Discipleship (we are a community of people becoming more and more like Jesus) Justice/Evangelism (we reach out and share the love of Jesus with others, especially those on the fringes of society) Locality (we are locally embedded in our neighborhood, especially through the use of our building) Unity (we are connected to the historical and global Church) On Sunday we focused...Read More →
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April 15, 2009
Bored in Suburbia?
Today Dave Gibbons wrote a post on the topic of Suburbia. He’s a great voice for this kind of stuff and in his post he addresses something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Boredom in suburbia. He writes, “And [suburban teens] are bored. . . this boredom’s outlet is doing something crazy often with activities that would impact their relationship with God and others. The spirit of adventure intrinsic in many youth is wasted in the lifestyle of the burbs, the American dream.” I think he’s right. My 5 year old is already saying he’s bored way too often. I also think he’s onto something we’ve been thinking through at The Well a bit when he writes, “My sense is that the greatest...Read More →
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March 31, 2009
Rethinking the Evils of Suburbia
Mustard Seed Associates invited me to write an article around the topic of Suburbia and the Missional church. Over the last few months I have started to realize that I needed to take a more positive approach to this topic. This article details a little bit of this shift. You can read the article on the MSA website here.
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March 31, 2009
Mustard Seed Associates Sampler on Suburban Missional Church
Mustard Seed Associates just published a series of excellent resources in their April 2009 “Seed Sampler” on the topics of the Suburban and the Rural Missional Church. This is an excellent collection of articles around these two topics. See the entire Sampler here. I am honored to have an article in this sampler that I wrote entitled, “Rethinking the Evils of Suburbia.” This article shares a subtle, but I believe important, shift in my thinking around this topic. I would love to hear your feedback. There are also a number of other excellent articles in the sampler that I have yet to dig into but I am looking forward to reading them. Happy reading!
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February 27, 2009
The Strengths of Suburbia? My #theideacamp session…
This afternoon I am facilitating a discussion at The Idea Camp around the topic of suburbia and them missional. Now, this is a topic that I have written about a lot and spoke about a few times as well. My most significant contribution to those of us that are talking about this topic is the paper I wrote during a seminary class. In that paper you’ll find a fair amount of my thoughts on the challenges that we are faced with as we seek to be faithful churches in a suburban context. In our discussion today however, I am trying to take a new approach to the issue and come at it from a different angle. While I think there is value in looking at...Read More →
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February 19, 2009
Headed to IdeaCamp / Kairos Church in LA
My wife and I are deep in the midst of a move to a new apartment so I am really looking forward to next week where we’ll get out of here and spend a couple of days in Los Angeles from Feb 25 – March 2. We are headed out there mainly for an conference called IdeaCamp which is a really cool looking unconference kind of conference. Here is a short description: The Idea Camp is a FREE, open source hybrid conference designed to help people move from the realm of ideas to implementation…We are gathering some of the most innovative and creative leaders from around the country (this means YOU!) to share ideas, intentionally network, and move collaboratively into idea-making…the focus of this conference...Read More →
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February 2, 2009
The Rule of Benedict and the Suburban Christian
In my recent post on “The Mob” I tried to bring out the idea that we need to always be aware and thinking thinking critically about our way of life. We need to constantly be allowing God, mostly through the scriptures and through prayer, reorient and reconvert our way of life. I believe this is especially true for those of us who live in Suburban America. We live extremely individualized, consumerized, busy and disconnected lives (just to name a few). Without paying attention to our way of life, we’ll more than likely just go about our culture’s default life without even realizing it. With this in mind, I’ve been reading around the topic of the Rule of St. Benedict. I’m curious about the connection between...Read More →
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January 26, 2009
The Mob.
Who do you get when you take a poor person in a slum in Ndola Zambia and give them… a house, a fenced in back yard, a two car garage, cable television with a DVR, two cars for that garage, and a job that pays me well but makes me work 50+ hours a week? You get a person who has just lost all they had going for them: Community and relationships. Sure. They had nothing. But you’ve just replaced nothing with nothing. That’s not much of an improvement if you ask me. Mobs do things that individuals would never do on their own. Individuals in mobs do things that that don’t make much rational sense. Individuals in mobs climb live electric poles and flip...Read More →
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December 26, 2008
Resident Aliens in Suburbia
I’ve been reading Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon over the break. Chapter four is brilliant. This year I have done a lot of thinking about the Church as a counter-cultural community. I think this is always necessary and I’m certain there is a desperate need for those of us in a suburban context to be intentional about re-imagining a life together that is in fact counter-cultural (in the way of Jesus). Of course, we don’t have to re-imagine out of nothing, without any direction. We have the witness of Isreal, Jesus, the disciples, the church and a hope of a New Heavens and New Earth to guide this process (you know, all the stuff found in the Scriptures). I’ve spoken about this...Read More →
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December 8, 2008
Talking About Money in the Church (Part 3)
Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a bit on how I have been talking through 2 Corinthians 8 with our community during our offering time. (You can read the others posts here) The last two time we covered verse 1 and verse 2. This week we get to verse three. Here they are (vs. 1-3) 1 And now, brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. 2 Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. 3 For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability… Verse three made me reflect a bit on how we...Read More →
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December 4, 2008
The Consumerism Mob
I’ve written in the past about things people will do when they are part of mobs that htey would never do while they were alone. Like, say “stomp a defenseless 34-year-old man to death, even for a free TV.” Shane Claiborne captures my heart very well in his recent article on Sojourners. CHeck it out here: Buy Nothing Day as Advent Activism Against the Demon Mammon
