This has been a topic floating in my mind for the past five years. Christians talk often about rebuilding the city or reclaiming a simple country life, but for the most part, we seem to have little good to say about the suburbs or the possibility for the suburbs.
We consider them detached places where people commute to their work, their grocery stores, their lives. They come home, pull their cars into their garages without the inconvenience of greeting neighbors, plant themselves in front of the boob tube or perhaps play with their children for a few minutes in the backyard, which is well protected by privacy fences, go to bed, and restart everything in the mornings.
Suburbs are the places of sameness, of boxed lives. Or so goes Little Boxes, the theme song to Weeds.
The suburbs arose in the 1950s, partly because of the massive and sudden expansion of families post-WWII. Those families needed someplace to go and fast. I also suspect that after the fears and harshness of war, new parents wanted to protect their new children. Can we blame them after what they saw?
So can the suburbs be redeemed?
Some fun facts about the suburb in which I happen to live:
- There’s as much ethnic diversity in this neighborhood than where I lived in downtown Dallas. Some of this is true cultural diversity, meaning immigrants from Asian and South American countries settled in here. Some of it is superficial, which means you may see different color faces, but their backgrounds aren’t much different than mine.
- Though we’d like to think of ourselves as untouched by poverty, that’s simply not true. A local Samaritan Inn, a "comprehensive homeless program that helps willing people gain dignity and independence," filled up with residents from my city. They’re building a new one closer a few miles from my house. There are also two orphanages (that I know of), where the residents come mostly from either abusive homes or homes where their parents didn’t have the means to provide for them anymore.
- I can get to a local farmer’s market in five minutes and a local dairy farm (for unpasteurized milk, fresh butter, cheese, and yogurt, and eggs) in ten minutes.
- About two miles from my house is a lot with lamas and alpacas. Next to that is a field that looks like it’s been recently tilled to handle some sort of crop. (Confession: the people who own this field may have been growing plants since I’ve lived here. For some reason, I’ve only recently noticed it. Ah, yes, the powers of observation run strong in my family.)
- Several people have vegetable gardens. In some ways, I taste the juxtoposition of the garden and the city in the end of Revelation in these gardens.
- The downtown area of my suburbian city (about 5 minutes from my home) has an art gallery and a theater (as well as some fun restaurants). Neither of these are cutting edge. But they represent local art.
- We do have public transportation, but I admit, I rarely use it. Nor do I walk or ride a bike to the grocery store or to run other errands. So, yes, I’m more concerned with my own convenience, even in my 5-mile radius. Especially in the Texas heat.
All this to say that perhaps the suburbs aren’t as bad as I initially thought when I moved here six years ago. Or at least this particular one isn’t. This is not to say that the problems don’t exist. I don’t know many of my neighbors well. But I’ve built my life in this five-mile radius. (For Chris, he goes a little further for work, although not much further.) I guess to move forward, I want to play with the idea that God can redeem the suburbs. We don’t all have to move back to the city or to the country (an impossible idea, anyway).
Though Revelation doesn’t specifically mention suburbs (because they didn’t exist at the time of writing; for that matter "city" was an entirely different idea to John, the writer of Revelation), I believe we can still look toward God’s future for us to get an idea of how we can redeem the suburbs.
Which I’ll have to do on another day.
Thoughts?
Our town of 20,000 is too small for suburbs, but I’ve lived there before. For me the problem was the lack of community that sometimes happens in suburbs. I simply didn’t know my neighbors. I didn’t know the local businesses and restaurants. If we ate out, we ate at franchises. If we shopped, we shopped at Walmart. We lived in a community of brands.
On the other hand, I think we could have engaged better in our suburb than we did. We did have work and church communities, but never that sense of holistic community that we have now.
It’s a bit rambling, but those are my thoughts.
I agree–it’s all about choices. We actually have several great non-franchise restaurants about three blocks from our house, and more in the downtown area of our suburb. I also notice that while I haven’t had a community in our neighborhood (aside from a couple of people), running/walking outside in the neighborhood rather than going to the gym or somewhere else is helping. I’m starting to see the same people, and stopping to chat with them is a great excuse to give me a break! I think in the suburbs, it can be harder to build this community (depending on the neighborhood–I have friends who regularly have cookouts with their neighbors), but if we work at it, it’s a great opportunity to break down some of the problems–such as loneliness–that come with suburban living.
I live in the suburbs outside Los Angeles, in a cookie cutter house which looks like all the cookie cutter houses around me. Yeah, sometimes I wish I lived somewhere more trendy like N.Y., where you can walk everywhere and creativity is as loud as the traffic. But most of the time I’m overjoyed to be in the house where my wife and I are learning to navigate the long road of family, and the house where the soundtrack of my kids laughter fills the air. Sometimes when I’m jogging through suburbia I think of this Coldplay song that I love called “Swallowed in the Sea”, One line in particular,
‘The streets You’re walking on, a thousand houses long, well that’s where I belong, and you belong with me’
Yeah, this is where I belong.
I think that is what I’m coming to. I’d love to live somewhere more creative and trendy, but this is where I live. This is where we’re building a family, where we work, where we eat, where we live. I should be more concerned with how to serve God’s kingdom here than I should be with escaping it (ironic since most people accuse suburbians of trying to escape).