Check out a good book: Death by Suburb: How to keep the suburbs from killing your soul.. by Dave Goetz. Fantastic take on spirituality in the suburbs.

"Walmartization of Christianity"?? Go ahead and pick on Walmart - it's an easy target. Walmart succeeds because they give people what they want for as cheap as possible.

The suburbs are all about OWNING: my roof, my car, my shrubbery, my riding lawnmower, my multimedia entertainment center. You know where your property line is, and woe be to anyone who challenges it.

Christianity should be about YIELDING: giving my life/thoughts/will/money to the Lord. We are encouraged to meet together, lift each other up, gather with (at least) 2 or 3, iron sharpening iron.

It's not Christianity that is being "walmartized", it's the age-old problem of selfishness. Now the problem is compounded by affluence. There are no easy answers to bring community back to the neighborhoods and churches. It has to be worked on one heart at a time.

Um, Mr. Fitch, this a pretty big brush you're painting with, and t'ah, maybe you should take a road trip around the country. Visit other churches incognito, yak it up with the locals, get a feel for what other communities are doing.

Cause I just don't see the same problem.
We do have problems, but not those, and I live in the burbs, middle class, hard working, 40+ hours a week; And we still have church socials, dinners and lunches with friends, family. Chit chat with neighbors about lawn work, new constructions going on in the neighborhood, complaining about the young kids and their loud car stereos.
I don't, brother, just don't have the same problems.

Thanks for these insights David. Indeed we must swim against the tide--a tide that is strong in suburbia.

Yesterday I read an article in the Chicago Tribune called: "Finding your soul in the suburbs." Great article highlighting Dave Goetz, author of "Death by suburb," who seems equally concerned about the challenge of following Jesus in suburbia.

Check out his website:
http://www.deathbysuburb.net/

You are fortunate, Brother Sheerahkahn. I am a neighbor to the Northwest of Pastor Fitch and I would agree, especially as you move from quarter acre lots to 5 acre lots to country estates this issue is increasingly pronounced. But after awhile privacy and seclusion leads to loneliness. The cure is a hospitality we too often reserve for our Christian friends but need to extend to the lost and longing around us. They will come into our homes long before they enter our churches!

As someone who works regularly with land use planners, goes to seminars on planning, and helps develop buildings (primarily condominiums, but other things as well), I have read widely on different fashions in planning and land use. "Dump on the suburbs" is merely one of many passing fads. The "badness" of suburbs is highly overrated, but has now assumed mythic status (as in "urban myth"; not true, but believed by many anyway).

So, no, I don't see suburbs as being a particularly bad or irredeemable form of development, or inherently leading to bad social structures. Like Sheerakhan above, I just don't have the same problems in my suburb. Families here walk to school, walk to local small stores, including grocery and hardware stores (but drive to Walmart or Home Depot for some things), they look after each others kids, socialize together, help each other, invite each other to meals, have coffee regularly, get invited to church, etc.

Although "Owning" is a problem, it is a problem for everyone, everywhere, and not just in suburbs (so I only partially agree with MarcV). Greed and owning and acquisitiveness happens a lot in condominiums and apartments, too.

Bottom line, suburbs have both good and bad aspects and are not better or worse than other types of developments; just different. Other forms of development also have their own pluses and minuses. Single-ing out a particular form (e.g., suburbs) as the "worst" or as "particularly bad" is unhelpful because, not only is that assertion wrong, it diverts attention from issues that are more deserving and significant (such as, why is one not socializing with one's unsaved neighbours?--suburbia is not a particularly hard barrier to overcome, if it is even one at all).

regards,
John I.

There is a growing movement in some cities to redevelop the areas that have long since been forgotten by many people. As a result, there is are many young urban professionals that are opting to live in the city rather than in the burbs. It is like bringing a Madison Avenue lifestyle to cities that had not previously known anything like it. It will be interesting to see if this movements grows large enough to cause a backlash against the flight out of the cities that have caused churches to back their suitcases and follow suit. Many mega-churches have been propped up by this flght out of cities.

I don't get the Wal-Mart comment either. Truth be told Wal-Mart is one of the best things to happen to the poor!
But absolutely right on in other regards. As Derek Webb puts it in his song “Rich Young Ruler”, we have moved out of Jesus neighborhood. Some churches are so far removed from “the least of these” they need to get creative to figure out how to get engaged.

Two interesting items:

(1) Philip Langdon notes in his book, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb, that “more than three-fourth of the American people live in metropolitan areas, and more than two-thirds of those live in suburbs.”

(2) In his book, The People’s Religion, George Gallup Jr. reports that his studies and polls reveal that Americans are among the loneliest people in the world.

One biblical mandate (which covers the suburban badlands):

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” --Matthew 28:19-20

Note: I live in the suburbs of Philly, which can be a pretty brutal place.

Having lived in various suburbs, I would guess that the previous commentors' dichotomy is based on whether the suburub has lots of kids.

In a neighborhood with lots of kids, the kids are often in each others' homes, which leads to the adults being in each others' homes. With kids, you have an excuse to not clean house before company arrives, and an excuse to visit.

So in my mind Mr. Fitch's "suburb problem" is really a "neighborhood without kids" problem.

Is it really news that the growing crowd that is too busy with whatever-in-life for children is also too busy for much discipleship or evangelism?

The word hospitality simply means love to strangers or kindness to guests. The suburbs are not the challenge nearly as much as our hearts. I live in the suburbs and know nearly every person on my street. I have sent food when they were sick, eaten meals with them and recently when one lost their 22 month old child to cancer I arranged 30 guys from my church to finish a restoration project on their house. Why? Jesus wants these people to know He loves them. Evangelism is telling people that God loves them and then volunteering to prove it. Hospitality is a tool we use in proving God really does care. When we get that as a core value for how we live there are very few fences or doors that keep us out. A pastor friend of mine once told me that there is no door you cannot get through if you are willing to stoop, bend or crawl.

I will admit suburb living does distract people to the point of not showing the kindness of God to others. But the real issue lies within our hearts as I bet people who move from the city to the burbs probably didn’t share God’s grace much in the city either. Thanks for a thought provoking post.

As a writer and someone who grew up in the epitome of a classic suburban neighborhood (master planned community), the 'burbs represent the worst of homogenized culture. As a Christian, that's equally troublesome because it's a constant challenge to not be conformed to this world.

The challenge of a Christian in the suburbs is to engage the community and become a leader. If not, the enemy is happy to step in and fill that void, where conforming to a consumer worldview becomes all too easy. When that happens, just try and raise children who fear God; the odds are no longer in the parents' favor.

Also, I disagree that the suburb was developed to idolize the family. There is more than one theory available to explain the development of the suburb. The development is much more complex that acknowledged by McCarthy, and I would consider his theory to be one of the weakest.

As for "After decades of this suburban lifestyle America is left with families split by divorce, kids leaving in rebellion, and millions on various drugs to relieve the emptiness as the idolized family turns out to be a myth." Suburbs existed before rates of divorce and rebellion skyrocketed, and currently the rates of divorce, rebellion, drug use, etc. is fairly consistent across all forms of residential development (urban, suburban, and--increasingly--rural). The causes of those issue are multiple, and linked, and have very little to do with the physical form of "suburbia". One need only do a little non-academic reflection to realize the vacuity of McCarthy's fashionable theory: rural farm life has to be the epitome of large lot isolated residential development. Yet many rural areas have fantastic levels of close community. It is because of social and religious factors that are unrelated to the physical form of development. On the other hand, condominiums and apartments keep people in very close quarters but are almost universally acknowledged as being extremely isolating.

Although McCarthy (a theologian)is correct to identify the fact that marriage and sex need to be embedded in community, he is outside his area of expertise when he delves into issues of the physical form of development and the relationship of that to social structures.

Over a lifetime of living in suburbs I agree that whether we practice regular "hospitality," getting to know, help, and support our neighbors, is dependent on either the presence of kids who drag us into interaction with each other and provide a common ground for activity and conversation, or of some very outgoing neighbor who fills the same function.

The truth is, suburbs or not, we do very little socializing in our homes nowadays, preferring our privacy except for occasional well-orchestrated parties and get-togethers that show off our stuff and our decorating and organizational skills.

It's so much easier and less risky to meet casually, with no commitment, in a restaurant or Starbucks, quit when we want, renege if we don't feel like it. And then we wonder why we are lonely or don't have the kind of friends we had in college when we were in each other's lives all day (and all night).

Swimming is difficult to do for any significant duration. It is much more difficult to swim against a prevailing current.

We, as men and women, swim in whatever culture we find ourselves. Our tendency is to simply drift with the current, and to occasionally cry out against the current as we float along.

Far more difficult is the task of, first, recognizing the current (Indeed, it is refreshing and challenging to hear several voices offering a critical assessment of their environments) and, second, to swim against it.

No culture in the world conforms to Christ's ideals for relationship and community with God and neighbor.

Let us, as leaders and innovators in our churches and communities, begin the difficult task of swimming in the direction of love for God and neighbor rather than floating toward further isolation and self-centeredness.

What's that? It sounds too difficult and time-consuming?

Try carrying a Cross.

Suburbs, like any place humans dwell, are filled with those who by nature like their own kind and on the whole prefer their own company. "What if they come to know me and don't like me?" So I guess the suburb, the apartment complex, the condo, the whatever, are all places people hide from others. There are utopian pockets around the place as described by some idealists above, but I think on the whole, to exercise hospitality in the name of Christ ... or for any other reason, is seen as odd and takes time and energy and persistance and prayer before genuine relationships are built ... and then their job transfers them to another state and you start all over again!

We are giving this middle-class suburban intentional mission thing a go here in Perth Western Australia, fun but -crikey - it's tough, for all the reasons outlined in the article above.

City or suburbs, sometimes I think the only people who really meet strangers anymore are the smokers.

This is interesting to me and largely rings true with ONE QUALIFIER - it's true of suburbs in large metropolitan areas.

Having lived in suburban D.C. and Atlanta, this DEFINITELY rings true. But living in suburban Syracuse now (a small and manageable city), it's much less the case. The standard forms of community and hospitality are easily accessed and I regularly have friends over from across town - it only takes them 10-15 minutes to get to my place.

So while it definitely takes effort everywhere to break down the barriers, the suburban problems are seen in exaggerated forms in larger cities, in my experience.