Dave Goetz is president of CZ Marketing (www.czmarketing.com), a brand and strategy firm for the service and nonprofit sectors. He has been an editor at Leadership Journal, and has written for Christianity Today and Christian History magazines. He lives in Wheaton, IL, with his wife and three kids.
In his book Death by Suburb, David writes,
“The SUV in the driveway, the golden retriever with a red bandana romping with two children in the front yard, the Colorado winter vacations, the bumper sticker with MY DAUGHTER IS AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT AT HUBBLE MIDDLE SCHOOL. Those are the dreams of the denizens, like me, of suburbia.”
But, he notes, the environment of the suburbs “weathers one’s soul peculiarly. That is, there is an environmental variable, mostly invisible, that oxidizes the Christian spirit, like the metal of a car in the elements.”
He reflects on the pop artist Jewel, a young woman whose albums have sold millions, who talked several years ago with Rolling Stone magazine about her motivations. She said, “I’m just a person who is honestly trying to live my life and asking, How do you be spiritual and live in the world without going to a monastery?'” Goetz writes,
“Her question rattled around in my brain, for neither can I move to a monastery. I’m stuck in the burbs; I don’t have easy access to nature (that is, enough cash flow to afford a second house in some rural area), to quiet, to a more contemplative life. Something deep within me yearns for a more spacious spiritual consciousness, a more direct connection to the God of the galaxies. How can I draw close to my Creator in a world of endless strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, ubiquitous vans and sport-utility vehicles, and no space for solitude?”
Of course, it is in the suburbs that most new churches are planted. The suburbs are where most of America lives. So how does one address the unique challenges of pastoring and planting in such environments?
Cutting Edge sat down with Goetz to talk about it.
The title of your book is quite provocative: Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs From Killing Your Soul. So a natural question is: are you anti-suburb?
[bctt tweet=”It’s the over-good-life, the extremely good life, which creates the toxicity. – David Goetz” quote=”It’s the over-good-life, the extremely good life, which creates the toxicity.”]
Absolutely not. The thesis of the book is that the environment of a suburb is unique and there are toxins that come with living therebut it’s not because the suburbs are bad, but because they are good. It’s the over-good-life, the extremely good life, which creates the toxicity. The answer is not to leave the suburbs but to stay and figure it out, and find Jesus there.
One of themes you carry throughout the book is what you call the “thicker life.” You contrast it with what the suburbs can become, which is very thin and flat, and lacking dimension. Can you elaborate on what you mean by the “thicker life”?
To me, the thinner life is very one-dimensional in that you organize your life to be concerned only with the values of suburbia: achievement, economic development, and your kids. Just last night a woman commented to me, “I think that the most important thing is my family.” There is no way to argue with people about that. Any person of faith would say, “Yes, that’s very important.” But it can become an idol. Sometimes I ask people, “Why is it so hard to invest in our marriages but so comparatively easy to find hours for carpooling, or driving to Omaha for a son’s traveling-team baseball game?” I think there might be things occurring in those emphases that we might call “immortality symbols.”
When we think about life on this earth, we need to remember than when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God he is not just talking about some sort of merely spiritual thing. He is talking about our physical lives. So the thicker life in my thinking means a life filled with joy, that embraces suffering, that exhibits the fruits of the Spirit. But the pursuit of certain suburban values can rob us of that. I remember a woman who had been videotaping her daughter’s birthday party and, later, as she was watching the video, she realized that she was the only one in the room not enjoying the party! In her pursuit of having the “perfect” party, she had lost the joy of the moment. And that’s a thinner life.
[bctt tweet=”The thicker life is a life in which we are alive to God and to his work in the world. – Dave Goetz” quote=”So the thicker life is a life in which we are alive to God and to his work in the world. “]
Abraham Heschel, a Jewish writer, talked about being able to fully experience the moment you are in-such as that moment of joy in that child’s birthday party. So the thicker life is a life in which we are alive to God and to his work in the world. Of course, that means a life in which we are alive to others. We aren’t just using them to further our own needs, but we are serving them.
There are people who say: “To really make a difference in the world, you’ve got to get into the urban centers and get out of the suburbs.” How would respond to that view?
The Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, in his book Exclusion and Embrace, has a great opening chapter called “Distance and Belonging”. Volf says that in the Old Testament, Abram physically left Ur and then created this new community that becomes Israel. In the New Testament, you still leave but you don’t leave physically. You “leave” internally.
This is a basic issue of faith and culture. Volf says that, as a Christian, you must always leave. Always. You are always moving. You are always on this journey, if not physically then internally. So to say we have to leave the suburbs physically is, I think, incredibly naïve. It implies that there is a higher and lower spirituality, and that higher spirituality folks are the ones who are leaving, usually to some romanticized version of the rural life. One of the people who reviewed the book in Christianity Today critiqued my thesis by arguing that we should spend a lifetime trying to get out of the suburbs. I think that’s an incredibly naïve statement by someone with a utopian idea of rural life.
The journey is one of simultaneously becoming distant from our culture, and at the same time deeply belonging to it in order to serve it. And this cuts against the view that to really serve God is to go into “full-time ministry”. But no longer serving as lawyers or doctors or carpenters is not the gospel. Unless God is specifically taking you elsewhere, you need to settle down and serve him here in the suburbs. And that is really hard work, to incarnate the gospel here.
But the impulse to want to get out of the suburbs is a good impulse?
Yes, because that impulse is a recognition that something is wrong. And that helps us move simultaneously into both greater detachment and a deeper embrace of the place we’re in.
In your book you point out eight “environmental toxins,” as you describe them, and offer eight “spiritual practices” to counter those toxins. Can you give us an example of an environmental toxin and the specific spiritual practice you couple with it?
“I want my neighbor’s life” is one example, the one that I personally struggle with more than any of the others. It’s this invisible, upward pull that starts for middle-class people as soon as they get out of college. Get the starter house, then move up to the next-sized house. Keep an eye on those who have just a little bit more than you do. I’ve noticed it in my own life. In the 1990s we were part of a small group in which everyone was, at that point, at about the same level economically. But as the group aged, you could begin to see an economic hierarchy emerge. And there was an increasing pull to keep a sharp eye on those who had more than we did, and a blind eye to those who had less than we did.
So in this kind of environment, you begin to think, “This is the way the world is.” Getting more money, more stuff, moving up the ladder. And you begin to say, “Why don’t I have these things?” And you begin to think, “I want my neighbor’s life. I want his house, his wife, his yard.” And it’s like giving God the finger. We find ourselves increasingly in a lifestyle of ingratitude, deep discontentment, and destroyed marriages. Now, does this happens everywhere? Of course it does, absolutely. All I am saying is that these sorts of toxins appear to be intensified in our primarily white-collar neighborhoods if, for not other reason, because they are so unrelenting and ubiquitous.
The corresponding practice to the toxic element of “I want my neighbor’s life” is the discipline of finding time to regularly be with people who are different than I amespecially ones who are lower on the economic ladder, not higher. It’s doing an about-face and becoming friends with those who have no immortality symbols.
Churches can unwittingly make this kind of practice difficult because people want to hang out with the people they are most comfortable withand this is especially true at church. So, I think churches could be more thoughtful about diversity.
We start to confront your fears and realize that these are just people. They love God; they have joy and sorrow in their lives. But these kinds of friendships with the poor don’t always fit in with regularly-scheduled church activities. There is rarely anything programmatic that calls you to this sort of thing. So it has to be one of those spiritual disciplines that the great, historical teachers of the church have taught us. Being with people who have less than us is one of the critical spiritual disciplines. But this is very difficult in the suburbs simply because of the way our lives are organized geographically. We have to drive everywhere. We’re not always as exposed to the poor as we could be.
But sometimes it means just looking for small opportunities. There is Muslim family with kids that just moved in right down the road, for a short-term rental of a home that will eventually be torn down. So our older son, who is ten, invited their son over the other night to watch a kids’ movie. He was doing something outside of his comfort zone, and it was important, but nothing terribly dramatic.
Learning an approach to spirituality is a big part of this.
The challenge of Christian spirituality is that there is no formula. People like a list of do’s and don’ts, but in reality it’s a life of following Jesus. True Christian spirituality is never a direct route. So instead, you develop a lifestyle of practices that open you up to God so that you can listen to him in the midst of this crazy world and see what happens. We cannot simply use willpower to control our life and our spirituality. It doesn’t work like that. But ongoing practices can open us up to all kinds of unanticipated things in God.
One of the important themes in the book, I think, is the difference between spiritualities in the first half of our lives and the second half of our lives. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan writer, develops this better than anyone I know. A real challenge in our Protestant tradition is helping people to take the right journey in the second half of their life. The second half of life is often symbolized by great suffering. But once you have gone through suffering, all of a sudden you are ready to hear the good news.
Do we need new churches planted in the suburbs?
Absolutely. These are places that need to hear the Gospel. There is a lot of room for planters who can think creatively, who see the world of suburbia as a missionary would. Very few people try that in the suburbs because they just default to what they know. Worship band, PowerPoint preaching, a four-step system for discipleship.
[bctt tweet=”Missionary training needs to be as rigorous for the suburbs as it is for the foreign mission field. David Goetz” quote=”I think that missionary training needs to be as rigorous for the suburbs as it is for the foreign mission field.”]
How would you encourage people who are thinking about planting in the suburbs?
Look, here is a lot of stuff that has not been done yet. Be creative. Don’t assume that large suburban churches have all the answers. Pick up the heart of what they’re doing. But there are a lot of ways to do creative ministry in the suburbs. Not everything has been tried yet.
Also, don’t quit too soon. It’s supposed to be hard. Don’t be surprised by it. All good things take time, and all good things are hard. We need to learn to stick with it. And continually seek to be creative – even more creative than you are now.
Are you hopeful that authentic Christianity can be expressed in the suburbs?
Yes. There was a book written a couple of years ago called The Millionaire Next Door. It was a study of a sample of millionaires. What the study revealed is that most millionaires don’t dress like millionaires, or drive cars like millionaires. They are people who live next door to you; very ordinary people who have managed to play the game well. It’s counterintuitive. They are not the people driving SUVs or living in huge homes. They live in average homes and drive used cars. It was a stunning analysis.
The principle here is that the people who are living a deeper life are not necessarily the people you think are living a deeper life. It’s very subtle. They are very generous with their time and their money. In an average church, you would never be able to pick them out. For instance, there is a man in our church who is 75 years old with the life inside of a twenty-five year old. He has given enormous amounts of money to help people, but you would never know it. They don’t talk about it; they just do it. They are the models for us.
For additional resources on suburban spirituality, go to www.deathbysuburb.net.
