Renewing Cities Through Missional Tribes

by Jon Tyson

What Anna wants to be a part of is an integrated life, a recovering of social capital, but with a missional twist — where her networks and norms and values are infused with the reality of Jesus. As a pastor, I have heard this reaction many times, and it has led me to believe that our culture has undergone such profound shifts in community that another great program to manufacture relationships is not the answer. Perhaps the key lies in the nature of the shifts themselves.

URBAN TRIBES: SHIFTING SOCIAL CAPITAL

Several years after Bowling Alone came out, and several small group programming attempts later, I came across a book that reflected and responded to these ideas in some fresh and insightful ways: Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment by Ethan Watters.⁵ It challenged the assumption that cultural capital would be recovered through official institutions and efforts, and suggested instead, that it may reorganize through unofficial communities he called urban tribes. Watters, a single, never-married San Franciscan observed how this sense of trust, community, and belonging — this social capital — was all around him, but in less formal social networks that were becoming the new superglue of our time.

As Watters surveyed his community and city, he noticed that his was a rich relational world of high social capital, and that his tribe had a deep sense of community. There was a real sense of belonging and desire to help each other in mutually beneficial ways. Although disconnected from the previous generation’s traditional structures and official civic institutions, people were utilizing new technologies, schedules, and freedoms to form organic capital among themselves.

Others are noticing the phenomenon as well. Journalist Howard Fineman highlights the cultural and ethnic dimensions: “As neighborhoods and schools become more diverse, marriages become more mixed, and social hierarchies break down, old lines are getting blurry. Voluntary tribes are a way of re-creating a sense of community.”⁶ So what is an urban tribe? And is this a sociological opportunity for the church to consider?

Urban tribes are the social networks of friends we build in and around cities. They often consist of people who are single well into their twenties and thirties and who form a new kind of family unity that functions like traditional families used to, in terms of support and structure. Each tribe builds its own culture over time, through weekly rituals, shared history, language, insider jokes, weekend trips, and relational support. They screen potential mates, loan each other money, provide housing help, and even start businesses together.

These tribes owe their existence to some of the major shifts that in many ways frame this generation.

Displacement. People are moving from their places of birth to college, then cities, and then other cities to pursue careers in industry centers and rarely resettling in their places of origin.
Freedom. People are getting married later than any generation in American history and have less family responsibility than either parents or grandparents. Their time and resources are primarily for themselves.
Causes. People are aware and concerned about the needs of their world, and the world, like never before. Fineman notes: “More than ‘associations’. . . these [tribes] are emotionally intense affinity groups based on shared aims, obsessions or political crusades, not on DNA.”⁷
Loneliness. This loss of family, displacement, freedom, and need converge to create a hunger for community that is greater than their parents.

Watters explains the intersection of these factors:

We live further away from our kinship networks. We’re not joining community groups…{We are} a group that is freer than any generation I can imagine. Because freedom is a lack of restraints, we don’t often look at what freedom is. We’re free of parenting responsibilities. That means that we have a lot of free time. We’re also free of parental control. There’s a corollary to that parental role. Other advice givers have stepped away from the plate. There aren’t the mentors, priests, bosses, and other strict advice givers. Now they just encourage us and offer support. They had a tough time, so they don’t have a unified front to give us advice. We’re also free of punishment for the consequences of our actions. We’re no longer disciplined by our elders. We have this notion that we’ve gone to the city once to create ourselves, and that we can always go to another city and try again. We also have more dating and relationship options. There’s also no order in which we’re expected to live our lives. Free from general social strife. There’s no shared sense of our being born for some specific purpose.⁸

Anna is the perfect example: free and open, looking to connect, but struggling to make it happen, especially as it relates to church. For those like Anna, a generation suspicious of “official” community, joining your local club or civic group feels more like an act of sheer desperation than a plausible response to the need to belong. That’s why Christian attempts to program community can feel forced at best and coercive at worst.

Our culture offers several examples of the urban tribe in popular media, some of which we even emulate for community. Consider the shows Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and Friends. People from different parts of the country, coming together to form a new family unit, with rituals and taboos and customs and language, all happening organically, unofficially, and in many ways, powerfully (even when we know it’s just TV). These shows highlight overlapping networks, personal values, and the norms in life. Seinfeld was even able to build entire themes and episodes on the minutest details of life’s norms. The people in these shows don’t seem to need anything official to function well together. Indeed, they often reject official structures. Imagine asking Carrie to join a small group at your church, or the cast of Seinfeld to join the Lions Club. You get the point.

It appears that Watters and others have been able to understand and describe one of the primary ways our culture is reforming in light of recent cultural fragmentation. These tribes seem to transcend class, race, past, and experience and have a unique ability to weave life together in such a way that social capital is powerfully released. Urban tribes may be the new glue and WD-40 of our time.

As a pastor working with literally hundreds of these late to marry, twenty and thirty something’s, I have found these tribal observations to be true. There is a deep loneliness and longing to belong, but informally, and in ways the church has not traditionally offered. And it makes me wonder: what if we could harness these tribes into some sort of missional movements in the city? What if tribes not only connected, but also served, and helped generate capital through our cities and networks? What if the key to recovering social capital wasn’t through official cultural institutions, or church programs, but by calling people to a new vision of community through the medium of the urban tribe?

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Comments

Andrea McCourtney

I am a young adult recently graduated with a major in Anthropology and Counseling. I spent my time at school studying African tribe’s and animistic religious belief systems costumes, values, and art, that I might understand them in making the gospel relevant to their lives. While living in America and seeing the shift in generational values and the churches disconnect with our age group, it is unbelievably refreshing to hear someone approaching our generation anthropologically! We should get to know our generation, like the love of our life we have been waiting for. How she thinks, what she feels, what she needs and how she sees the world! She is Christ’s love, and by extension, Ours. Thanks for the site, and yall’s passion.

Chris Hadsell

This is a really compelling article and speaks to some major questions I have had about community and faith. Practically speaking, how do we organize a tribe around a cause and keep it organic? As we all know 'the church' wants not only quick results but also the control/credit for what takes place. This sort of thing takes time and doesn't lend itself to having the church logo alongside. Is it just a matter of courage that organizationally the church will "make it" if it doesn't receive the credit? I love the thought... the courage to care less about the institution and more about the people, gospel and world change.

thanks for this article, it struck a deep chord with me.

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