I once lived the “American Dream.”

I had a single-family detached house on a half-acre parcel with a three-car garage in a bedroom suburb of Southern California. In order to afford my piece of the “American Pie,” I commuted to work at least an hour each way, barely making it home in time to tuck in my youngest child each night, and rarely in time to have dinner with the whole family. I spoke to my next-door neighbor about three times in three years. The elementary school that was located behind our tract was shut down so my son had to be driven or bussed several miles to the next school. Although I attended the same church where I became a Christian, it had long since given up its Main Street address to relocate to forty acres of agricultural land on the periphery of the city. As a result, it had achieved mega-church status, with over 5,000 weekend attendees. I felt my wife’s pain as she attended week after week enjoying relevant teaching and worship, but not one real conversation, much less the start of any new friendships. It may sound like a “glass half-empty” description, but, in fact, having grown up in Europe and Asia in urban flats, apartments, and townhomes, I felt blessed to have a home like this for my family. However, something was missing from my American Dream.

I have come to understand that something to be a God-wired hunger for community.

THE KIDNAPPING OF COMMUNITY

God is a God of community. Before the beginning, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “did life together” in community. “In the beginning,” God created a perfect setting for community—Eden—for vertical connection with him, as well as horizontal connection with others. After the cleansing of the flood, God chose a particular people—a community—to tell his story and reveal his ways. And for the past two thousand years, the Bible says that his presence has not been contained by a tent or a building but is somehow found within in Christ-centered community: the church. Humans, made in God’s image and for his purposes, are hard-wired for community.

However, today, the concept of community is being kidnapped from us. To be sure, the word itself is still used at great lengths. We have special interest communities (e.g., the gay community, the evangelical community, etc.). Single-family detached tract residential builders have renamed themselves “Community Builders” and their single use tracts with the minimum required landscaped setbacks are “Master Planned Communities.” And the leading Real Estate Development trade and research association, Urban Land Institute (ULI), defines “Community Centers” as a shopping center anchored by a discount or department store with a typical GLA (gross leasable area) of 150,000 to 300,000 square feet... a.k.a. a “strip center” or “big box center.” But amid so much talk of community, we have lost its true meaning.

The three-car “garagescapes” that have replaced the tree-lined front porch streetscapes of small town America create anonymity and social isolation. Anonymity is also a common critique of the Sunday morning experience in the darkened rows of contemporary mega-churches (many of which actually use the word community in their name). Ironically, in order to achieve mega-church status, many of these “faith communities” are essentially once a week gatherings of dispersed families from the same 20-minute drive radius as a big box retail center. Given the placeless homogeneity of much suburban sprawl (the same big box retailers, tract home builders, gas stations, and “vanilla” office parks), the word seems to be invoked specifically to compensate for the lack of authentic community.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the classic definition of community is technology. The internal combustion engine killed Main Street, Elm Street, and the walkable scale of human settlements and towns. Whereas the “public square,” with its sacred and civic spaces (from the Greek agora, Roman forum, and Italian piazza to the New England village green) was the first and central defining anchor to any community, for the last sixty years the creation of such public spaces is actually prohibited by modern single-use zoning practices. The latest technological shift that is radically transforming the definition of community is online social media, which seems to remove the need for actual physical spaces to connect with others. Are the “real” places becoming obsolete?

All of these changes are demonstrating that when we divorce the word community from the reality of a particular human-scaled place, we fundamentally lose something in the mix. Today, many church planters and next generation Christian leaders feel a calling to be “architects of community” in either urban or suburban settings. However, most are ill equipped to answer this call because they lack a biblical understanding of place and a historical understanding of terms like city and suburb. Without an adequate theology of place, we resort to either devaluing it (throwaway church buildings) or overdoing it (by trying to re-build the temple). And without a greater understanding of how physical human ecologies and environments either facilitate or constrain community, we will fail to be truly present in the places and cities to which God has called us. In light of this, we’ll consider a theology of place first, then explore the tangible challenges we face for creating authentic community in our cities, with a special focus on the suburbs.

A THEOLOGY OF PLACE

Some consider a theology of place to be primarily concerned with religious buildings; they focus on how to create sacred worship space. Church and religious architects would even argue that there are “timeless principles of liturgical design.” I call this the standard bag of tricks. These induce the user through a series of perceptual and physiological manipulations in order to artificially induce a sense of sacred. They include using stairs and ramp for ascension, forcing the “pilgrim” to lower their head through lowered openings or ceiling elements, and then using filtered natural light to “draw the eye heavenward.”

In contrast, I have come to believe that the most beautiful (not to mention opulent) cathedral can be the site of the most profane acts (e.g., child molestation), and that the smelliest back alley can be the site of the most powerful redeeming act (serving a homeless teen as if she were Jesus). A theology of place needs to be bigger than even the biggest and grandest of church buildings.

The Bible is concerned with place. Indeed, the entire biblical story can be seen as a metanarrative of the journey of God’s people from one place to another, from the Garden to the City. This first place we encounter comes at the culmination of the creation story. It’s a very good place.

Some of our imagery of the Garden of Eden is fuzzy, ranging from an assumption of an abstract metaphor to a literal image of an unending, unspoiled jungle. The actual word Paradise entered European languages from the Persian root word pardis, which referred to a beautifully-tended garden enclosed between walls. The Hebrew word pardes (probably derived from Persian and used in the Jewish Talmud to refer to Eden) could be interpreted as a park, a garden, or an orchard.

This may sound a bit off, but I find it helpful to relate the Garden of Eden to a theme park. Although an angel with a flaming sword is more impressive than a typical minimum wage theme park security guard, the idea of a carefully designed environment in which every detail (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) is carefully considered and designed for the enjoyment of its denizens is a powerful one. In fact, it is so compelling that Disney’s walled gardens are the top tourism destinations in America, Europe, and Asia. After spending nearly a decade of my life with the Walt Disney Company, I have come to appreciate the intensity and intentionality of the multi-disciplinary design effort that goes into the creation of a theme park.

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