Babylon and Suburbia

I recently spent a week staying and serving at an inter-city ministry. The purpose was to serve in that community but mostly it was getting to know the neighborhood kids, the kids that live in this government subsidized housing development. I was and am frustrated with the gap that exist between this community and the resources that could make the kind of difference that turns a kid’s life around. What happen?

Like Israel in the Old Testament the American church has been taken captive. But, unlike Israel we were not taken captive. Instead we willingly rushed into captivity in America’s new destination for the American Dream, i.e. suburbia. In 1961 Gibson Winter wrote a superb book entitled The Suburban Captivity of the Churches. The most surprising thing about the book is the date of its copyright. As early as the mid 1950s, according to Winter, suburbia had largely reduced the role of the American church to, “religious parks and recreation for the middle class.”

That is pretty amazing since the first suburban community in the U.S. was not built until 1948. Throughout the decade of the 1950s the White Flight to the suburbs was unabated. Before the end of the fifties it was already apparent to Winter, an ordained Presbyterian with a degree in Sociology from Harvard, that the suburbs were having a radical influence on the churches attitude toward local mission, and the demise of America’s inner cities.

The cover jacket of The Suburban Captivity of the Churches has the following two paragraphs by the editor of the magazine Presbyterian Life.

“The United States is increasingly a metropolitan society, but within the metropolitan areas in which two thirds of us now live, the Protestant churches exhibit some startling anomalies. They are deserting the cities and pouring money and men into the suburbs. The problems of cities grow: poverty, crime, racial discrimination, and over-crowding.

In The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, Dr. Winter analyzes the origins and direction of the main thrust of Protestantism, including this irrelevance to the desperate needs of the inner city, the emasculated style its suburban life, and the prospects of its renewal.”

This was written in 1961; fifty years later the problems of inner city and suburbs have only gotten worse. Now a growing portion of suburbia is not only distant from the groans of the inner cities, it is also “gated.”

The choice of word anomaly in the quote above was perfect. (Anomaly= Inconsistent with what would naturally be expected.)” For example, when you drive on a normal city street does it strike you as odd to see a Hummer rolling along as though you were in a war zone? Suburban churches with few or none of their people directly involved with the poor are like Hummers on peaceful civilian streets; given the church’s historical commitment to the poor they are anomalies.

Winter’s insights were chilling in 1961, “Deserting the cities, irrelevance to the desperate needs of the inner city,” we now live with the results of a generation of middle class Christian neglect. And it has had a huge price tag for the church. Not only have we lost our culture but in the quote above, “the emasculated style of its suburban life.” In other words and being as polite as I can given the word “emasculated” suburban churches tend to have lost their nerve and effectiveness as well.