A friend of mine in the Philly area, Todd Hiestand, was able to put together a really good conference with Al Hsu yesterday called The Church and Suburbia.‚ Unfortunately, I was unable to go, but Todd’s such a nice guy he’s posting the audio.
I was reading through some blog searches and found a 30’s something lady who happened to attend this conference.‚ She lives in Bucks County, PA but used to live in New York, and as best I can tell went to Redeemer Church where Tim Keller is pastor.‚ She made an interesting comparison about community in suburbia vs. the city.‚ She states:
To start with, suburbia is incredibly insular. By comparison, New York City can also be insular, but I think a greater opportunity exists to interact with one’s community in NYC. For instance, if I needed to go to the store in Manhattan, I would go down the stairs of my 3rd-floor walk-up on East 88th Street and take a stroll over one block and down to 86th to reach the nearest grocery store. While on that walk, I might run into people I knew (that happened more frequently than you’d think), but I would at least be in the company of others walking, some of whom I might even say hi to or ask a question of. A run to the grocery store now means I leave my house, close myself up in my car, drive 2.5 miles to the nearest grocery store. Assuming I manage to avoid getting into a car accident, a trip to the store now involves absolutely zero human contact.
In the city I felt I did more talking, more relationship building, and definitely more walking. My apartment was a shoebox, so I didn’t typically spend a whole lot of time there. Sundays meant walking to church, going out to dinner afterward with friends, and then walking home with some of them because we all lived within a few blocks of each other. Hello community.
Sounds, nice. Really nice.
If we are serious about following Jesus, at what point do we take a look at our overall lifestyle. It seems that so much of how we live is set up to make discipleship harder – all so we can be more comfortable.
Strange.
Thanks for quoting my post – I’m glad you found my comments useful! Just for background, I did attend Redeemer while living in NYC (in fact, my membership still sits with them) and was very involved in leadership there. I moved out of the city in October 2005 and have found the transition from city-to-suburbs to be challenging, to say the least. The conference was great, I’m still processing through it and very much looking forward to reading Al’s whole book as well.