Alone, Suburban and Sorted

Richard Beck has a most interesting series of posts on suburban living here. Written from a North American perspective, it's very incisive and creative in its thinking. Here’s a taster, but all the posts are worth reading…

Specifically, I want to highlight one major facet of contemporary life in America: We rarely encounter difference in any meaningful way. For two reasons noted thus far. First, we are alone. Our civic disengagement, particularly our lack of bridging connections, gives us fewer opportunities to encounter people who are different from us. Second, we are sorted. The migration patterns of Americans over the last 30 years have sorted us into communities of like-mindedness. Thus, even if I do mix with people in my community they are likely to be people very much like myself. People who share my voting preferences, my religious beliefs, and my skin color. Again, we fail to encounter difference in these homogeneous communities.

My concern with these trends is that we rarely get to practice the skills of welcome, debate, listening, inclusion and hospitality. We begin to find difference shocking, deviant, weird and effortful to live with. Worse, as the research on group polarization showed us, separated from difference we grow more extreme in our views, demonizing difference rather than listening and learning to make room for strangers.

Isn’t church (ideally, at least) one of the few antidotes to this kind of fragmentation? There we may find (if we are fortunate, and if the church hosts this possibility): connection, welcome, debate, listening, inclusion, hospitality and difference. And, as Beck suggests, these values, paradoxically placed together as they are, promote the very opposite of extremism. in fact, the tension they set up - for example, hospitality and difference - is one of the most creative things an ecclesial community may have to offer.

Might then a properly envisioned church not be a third place (alongside home and work) whereof Beck speaks?