Reburbanization

Julie and I were conversing yesterday about the use of land in the Midwest suburbs and what it would take to make the suburbs environmentally and economically sustainable, to increase suburban commerce and lower metropolitan commutes.

As more and more people are moving into the cities (I’ve read that never before in history has such a high percentage of people lived in urban centers) there is a need to redefine the suburban appeal for two reasons. First, and most obvious, so that people will choose to live there. The emerging generations seem to have bucked the idea of McMansions, anonymous neighbors, and extreme vehicular dependency. In the next 20 years, the suburbs will need to get their sexy back, it seems. The second reason for concern is that the world is watching our nation. Julie made the point that as China develops a middle-class they are quickly mimicking what they think to be the American Dream — suburbanization. The onus is on the U.S. to create an ideal worth mimicking, to lure our copycats into environmental and economic sustainability.

City planners and local governments will have a lot to say in the matter in years to come, seeing as one thing that will need to change is the way in which our land is coded for permits to build and develop. If the goal is to decrease dependency on vehicles and urban centers, land will need to be re-coded so as to allow everything from corner stores to “third-place” gathering spots to be built in the middle of developments that have previously been entirely residential. It comes down to increasing walk scores, making practical goods and social benefits available to suburbanites within walking distance of their homes, increasingly so, so that more and more family members are not only shopping in the neighborhood but are employed in the neighborhood as well. Neighborhoods become villages. Suburbs become small cities near a big city (which, I should add, are already the most popular suburbs currently in most metropolitan areas I’ve visited or lived in).

As Julie and I were talking about the renewal of the suburbs, she recalled an interesting project she read about this summer, Reburbia. Check out some of the bright ideas for suburban renewal that were entered into their contest. Most of them make me want to hit the fast-forward button so that I can live in a world in which all of these ideas are functioning.

What are your thoughts on this topic? If you’re currently living in the suburbs, would you invite change to the feel of your neighborhood? If you’re not currently in the suburbs (or if you are but have been looking to flee), would the changes suggested by Reburbia make you more excited to live and have community in those areas?

What the “IKEA effect” says about ministry

(photo taken from the99percent.com)

 

I read a piece on The 99 Percent by Scott Belsky, focused on something dubbed the “IKEA effect” — the connection between participatory investment and satisfaction.

 

 

“I was in a board meeting the other day for a non-profit organization struggling to engage its constituents. Along with the staff, we were trying to find ways to keep people involved and motivated over time. So much work goes into programs and communications – but sometimes people still fail to listen and engage.

 

 

“Rather than focus on the reasons for the struggle, we decided to discuss the examples of success. Why were some programs especially successful?

 

 

“One early discovery was that the programs organically conceived by participants, rather than staff, seemed to have a higher success rate. In addition, the programs with especially large programming committees (i.e. number of people leading the event) were also quite successful.

 

 

“It was at this point that a fellow board member chimed in with the concept of the ‘IKEA effect.’ When people buy furniture at IKEA, they are forced to assemble it themselves. As a result, people report a high degree of satisfaction with their IKEA furniture – largely because of the greater sense of ownership from the labor required to assemble the furniture.”

 

 

This might very well be the greatest challenge standing in front of me in terms of ministry leadership — involving people beyond keeping them informed. As Belsky writes, just as programs aren’t always the answer, communication is not always the X-factor its often made out to be. Keeping people informed is wildly different than keeping them involved and thus invested.

 

 

Here’s where the intricacy comes in. We want people to have investment — to be the builders of the proverbial Swedish sofa — without doing so by creating bureaucratic watchdog positions. It’s easy to get people involved by giving them a voice on such and such a committee, but then, before you know it, organizational decisions that should have been simple are suffocated because they need layer upon layer of approval. There’s a difference between the “IKEA effect” and having a bunch of chefs in the kitchen.

 

 

Decision-making is a legitimate form of participation only when it goes hand-in-hand with the carrying out of said decisions. To use a ministry example, we can listen to someone’s armchair quarterback opinions about the role of music within a liturgy or the direction our teaching time should take, but the “IKEA effect” comes into play when that person picks up an instrument, runs a soundboard, or gives a sermon. 

 

 

In other words, it’s easy to create positions of oversight, but creating positions of ground-level involvement is far more risky-yet-potentially-rewarding. The “IKEA effect” comes into play when people make the bed and sleep in it, too (metaphorically as well as quite-literally in the case of the Swedish furniture company).

 

 

When I think about how this connects to Paradigm and our calling in Seattle, the one word that comes to my mind is “liturgy.” Literally “the work of the people,” a great liturgy minimizes a hierarchal transfer of information in favor of something more communal and lateral. That’s not to suggest that a good liturgy is somehow leaderless; good leaders will find ways to direct while allowing others to build the proverbial Swedish sofa.

 

 

For this reason I draw a line between emphasizing learning and exalting the typical sermon form. I think people learn best when they take ownership of the “material.” In some ministries this comes into play through a dialogical sermon form. At Paradigm this means leaving plenty of room for people to engage God’s Spirit creatively in both the unison and free space components of our liturgy. The challenge for furthering the “IKEA effect” in our gatherings is to find ways that the reflections people generate during our worship can find back into the progress of the gathering.

Sorry, PC, you get what you pay for

Check out this Fast Company article on Microsoft having to retract outdated Mac pricing info from their Bargain Hunter ads. Especially amusing is the mock video spot at the bottom of the page. Funny stuff.

Re-branding Maple Leaf

Paradigm is hosted by Maple Leaf Church, where Shawn (our Lead Pastor) is on staff. Maple Leaf is an extremely elderly (as in wrinkles, not leadership models) church that has lost a bunch of people in the past 10-20 years (they’ve gone from 300 people to around 15 regulars attendees and a bunch of shut-ins). Some of the congregation really enjoys being such a small church and wants it to stay that way (they like that everyone is either playing an instrument or on the church council… it’s amazing how many committees and how much bureaucracy you can cram into a church of 15 people…), while others are intent on re-growing the church (which I applaud so long as the goal is quality – a healthy community – first and quantity second).

Everyone on the Paradigm staff helps out with Maple Leaf – contributing to the Sunday service and doing some admin work for them during the week. It seems like a good way of thanking them for hosting Paradigm. And as we’re getting to know the congregation, one of the things we’re really trying to communicate with them is the importance of connecting their facility with the needs of the community. 

The building is really great from the outside – a large classic red brick structure in a residential area, but within a couple blocks of two main streets. While the outside of the building could use a good pressure-wash, it is in mostly good shape. Inside the building, however, is a monument to untapped potential. Circa-1988 carpets, with their array of coffee stains, cover the gorgeous hardwood floors. Soiled and/or broken couches (again, circa-1988) sit in nearly every room in the building. We won’t even bother explaining some of the “art” on the walls. 

Just know that this is as good an example of the Broken Windows Theory (as articulated in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point) as a church could ever be. The vibe of mediocrity is thick in that place. It’s suffocating, really. Most of the people in this tiny congregation have been in the church for 30 years (for some of them it’s more like 60 years), and I’m beginning to think that seeing their community take such a hit in momentum and attendance has drained their imagination, and now they can’t see past the present mediocrity (yet they can’t understand why the young families in the surrounding neighborhood don’t want to spend their Sunday mornings gawking at the funeral decor and muttering along as a dozen strangers drone through a bunch of hymns that seem really irrelevant and out of touch).

Those of us from Paradigm who help out with Maple Leaf are trying everything we can to help them connect the potential of their building to the needs of the neighborhood. The houses in the neighborhood are being rented or bought by young families, professionals, and people who walk their dogs religiously. One particular coffeeshop a few blocks from the church has a make-shift play area where toddler-hand-holding and stroller-pushing parents (not just moms… I guess Seattle’s notorious pastor hasn’t condemned all of those “evil” stay-at-home dads yet…) can deposit their children so that kids and adults alike can do some mingling through the morning and afternoon. The only thing is that this play area is around five square-feet and usually contains at least eight kids (better pull out that hand sanitizer…).

Let’s just say it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what could be done with Maple Leaf’s giant finished basement and the three or four adjacent children’s rooms (which, ironically, are the most decked-out part of this building – one room has a nature theme with a giant fake tree; another room has a space-age theme with a mini-theatre; if I was a kid I would love it down there).

But who wants to remodel a basement when we can just pass out tracts or write something pithy on our church sign? What does having people over to our place during the week have to do with ministry?

There are a lot of changes this congregation is going to need to make over the next several weeks and months. But there’s something potentially constructive about hitting rock-bottom – sometimes it takes reaching the floor to receive a wake-up call – and I don’t know how much longer this congregation can afford to heat their building if they’re not growing. It would be so disheartening if they had to give up their worship space just because, when things got rough, they fell back on outdated methodology rather than locating the pulse of their changing neighborhood. 

With no tangible or rational evidence to support this claim, something in me believes they’re going to figure it out and begin to live missionally and incarnationally in their neighborhood, and the Castle to Untapped Potential will begin to reflect that vibrant locality. 

As an exercise in hopeful anticipation, and for the sake of addressing at least one element of Maple Leaf’s “Broken Windows,” Shawn and I are trying to re-brand Maple Leaf, in terms of imagery (and pretty much every respect). Shawn worked with a design company a few months ago on some loose ideas and I recently did some editing to refine those concepts. What we really want to communicate visually is that Maple Leaf is a neighborhood church and a multi-generational church. (These are prescriptions more than descriptions, but if Maple Leaf is going to survive, they’ll need some of these young families in the neighborhood to join their community. And even up until that happens, it is this neighborhood full of young families whom Maple Leaf should be serving.)

Tangible change has to start somewhere, so why not start with the central image for all of Maple Leaf’s materials? Over the next few weeks we’ll try to get this new image circulating throughout the church community. Our hope is that it connect them with the church’s history while helping them to see forward into a new chapter of community life, and will inspire them to navigate through this next bend in the road with imagination and optimism.

How people respond to this new image – whether it becomes a catalyst for further changes and widening imagination – will determine whether it was powerful and purposeful. At the very least, to whatever extent this image will be seen from the building’s exterior, we’re making the neighborhood just a bit more charming.

Paradigm is up and kicking

The Paradigm website launched a couple weeks ago. I’m still in the process of fine-tuning both the content and the quality of site navigation, but it’s enough of a “finished product” that I feel okay about giving a shout-out to it here. 

So check it out if you have a moment or two, not even for the site’s sake as much as to get a glimpse of what we’re up to in Seattle. It’s a largely unchurched city, a place in need of a community that communicates and embodies a life-giving Gospel (not that we’re the only ones attempting that; I know of some great things going on in other Seattle churches).

Ministering in a city to which you’re new is really daunting, so I’m glad that I’m serving on a team with people who know Seattle much better than I do. Really, for being new to a city, what better way to get integrated with people than to journey alongside them in a faith community. I’m having a good time.

If you’re in Seattle and are looking to participate in a church, or you know of someone who is, the website is a pretty solid primer of who we are and what we’re doing, at least so far.

Paradigm

Nice shelves

Found this on Relevant’s Slices: really fun bookshelf designs.

If most of them weren’t bigger than my apartment, I’d be all over these – especially Graffitiesk and Infinity. Nice stuff.

Funny video on church marketing

Julie just showed me a hilarious video about church marketing — and what would happen if Starbucks behaved like the church.

I thought the clashing patterns and use of Papyrus really brought the message home…

Helpful[?] tips for worship leaders

The worship leaders I know are a very mixed lot – varying in their strengths, weaknesses, preferences, influences and so forth. They’re as unique and diverse as the churches they serve. One thing that binds them unilaterally is that they face many challenges when it comes to writing their own stuff. For some of them, the problem is their own mentality – the laundry list of excuses which they believe exonerates them from the guilt they should feel for making their church sing a Chris Tomlin song for the eighteen thousandth time. Other leaders are willing to write but feel limited in the creative process.

Here are a few of the dilemmas that I, or people I know, have faced, and some advice on how to get over the hump.

Seven hang-ups to worship songwriting:

1. The overwhelming feeling of making statements about God. If you ever want to get a sense of God’s grandeur and ineffable complexity, try to write an entire song about Him! Not only will your words feel like such a shortcoming, but even your chords and melody will seem to not do justice to who God is and what He’s like. The solution? Admit it – your words do fall short of grasping and capturing a wild God. You can wallow in the inadequacy of your words or you can suck it up and create anyway. Your lyrics don’t need to be exhaustive treatises. Each song should be focused on providing lively imagery to a specific concept.

2. Other songs are already out there. Yes, it’s true – five or ten “worship celebrities” keep pumping the jams. Some of their stuff is useful, and there is some value in using a “stock” worship song now and then – it connects you to the modern global Church (or at least the Western Church) just like older hymns connect you to the historic Church. But keep this in mind: those commercial worship leaders do not know your particular church; you do. You’re the one who’s in place to pastor and shepherd your community through music and the arts. Study your church – where it is and where it’s going – and write out of your particular church’s experience and expression. If nothing else, it’s an extra excuse to grab coffee with the people in your church and hear about their stories.

3. Writing verses can be a pain. It’s true that for almost any musical genre the chorus is the easiest part of the song to write. Even bad musicians write decent choruses. But when it comes to creating a verse, the melody often gets super forced or contrived, the lyrics lack theme and flow, and chord selection is completely bland. If you can, start by writing the verse of your song. Or, if you have a chorus in place, make at least three or four different verse possibilities before you begin to really edit the song – before you start considering it solidified to any extent.

4. You’re in love with a particular strumming pattern. You want to know why everything you write sounds the same? It could be that your strumming pattern is one irrevocable stream of dull rhythm. How do you flee from the boredom? Try doing your chord changes at less-than-obvious places – you might start to hear new ideas.

I’ve learned that if I’m working on a song for worship, listening to the typical commercial worship songs is the absolute worst thing I can do. Instead I search through my music and find bands whose musical integrity I respect and whose stuff is also quite “singalongable,” because that accessibility is so key to what I’m making. Basically, just ease toward the poppy end of whatever music you respect.

5. You ran out of “biblical” language. Good. I was hoping you’d stop cramming words like “righteousness” and “omnipotent” into your songs anyway. David thought for himself. Paul thought for himself. You can too. You’re free to take ancient concepts and put them into language that makes sense to people today. You’re writing with your church in mind, so write with language that has a fighting chance of conjuring exciting thoughts of God in the minds and hearts of your church community. Don’t equate outdated language with reverence.

6. You wrote a song last year and it still works okay. Really? You’re that lazy? This connects to the previous point in that language changes. Phrases grow tired. Metaphor is limited – one is never enough. If Charles Wesley can write thousands of hymns (his goal was one a day) and Sufjan Stevens can write entire albums about individual states, I think you can muster up a song each month at the very least. Remember how God is so huge that it can be intimidating to write about Him? Yeah, that also means He’s immense. So you’ve got a lot to work with. Plus, the more you write, the easier it becomes.

7. The songs are finished, but they don’t seem like irreplaceable timeless capsules of majesty. What were you expecting? Most songs aren’t timeless. My iTunes is filled with songs I was excited about for a few months; I go back to them here and there after the honeymoon period, but their role in my song library changes dramatically after a couple months (there are rare exceptions, but this applies to at least 97% of songs I own).

Why would worship be different? Words about God are still words about God. Not only do you need to keep creating for language’s sake, but you need to do this for your own sake (you’re a musician, after all) and for the sake of your church. Your church is different than it was eight months ago, and it’ll be different again in another eight months. If your songs are going to tell their story, you’ll need to be narrating their evolution each step of the way.

Official warning: abused font alert

This post goes out to every magazine, band, church, or business that has decided over the past year that the above font (in its four or five variations) is basically the best thing to ever happen. Yes, it’s true that this is, in fact, a fairly clever, thought-out font design. I can look at it and immediately contextualize the exact audience to which it’s meant to speak. When used sparingly, it’s a font worth having in the folder. 

But you wouldn’t let it fulfill its destiny as a font of occasion, would you, Mr. Overzealous Font User? No, you were so excited about this thing that you decided to use it for every website, ad, article heading, branding and signage that you could get your hands on.

In doing so, you ruined it for the rest of us. You turned “augment” into “novelty.” It was going to happen sooner or later, but gosh did you expedite the shelf-life of hip on this one.

Damien Jurado’s new listens

I’m posting these just because I so enjoy Damien Jurado’s music, and the new songs are right in line with the good work he’s been doing for some time now.

If you’re someone who has listened to Jurado for awhile, then this first track might bring you back to the days of I Break Chairs. The guitar tone in this one is great – a real warm crunch on the chorus. “Go First” (there’s no video to it, just the album cover):

This other video is of “Last Rights,” and it was taken at a show Jurado played last month in Portland.