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?

Where E/emergent goes from here

Via Julie Clawson’s blog I read through a recent blogosphere conversation that was sparked by a post from Nick Fiedler (with whom I’m not familiar) titled, The Great Disappointment (A Post About Emergent). The conversation has revolved around what is perceived as a fizzling out on the part of Emergent Village, which many people seem to attribute to the movement bringing in too wide a network of people and lacking leadership.

As someone who is very much lower-case “e” emergent and enjoys brushing shoulders with the Emergent Village crowd whenever there’s an opportunity, I’m going to put out some hyper-opinionated bullet-points on the matter:

*First, I don’t think Emergent Village – or general emergence, for that matter – is fizzling out. I think it’s becoming more mainstream (not to be confused with mainline), and thus has lost its subversive feel. I imagine this annoys some who had followed the emerging conversation because it was subversive and not because of its theological and ecclesial implications. To that I say, “Get over it.”

*That said, I do see a lot of room for EV to better clarify itself and some of the different ways in which very average parishioners and church leaders can participate in the conversation. Sometimes the “us-them” feel is cultivated by poor communication. I don’t toss that out there as a definitive accusation, only a possibility.

*I have a feeling that there is tension between some EV folks with a club mindset and the larger EV and the lower-case “e”s like myself (this is evident within the comments section of Julie C.’s post, from perspectives on both sides of the tension). There’s enough suspicion within the “conversation,” that it doesn’t always feel like a conversation so much as a select few gate-keeping particular stances (to clarify, I don’t hear these gate-keeping statements from EV’s most notable voices so much as from pace-setting contributors who, I feel, give everyone else the vibe that this is an invite-only conversation).

*My best example of the last point is the issue of homosexuality. EV’s strongest voices, in this writer’s perception, lean further each day toward an attitude that the only reasonable take on homosexuality is to see it as a viable lifestyle rather than a reflection of corruption and brokenness. I imagine that vibe keeps a lot of people who agree with 90% of the EV “platform” held at bay, feeling like they don’t exactly fit as card-carrying members, figuratively speaking. One of the best things that could happen for EV is to give place to leaders who have less-to-the-left positions on homosexuality. Or – gasp – a leader who didn’t vote for Obama. (Or is our orthodoxy really not all that “generous”? )

*People within EV need to understand that not everyone they meet is going to be as disgruntled with Evangelicalism as they are. Believe it or not, some good things have happened within Evangelicalism. Why do we need to rally people based on what they’re against?

Is there room within EV or greater emergence for people who don’t hate Rick Warren but are becoming increasingly interested in re-claiming the gospel’s missional Kingdom emphasis? Or is this a conversation about being pissed off about all of the same things? If that’s the case, then screw the “conversation,” because it’s nothing like a Messiah who esteemed what he saw as good within the diverse people he encountered. (Again, to clarify: the people I see demonstrating this negativity are not the most well-known folks within EV or greater emergence.)

*For the love of God, embrace healthy leadership, leadership that is entrusted with power and uses it to organize and empower rather than confuse and restrain. This applies not only to EV but the lower-case “e” emergents as well. Leaderlessness is not the goal, is it? How ridiculous would it be for someone who was raised by an abuse mother to go around telling people that they should strive to be orphans? Leadership, organization, and methodology are not signs of failure in and of themselves. In fact, they are attributes of the Early Church.

Tony Jones made an important point in his response to this conversation:

…I bet you’re not disappointed with Shane Claiborne. That’s because, to this point, Shane has made the very noble decision to live a chaste life, and he has committed his whole self to an irresistible revolution. Meanwhile, most of the founders of emergent are raising children and paying mortgages and coaching YMCA t-ball. Martin Luther King didn’t coach t-ball; neither did Ghandi. Start a revolution if you want, but that’s not a price that I’m willing to pay.

There shouldn’t be an expectation on EV’s leaders to leave their other full-time professional and relational involvements to oversee the organizational components of the conversation, but maybe there are others who God is calling to serve EV full-time in that capacity.

*Tony mentions that books are not the future of EV. I hope that’s not the case, because it’s been his writing, along with the books of McLaren, Pagitt, and Keel that have best connected me to pulse of the conversation. There’s a carefulness in book writing that none of us truly adhere to in blogging. The books (in my opinion) have represented the most thorough and credible tellings of EV’s story.

*Tony points out that Christianity21 is going to help set a new direction for EV (and, I imagine, the larger movement). That sounds great, but I know very few people who are in situations where flight costs, $195 for event registration, and $198 for a hotel (that’s a two-night total) is a real possibility (especially since most of us are considered quasi-heretics by now and we’re not supported by Evangelicalism’s enterprise or the Mainline’s old money…). I don’t have a better solution. I’m simply pointing out that we’re stuck in the tension of getting members of what is largely an electronic conversation into the same place for a weekend.

The states of religion

How religious is your state? A recent Gallup poll mapped out the religious devotion of Americans – check it out.

(Thanks to Tony Jones for posting this link.)

Obama buttons, credit cards, and Jesus

Julie and I tend to have sporadic email conversations throughout the day. Of course today’s dialogue centered around the Presidential Inauguration. I watched it from home this morning, while Julie was part of putting together a campus-wide viewing of the ceremony at SPU. This afternoon we exchanged some reflections, and hers were so insightful that I am posting them here (with her go-ahead).

On Obama’s speech and personal responsibility:

Obama’s speech was good – very good. But will people heed his call to be participatory? Or will they sit on their hands and say, “Obama-messiah’s got it under control! I don’t need to do anything to change the way things are. I’ll wear my Obama button and my Obama hat and show off my Obama sign – that will change the world.” Will Americans actually do what their president asks of them? Will individual Americans take responsibility?

On the connection between faith and politics in terms of participation and responsibility:

(And here we have an odd parallel in the lives of average Americans: the average American, who is likely “Christian” to some degree, doesn’t want to be participatory on a global/political level by ceasing to buy SUVs or by having fewer credit cards – and also doesn’t want to be participatory in God’s kingdom. The government can fix it itself, can’t it? God can fix it himself, can’t He? If things are bad, it must be fate. If things are bad, it couldn’t be our fault. I’m not trying to draw a comparison between government and God, but just trying to point out that the average American approaches citizenship the same way that they approach faith.)

I know I’m partial, but I think these are brilliant thoughts.

Warren a good fit for Obamanauguration

We’ve got an abomination in Obamanation.

So it was one thing when Cameron Strang (and Donald Miller, after Strang declined) received an invitation to pray at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, but inviting Rick Warren (of Purpose-Driven fame) to pray at President-elect Obama’s inauguration in January is clearly a whole different ball game. 

Liberals are going nuts about the choice to incorporate Warren, with his darned views on abortion and homosexual marriage, into the January event. That’s a real pain when people look at toasting an unborn kid as a human rights issue, right? Really gets in the way of “progress.” And to think that Warren believes that people of the same sex shouldn’t be romantically involved with one another, let alone participate in holy matrimony! What a caveman, this Rick Warren.

Often (rightly) eager to talk about matters such as the AIDS crisis and global poverty, liberals will have none of it this week – at least not in regard to Warren, who has given more to these causes than probably any Christian of our era. Those issues need to sit the bench this week because what America needs to know is that that crazy Jesus-guy Rick Warren is telling us we shouldn’t be able to kill kids and that not every sexual situation we’ve accepted culturally is really all that acceptable.

Who does this guy think he is? 

For me, the best part of this entire debacle came to light while watching Anderson Cooper 360 last night. Cooper was assessing the Obama-Warren situation, and applauded Obama for reaching out to people of “different faiths.” Really, Anderson Cooper? I know Obama and Warren see some things differently, but are they of different faiths? I suppose Cooper has been taking Obama’s professed Christianity about as seriously as some conservatives were during the election season.

Do Obama and Warren serve the same God? Some of Obama’s followers will have none of it. How can Obama and Warren share a God when Obama is our God? And what if Obama and Warren’s God has His own views on issues of abortion and marriage? Maybe we can convince Him that those issues are so 1980s. The last thing we need is our Messiah talking to some other Messiah and getting a bunch of crazy views that don’t entirely lead to our comfort and  moral limitlessness. 

Plus we hear Reverend Wright is available.

Jesus gets his throne back tomorrow

So we’ve finally made it to Election Day 2008. Tonight or tomorrow (or maybe a week from now, after re-counts and law suits), the US will know who its next president will be.

Will there still be an economic crisis in this country? Yes. Will one of the primary causes of that crisis be the culture of debt we’ve accepted in the country? You betcha, Joe Six-Pack. Will the government continue to excuse oil companies for their tyranny? Yep. Will the majority of Americans lobby to drill their way out of an energy crisis? Sure thing.

The only thing that will really change this week is that Americans will have a new name to blast when things don’t work out, a new resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Well, actually, two other things will change as well.

First, Saturday Night Live writers will have to find new material. Tina Fey will return to being Liz Lemon and not a governor who can see Russia from her house, and the SNL writers will probably need to up the dosage of “McGruber” episodes or have more of Kristen Wiig playing that crazy middle-aged, cat sweater-wearing cashier at Target.

Second, Christians will decide to believe in Jesus again. Not that they’ve been openly denying him over the past few months, but it would be a huge stretch to say that he’s been the person in whom Christians have been placing their trust and hope. Sometime during primary season, Jesus stopped being the change they could believe in.

Certain as the election cycle every four years, the political apostles like James Dobson and Jim Wallis came along to point Christians toward alternative messiahs. Pastors and church leaders began to write and talk almost exclusively about the alternative messiahs, and managed to get onto television and radio in order to talk about their newfound eschatological hope. Christians scurried onto Facebook to join groups and add pages endorsing their alternative messiahs, and on message boards they offered their testimonies for their anointed leader.

But all of that ends this week. Some Christians will be excited about the nomination, while others will be furious – depending on which alternative messiah they clung to. But, like SNL, Christianity will have to recalibrate and return to the conversations and hopes of a year prior.

James Dobson and Jim Wallis will suddenly become less interesting, slipping into relative obscurity for a few months. Pastors – suddenly amazed by all of the time on their hands – will slowly re-learn what it looks like to discuss spiritual formation and the discipline involved with walking in the Way of Jesus. And many Christians will look for new Facebook groups to join.

Jesus will get his throne back this week. He’ll go back to being the hope of the world, a true agent of change, the one with the power to rescue and deliver, the person Christians want representing them. Because Jesus is good enough for Christians – at least in three years out of four.

Stat-crunching guru nails politics and baseball

Nate Silver is a nerd. The 30-year-old Chicagoan is a number-crunching stat jockey. And he’s becoming a household name.

Silver is an employee of Baseball Prospectus, an organization that works to rightly interpret baseball stats. Baseball Prospectus is regarded as a near-flawless authority in the sports world, and Silver is no small part of that success. How good is Silver at his job? He created PECOTA, an algorithm for determining a player’s success by comparing him to past players in similar career, style, and team settings.

Does PECOTA work? You betcha. Silver used PECOTA to predict, before the beginning of the baseball season, that the Tampa Bay Rays would win 90 games this year. Consider for a minute how absurd of a prediction that was in April. The Rays had never won 70 games in their franchise history. But Silver saw that these players, based on historical precedent, were supposed to succeed this year.

He made the bold prediction. Tampa Bay went out and won 97 games.

While baseball is his day job, Silver has been rocking a bit of a political side-project. He created FiveThirtyEight, a site on which Silver tracks and interprets national polls in order to predict elections. After some of his underdog predictions for the Democratic primaries came to fruition, Silver – who was writing under the alias “Poblano” – found his site rising from 800 visits a day up to 600,000. It wasn’t until May that Silver revealed his identity – and much to the shock of baseball junkies everywhere.

FiveThirtyEight continues to gain notoriety as a reliable political resource. Silver’s success has gained him interviews with everyone from MSNBC to ESPN. A recent New York Magazine piece (great journalism in this article, by the way) about Silver’s rise from a math guy who loves the national pastime to political informant.

If anyone wants to doubt Silver’s methods, that’s fine. But – look now – the Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series.

Update to the ACORN voting fraud

Here we have a story of a mouse and some rats.

Not only are Ohio voters finding their votes diluted by ACORN (as I wrote about this morning), but our Floridian friends are suffering a similar fate. In Florida, Mickey Mouse has decided to vote in their state, his registration stamped with the approval of ACORN. Fortunately Orange Country elections officials caught the scheme.

I wonder if major media outlets are going to give this story the attention it deserves, or if it’s going to be pushed under the rug. It seems that, regardless of your personal politics, this sort of corruption in the process is alarming and something of which you should be aware.

Fraud waters down my vote

As a registered Ohio voter, I feel quite important throughout the presidential primaries and general election. It’s a good time to be from “The Heart of it All.” Candidates are basically sitting on your front porch from mid-October until Election Day. There’s a lot of wooing taking place.

Being an Ohio voter is probably much like being a 16-year-old Baberaham with a rich family in a day and age when arranged marriages were the going thing. You’re the commodity.

So when I find out that ACORN, an Obama-endorsing (their declaration, not mine) voter registration initiative, is planting nearly 4,000 fraudulent votes in the Cleveland area – an influence of more than five percent of their total garnered registration – I get a little ticked off. Not only are they skewing the election, but they’re diluting my super-hot Ohio vote.

I kind of want to be a big deal. No stealing my thunder, people.

I doubt that Democrats will ever do anything about voting fraud because the benefits of misconduct are so sharply titled in their favor. But next time the Republicans have the House and Senate, they should really try to pass something at the federal level to clean up the voting process nationwide.

Maybe the church can take a page out of football’s playbook

I was reading an article the other day about my beloved hometown Cleveland Browns and the ways in which political discussion is and isn’t appropriate in their locker room. And while I’m not very quick to make the sports-to-faith application (I usually find it pithy), portions of this football story have much to say to daily life in the church.

Browns coach Romeo Crennel made national news last week when he called his team together for a meeting in which he instructed them to use caution in their political statements and endorsements, especially when gathered as teammates. The meeting came a few days after linebacker Willie McGinest participated in a voter registration drive during which he publicly backed Sen. Barack Obama, and hours before quaterback Brady Quinn and tackle Joe Thomas participated in a rally for Sen. John McCain (Quinn was the person to introduce McCain to the platform at the Strongsville, Ohio rally).

For Crennel, the primary concern is that partisan involvement does not damage team relations.

“My main concern is that they don’t get up on a soap box here in the locker room and get it going back and forth about a particular candidate against another particular candidate.”

Crennel continued, “I just know politics. If you are stating your case for this guy, the other guy is stating his case for that guy, then there is room for potential confrontation. I let the team know whatever their feelings are about politics, they have a right to them, but the team is first. So they have to prioritize” (italics mine).

Coach Crennel isn’t dismissing the validity of political interest and involvement, but he is reminding his team that they’re on a big stage (as local celebrities) and are collectively fighting for a bigger cause (though some would debate that). 

Browns kicker Phil Dawson, who’s been with team since 1999, noted that the team is handling this election differently than the past two. “I can remember open, loud, lively debates over the last couple. This year it seems relatively quiet. You’ll hear guys talk at lunch a little bit, but there haven’t been arguments. Maybe we all know each other better and where everyone stands. I’d like to think that we’ve got a group of guys who get along well enough where even if we disagree on stuff like that, it doesn’t divide us.”

It’s an interesting point that Dawson makes: when people are really getting to know one another, truly immersed in life together, these hot-button conversations are less likely to become arguments. While Dawson advocates for the strength of those relationships, Crennel advises players not to carelessly push the boundaries of those relationships. Their points come together in that both are claiming that a “higher” purpose is at stake and that healthy relationships on the team are paramount to achieving those goals.

What if the local church took a cue from the Cleveland Browns locker room? What if members of the church were free to develop their political ideas, but were encouraged to spend the election season – like every season – focused on their collective objective, which is of greater importance than anything that happens in the polls and ballots?

What if church leaders, rather than risk their tax-exempt status, or, more importantly, their ecclesial influence, exercised some self-discipline and became people of balance and stability, calling church members back to their deeper, more significant purpose?

It’s funny that Romeo Crennel is functioning more pastorally than some of the church leaders who are making waves these days. And it’s amusing that the Cleveland Browns are doing a better job than most churches when it comes to keeping the relationships and goals of the “team” as their first priority.