The Coming Demise of Suburbia
The kind of churches the next generation will plant
What kind of church do they
dream about? They dream of planting a downtown church. In the past four
years, only two groups (out of 48 groups total) have designed a suburban
church. The other 46 groups went
downtown.
My students think living down
town is cool. They think life in the suburbs is hollow and fake. No wonder. On
TV for the last generation Seinfield, Friends
then Sex and the city portrayed city life as the ideal. More
recently, Desperate Houswives and The
Sopranos reinforced the idea that suburban life as a place of despair and
moral decay. Even when students are forced to develop a church planting plan in
a town of 30,000, they still pick the “inner city” for their new plant. They do not despise storefront churches like
their parents do.
We may be at the tipping
point for suburban churches. Beltway churches have reigned supreme at the top
of the food chain among evangelical churches. They may be at their zenith.
Large sprawling churches with mall-like parking lots are still the envy of most
boomer pastors. Now comes a younger generation who dismiss both the size and
the location of top rung of the ladder. They prefer simple coffeehouse
accepting storefront churches with active social programs providing a chic
comfortable Starbucks-sized atmosphere. My student’s heroes are pastors like Adam and Christy Lipscomb,
not the famous suburban Boomers pastoring sprawling mega churches. They don’t
despise mega churches, they just dismiss them. The Lipscombs
are the indy bands of the coming generations and mega church pastors have become mainline pop.
Until this week I thought
this trend was only a generational shift among ministerial students. Now I’ve
read Chris Leinberger’s article (to appear in the upcoming March 2008 issue
of the
Consider these factors:
1. Fashion. Generation X
& the millennials already have shifted their dreams downtown. While the
church jobs for young ministerial graduates are still in the suburbs, their
heart is downtown. It is no longer cool to be on the beltway. As millions of
the “greatest generation” move out of their homes the emerging generations
won’t be buying them—they’d rather have a downtown apartment. Who will buy
them? Poorer families will buy (or, more likely rent) these declining homes.
The younger people will have moved into quaint (but cleverly decorated)
downtown apartments and mini-homes. The market follows fashion—as demand for
suburban homes declines so will prices. Chic is moving down town.
2. Sub-prime mortgage
crisis. We already see the precursors. The suburban housing
market is collapsing and prices are falling. Millions of homes have already
been abandoned and turned back to the lenders. They sit unoccupied, as vandals
tear out the copper wiring and
3. Suburban blight. We may see a
reversal of what happened downtown in the 50’s and 60’s. Then, people moved out of the downtowns to
the suburbs and inner city home values declined. Poorer families moved in and
the properties (now owned now by landlords who had scooped up cheap houses)
simply “milked” the properties. We may see the reversal of that and the
“trading places” is now headed the other way. Suburban space (per square foot)
is already cheaper than downtown space. Builders notice such disparity and “the
market follows the market”—new building will move downtown. Downtown space is gentrifying. In the coming
decades suburban housing will decline and poorer families will move in.
Landlords will divide giant McMansions and they will
become “rental units.” Neighbors will fight it at first but eventually they’ll
sell out too, if only to escape the crime and blight. Deterioration in suburban
homes will be worse than the downtown homes of the 60’s and 70’s though. Most
suburban homes are built cheaper than those old downtown homes (same with
suburban churches.) Suburban building
features hollow core doors, 10-year shingles, cheap drywall and plastic trim.
These will not survive renter’s abuse like the old downtown solid oak doors,
slate roofs and plaster and lath. A suburban home can get trashed in three
years. By 2020 we will see “suburban
ghettos” emerge. They will become as infamous as the former inner city ones
were and we’ll see them on the news each night. The plot of Escape from New
York will be reversed. Upscale young people won’t be moving to the edges of
town—they will head downtown where all the newest and most exciting churches
will be located. Suburban churches will continue with their brightly lit big
boxes with tiered theater seating and praise teams on stage while the younger
folk will seek out dark flat-floored club-like or coffeehouse atmospheres that
Boomers will dismiss as “not a real church.” By 2020, many cheaply built
suburban churches will be 25 years old or more and their bathrooms and
classrooms will feel like the bathrooms at the mall. Mega churches will still ‘stack them higher
and sell them lower” but younger people won’t be at Wal-mart,
they be shopping over at J.Crew, G.A.P. and Abercrombie and Fitch… and
at the local Salvation Army outlet.
4. Decline of malls. The temples of Boomer suburban life have been its
malls, big box stores and mega churches. Yet shopping malls have fallen out of
fashion as the owners milk their former investments and board up empty stores.
Big box stores are still at their peak, as Mega churches are. But the cutting
edge for developers is neither shopping malls nor big box stores. The cutting
edge has moved to developing faux downtowns—complete “cities” with
narrow streets, tiny shops and hidden parking lots built at the edge of town to
cater to the desire to return downtown. Yet these edge-of-town cityscape faux
downtowns are missing one element: churches. They offer banks,
shops, coffeehouses and exercise spas but no churches. Where are all the Boomer
church planters? Still chasing the mall crowd and buying property on the
beltways. Denominations who do not seek
space in these faux downtown cityscapes will be left out of the future wave of
culture. And it will be expensive—just like beltway property was compared to
declining downtown or rural land. Denominations who ignore the great cultural
shift back downtown (either faux or real) will be left paying off debt
on their declining megaplex monstrosities filled with
baby-boomers-using-walkers. They will become just like the old downtown
congregations of the 1980’s. Will boomers support this trend that undoes their
own great works or will they fight like the old “downtown association” of
retail shops did in the 70’s?
5. Walkable
living. More than any other trend,
this one mystifies Boomers. Boomers can’t imagine life without a car. Some
younger folk can. Suburban life is car-driven. Downtown life is walkable. None of my ministerial graduates could survive an
interview in a suburban church if they admitted they have no car and don’t
intend to buy one. They’d be laughed at by Boomer interviewers! Yet, in the coming 50 years the “walkable lifestyle” will increase. I know several of our
graduates who moved into downtowns and have no car whatsoever. (I am not making
this up!) They ride bicycles, use public transportation, hire taxis and get
cheap rental cars to take on long trips, or even borrow their friends’ cars.
They have crunched the numbers and say they save both money and the
environment. Boomers are bewildered at such ideas. We don’t consider you
grown-up if you don’t own a car. the walkable
lifestyle is a central feature of downtown life. What will this trend do to our
notion of church planting? I notice this
trend every time my students plant their dream church. Most envision a
neighborhood church—reaching out to those near at hand. Where do they get this?
Yet they “see” it when asked to let their vision loose. Perhaps more than all
other cultural trends, this one will affect the kind of churches we become in
the future. These younger people will either change the kind of church we
plant, or we will change these younger people’s values and vision.
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The bottom line is suburban
churches seem to be hitting their zenith.
We may soon see a cultural tipping point when the suburbs (and suburban
churches) enter a 50-year period of decline. The suburbs had 50 years to do
their thing. Now it is the downtown’s turn. Downtowns began their period of
decline in 1946 (when suburbs were invented). The next 50 years saw a period of
decline and deterioration for the down towns. Most downtown churches declined
along with their neighborhoods. These downtown churches became drive-back
churches for the moved-out members of the “greatest generation.” their boomer
children didn’t drive back. Instead, we founded sprawling suburban mega-centers
patterned after our beloved shopping malls. Now, 50 years after the founding of
the suburbs have seem to have reached their own zenith. The fashion is shifting
back down town. Will boomers be just like the downtown stores of the 70’s,
believing things will never change? Will Boomers never listen to the different
ideas about lifestyle and churches the newer generations cherish? These younger folk don’t dream of suburban
mansions and megachurches far away from the downtown.
They seem curiously satisfied with modest downtown apartments where they and
their neighbors “do life together.” When my students dream up church plants
they design churches that would appeal to the characters in Friends, Seinfield and Sex and the City… and
themselves. They dream of a church that is socially active in caring and
sharing with their community who “does life together.”
I wonder how the incorrigibly
suburban boomers will react to this massive cultural shift? How will suburban churches respond? How will
denominational church planting efforts “church daughtering
strategies” address this coming shift? How will Boomers respond to the dreams
of emerging generations to go downtown and start the kind of churches again the
boomers left long ago?
So, what do you think?
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