Missional Church in Suburbia: Are You Kidding?

Todd Hiestand, a fellow PBU alumni, and Gary Alloway co-lead the following breakout session:

Are you fed up with suburbia?  Don’t hate, dig deep and explore its culture.  Engage it to find ways to bring the gospel.
Consumerism is killing suburban culture.
The suburbs are made to be comfortable.  Theologically, Comfort is the god of suburbia.
There is very little cultural awareness in suburbia.  It is a-cultural.
In suburbia your identity is based on somewhere "other"; i.e., living in a suburb you always tell a stranger you live in Philadelphia or "near New York City" (I say that one all the time).
We drive by the poverty of suburbia to get to the poverty of the city.  We help the city out…we need to help suburbia out…by:

• Canvasing the town—mission is right in front of you, O suburbanites!
• Pointing theology outward: our preaching must point outward into the community.
• Going on a local missions trip focused on local mission.
• Asking non-profits about how to best serve the community.
• Fostering small groups that enhance locality.
• Remembering, God is present long before we ever get there—we must partner with what God is already doing.  If we don’t know our communities we don’t know what God is doing.

Todd Hiestand and Gary Alloway gave an excellent talk on how to be missional in suburbia.  You can read more of Todd’s thoughts on suburbia at toddhiestand.com and subtext, while Gary blogs at There And Back Again.

An aside: Gary’s thought concerning identifying with the other has a colonial/colonizer aspect to it.  In his Marxist history of colonisation Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes this as attaching culture to the metropole.  Areas like Vermont or the Amish Country are so beloved because they have untied themselves from the metropole and become their own regions, cultures, and found a unique identity apart from the dominant discourse.