Dysturbia

A few months ago, I returned to (suburban) Chicago for a quick visit to see old friends.  I stayed with a cherished brother, Erik (<- not his real name, and no, it's not Eric).  For breakfast, we went to a place in downtown Wheaton that I quite enjoyed, a breakfast nook next to the Masonic Temple.  We entered, had a seat, and as we tucked into our breakfast he looked around and told me, "Henry, you know what I just realized?"

"What?" I asked in response.

"This place is sooooo white!"

You see, earlier this year Erik intentionally moved into an apartment complex occupied mostly by immigrants and refugees, and all of them poor.  I must admit that the first time I visited (January), I was slightly wary.  I was sure everyone living in the area was nice and all, but you never really know.  But I've come to realize that there's a conviviality there that I rarely see elsewhere.  Nonetheless, his comment about the "white-ness" of the breakfast nook was a little bit odd.

A few weeks ago I had a phone conversation with Erik.  One thing changed in a few months between me meeting him and the phone call - I found a new church home, and this one in downtown New York in the heart of Chinatown.  Of course, there are many Chinese at my new church, but perhaps what stood out most was the socio-economic diversity.  I grew up in suburban Chinese churches where everyone was expected to graduate high school, get respectable degrees, and - above all else - live comfortably and ensure that their descendants do the same.  Although most of the people I know at my new church live in Flushing or Brooklyn, neither are considered "suburbs" in the real sense of the term.

What I've noticed is that in suburbia, it seems that our problems which in reality are trivial are magnified to significance.  Instead of finding good jobs, we're looking for ideal jobs; instead of doing well in school, we're gunning for the top.  And that is not to say that ideal jobs or gunning for the top are wrong, per se.  But why is it such a huge deal?  How ideal will ideal jobs go?  And how high can you climb in the employment/academic ladder anyways?  I think a lot of us have this view that if only we climb high enough, if only we work hard enough, if only we gun for something worthy enough, then there will come this ethereal moment where the heavens open up, and a dove descends and all we have done has been vindicated, and then we can chill.  There's another word for that: dreaming.  Perhaps that's why Stanley Hauerwas, in a talk given at a conference on youth ministry, said that one of the worst things we can teach our youths is that if you only work hard, you'll get what you want.  That simply is not true, and the once powerful American economy is slowly waking up to the fact that working hard doesn't always lead to streets of gold.  Many times, life just deals you the worst hands possible.

The same, I suppose, applies with spiritual issues.  The suburban mentality easily leads to the supposition that spiritual problems are ultimately personal.  After all, in the suburbs, what could go wrong except in our personal lives?  The logic then continues: if only we followed God to the "T", then God has to bless us.  If only our church follows the right doctrine, the right commands of God, and enforces it well, then God must bless us with the requisite numbers.  But note the problem: it's always about how humans are the ones doing what's right.  We fail to realize that we can only do good because God is good first.  We know what love is, and can dare to love, because God first loved us.  We know what righteousness is and we can strive for it, only because God has revealed righteousness to us through his Son.  We know what the Church looks like, because Christ described it first to his disciples.

But if we forget the ordering, we devolve into this prosperity-gospel tendency of "if we do this, then God must respond this."  And so we make a huge deal out of personal piety, often imposing personal pietism on others.  When things go south on others, we assume something bad must've happened to them.  This is, by the way, not a new problem - some of Job's friends ran into this theological problem as well.  In today's context, how would that look?  When others struggle with employment or poverty, we easily assume that they're not hardworking enough.  If only they were as hardworking as I was, then they wouldn't be in such dire straits.  When others struggle with schoolwork, they must not be as smart as I, because if they were, they wouldn't be doing so poorly (meaning, B+).  What if we started to think, "God gave me the gift of knowledge and wisdom so I can get A's... why don't I pass it forward to help others get A's too"?  God gave me a good job... how about finding ways so that others can have one too?

The problem with suburbia is that it is a land of the self-made, the land of the middle-class.  It is a blessing for people to be self-made, for people to climb by virtue of their tenacity and hard work to change the course of their lives and that of their descendants.  But if we impose the self-made-ness of suburbia onto our Scriptural lenses, then we become like Gary North and insist that the Scriptures are ardently libertarian (economically-speaking).  The poor are that way because they are lazy.  It peeves me when conservative evangelicals make absolutely heretical claims because many view the world from "self-made" lenses.  One evangelical scholar remarked once about how allowing immigrants into the country encourages laziness in immigrants themselves!  What?!  But it makes sense from self-made eyes.  After all, my dad didn't do that.  His dad didn't.  Why should we do so?

But the bigger problem with the self-made suburban hermeneutic is that it rises and falls with the economy.  Poverty is increasing in suburban areas, and unemployment among the younger sectors of the population is increasing.  At the same time, costs of higher education are increasingly prohibitive.  Increasing healthcare costs decreases incentives for people to retire earlier.  And churches are feeling the pinch.  The suburban Crystal Cathedral is bankrupt, buoyed by the charisma of their former pastor, Robert Schuller, but hobbled by decreased giving due to the recession.  Churches are closing, many of them due to giving alone.

The solution is not to add more church programs to make church more attractive for people.  Church programs, after all, only cater to what people want or think they need, not necessarily what they actually need.  I have never heard of a church program that rebukes people, for example.  The solution is for the church to teach the world what it means to live rightly in the world.  And that means that the church must teach that we are not self-made, but created to do good works by God!  There is a difference!  The former makes no distinctions between what's right or wrong.  The latter is insistent on the pursuit of God's righteousness.  The former says, "It's a recession, I better give less money to the church."  The latter says, "I still have a job!  How can my church help so others can have one too?"  When we view this world from a God-created perspective, we stop seeing the world in terms of our actions motivated by our circumstances.  Only then can we truly become powerful witnesses in a world in increasingly-desperate need.