#264 | Sanctifying Suburbia: How Suburbia is Shaping Your Faith with Brian J. Miller

Today's episode is brought to you by Jack and Kathy Brothers. Not only do they support the ministry, they also make a mean fall chili.

That I really miss.

So I think typically when academics think about evangelicals, they tend to focus on issues like theological beliefs, particular political practices, maybe behaviors. And I think all that makes some sense, right? It's the sort of stuff that's in the news these days.

It's maybe the issues of the last couple decades, but my argument would be underlying that is your context, your environment is shaping all of that.

So who you're around, what you're seeing on a regular basis, what your priorities are daily, is going to affect behavior and belonging and beliefs in ways that evangelicals. But I also think others don't give a lot of credence to. We tend to think we're individual, autonomous agents who can make our own decisions.

You know, if I were to ask a group of students, oh, the environment doesn't shape me, you know, those advertisements don't do anything to me. You know, I make my own decisions. I'm an individual. Well, that's simply not true.

We're shaped in good ways as well, by the context and environments around us.

Welcome to Apollo's Watered in the Ministry Deep Dive podcast. We tackle the big questions few are willing to ask about ministry, culture, and the challenges you face every day.

Ministry is hard, and the road ahead isn't always clear. But with God, nothing is impossible.

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So let's dive deep together. Refresh your soul, renew your vision, and get ready, because it's watering time.

At Apollos Watered: the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics, we often say, water your faith, water your world. But watering your world means paying attention to where you actually are. Every one of our worlds are different.

I've ministered in entirely different environments. I'm sure you have, too. It might be in an urban environment, a small town. It could be in a suburb.

And each one of those environments affects how we see and understand our faith, especially when we're talking about the suburbs. The suburbs aren't just quiet, comfortable backdrops.

They carry deep assumptions about race, class, and culture and have long shaped evangelical faith and practice, sometimes in ways that don't fully reflect the gospel's call to justice and inclusion.

And those assumptions are being challenged now as suburbia rapidly changes, becoming more ethnically diverse, more pluralistic, and frankly, More complex. This means ministry in the suburbs can't simply replicate old models or. Or nostalgia.

It requires new listening, new humility, and a willingness to wrestle with hard questions. That's why I wanted to talk with Brian J. Miller and his book Sanctifying Suburbia.

It digs into how evangelical faith has been shaped by suburban culture and what it will take for the church to faithfully proclaim or engage the suburban future for the gospel of Jesus. Dr. Miller is professor of Sociology at Wheaton College, whose work is explores the crossroads of culture, place, and faith.

And through his research and writing, including his latest book that we're going to be talking about today, he challenges us to rethink how our environment shapes belief and practice and how the church might respond with faithful presence and amid shifting social landscapes. Brian, welcome.

Thank you, Travis. Great to be here.

Are you ready for the fast five?

Let's do it.

Okay, if sociology didn't work out for you, what was your backup plan? You get three choices. Professional juggler, jazz saxophonist, or reality show contestant.

The middle one works fine for me because I play the alto saxophone, so I'm not a great jazz musician, but I can play the saxophone, so that's the route I would go if I had those three options.

Awesome. Okay, how about this one? What's the most sociologist thing you've ever done at a party?

And bonus points if it involved observing people from behind a potted plant.

Oh, I don't know about behind potted plants, but as a sociologist, you definitely start looking for patterns, thinking about context, structures. That's what I do. I can't say I'm very great at parties.

I'm maybe not your favorite party guest for that reason, but we're definitely observing all the time.

Well, if you're observing and you're playing saxophone, I think you'd be a great party guest. So here we go. Number three. If you had to explain what you do to a fire five year old using only breakfast foods, how would you go about it?

Sociologists study groups and institutions. So breakfast foods. Maybe I'd look at your. Your plate, the where you're sitting. Think about that whole tableau. You can't use tableau with 5 year olds.

But the. The set of food in front of you, how does it all come together? I don't care so much about your pancakes, your bacon over there, your orange juice.

But what is it together as a whole? How does it add up to more than the sum of its parts? How does it all work as breakfast as opposed to just individual components?

I Like that. That's really good. All right. Now you've been given an unlimited budget to create your own coffee shop. What's it called?

And what's the weird signature drink that you have?

Name of a coffee shop? A drink.

I'm partial these last few years to something called Delgona Coffee, which is a drink where you sort of froth instant coffee and milk and sugar or water and sugar and sort of pour it over the top of your coffee. So it happen to be something with that as a name. I have no idea. I've never thought about opening a business. I'm a sociologist through and through.

I'd have to think more about that. I. I'm not sure if I'd go the punny route that works with a coffee name. That. That's going to take a lot more work.

A lot more work shopping here or Groups and Categories.

Yes, welcome to the Groups and Categories Coffee shop.

I don't know if people would know I'm selling coffee, but I could go with it.

Okay, okay, that's true, that's true, that's true. All right, here we go. Number five, last question. If you had a walk up song like a baseball player, what would it be?

What would you actually be confident and would you actually be confident enough to use it?

Yes, partly. I have two boys who both are playing baseball right now, so we have way too many conversations about walk up music.

It's maybe a little out of place for their typical music, but it's a great song. No one would know what I'm playing for walk up music. I would like that part.

Okay, let's get into the subject. Let's just start this off because I've looked over your cv. What is your fascination with suburbia?

It's something I realized when I was an undergraduate and then in graduate school. It's something I've thought about all my life but could never quite. Quite articulate as a subject or worthy of study.

I've always loved places, so even as a young kid played a lot of Sim City that came out when I was young. I would draw my own maps of communities. My mom grew up on the north side of Chicago in a couple different neighborhoods, including Rogers Park.

My dad grew up in the suburbs. I ended up living from a young age. I've spent almost all my life in suburbia.

And so trying to figure out what is this place is an interesting question. And then as I advanced academically, realized there's fewer people than I expected studying that.

There's tons of studies of cities and urban areas, which makes sense. They're exciting, they're dynamic. That's where a lot of the research universities are in the United States.

But the suburbs are where the majority of Americans live. Why don't we care about them as much? Or why don't we explore them as much and all their consequences?

Full disclosure. By the way, you said your mom's from Rogers Park. I lived in Rogers park for a couple of years, so I know that area pretty well. And talking about.

You're talking about suburban in some respect. Suburban missiology, Yes. I mean, I remember first time I ever heard a sermon on urban missiology with Ray Bakke.

He gave it at Moody Church one year, and I was blown out of the water. And I remember Tim Keller was talking about center church in the cities and things like that.

But it was my experience to see everyone I knew in the city that had young families.

For the most part, unless they had been there their entire lives, if they were there for any education, they would move out to the suburbs almost inevitably. And as you said, that's where a lot of people are living. Why haven't we studied that?

So this is why I really wanted to talk about your book, because you're right. I do think our. The places that we live actually influence our theological or gospel expressions.

So this book explores how evangelical faith and suburban culture have been deeply shaped by one another. How would you summarize the core ways that suburbia influences evangelical identity and practice?

So I think typically when academics think about evangelicals, they tend to focus on issues like theological beliefs, particular political practices, maybe behaviors. And I think all that makes some sense. Right? It's the sort of stuff that's in the news these days.

It's maybe the issues of the last couple decades, but my argument would be underlying. That is your context, your environment is shaping all of that.

So who you're around, what you're seeing on a regular basis, what your priorities are daily, is going to affect behavior and belonging and beliefs in ways that evangelicals, but I also think others don't give a lot of credence to, we tend to think we're individual, autonomous agents who can make our own decisions. You know, if I were to ask a group of students, oh, the environment doesn't shape me. You know, those advertisements don't do anything to me.

You know, I make my own decisions. I'm an individual. Well, that's simply not true. We're shaped in good ways as well by the contexts and environments around us. We like to think.

One of the examples I like to use is peer pressure. We usually say that's a bad thing, right? You don't want to be peer pressured into negative behaviors.

But there's tons of stuff in the Bible in the Christian faith about positive peer pressure.

Why wouldn't you want to be in a community that pushes you in the right direction or holds you accountable or is doing good things together so that you're not just out there as an individual having to make these tough choices or trying to summon the willpower and the ability on your own to do things?

Even what you said, though, about your students, where they said, you know, I'm an individual. Well, where that idea come from? Part that's. It's been shaped partly by the context you've been raised in. Where did that idea, even that come from?

Well, this is so important because as you said before, some. I don't think we realize how much our context actually influences how we actually see in theological expressions. For me, I realized this years ago.

I was pastoring in the inner city of Chicago on the Northwest side. And I had.

It was.

It was a Friday night. Our youth ministry had ended at like 9:00', clock, 9:30.

The kids, you know, many of them had come from like two hours by bus or they'd come from different places. So we'd go over to our house. I was a youth pastor, so we had to let him hang out for another hour or so.

And I remember on my back porch, I had 19 young men sitting on my back porch. And we were talking about what it means to be a man. And this is over 20 years ago now. And because I think 90% of them at the time didn't have dads.

And I realized I was trying to find ministry material for that, and I just couldn't find it because it was.

All of the publishing houses had developed it, which had been in the suburbs, had developed a material that was aimed explicitly at kind of the ideal family unit. And no one that I had there, or very few, I should say, had that ideal family unit. And it made it very much more difficult to approach.

So I had to create my own things. But you're right, these are the contexts that we often miss as we go through this.

So you write about, though, and I Thought this was very telling as I was reading your book, how the suburbs, as an attempt to create an alternate kingdom, one of the reasons that kind of created based on exclusion rather than grace. How should the church reckon with this tension between suburban comfort and gospel radicalism?

That is a great question, and it's underlying this book and in ways this book can't answer those questions. And this is more of an academic book trying to get some of the data, data and the patterns.

But it's been one that I've been thinking about for years now and is motivating me to write books like this.

My argument in the book is that evangelicals sort of adopted these suburban practices and living in the suburbs in ways, because it was in many ways sort of the default choice among largely white Americans after World War II. If you were to ask, where should you go? Where's the best place to raise a family? Where are their opportunities?

The suburbs made a lot of sense, if you care about nuclear families, for example. That's an idea in American life. Not just evangelicals, but more broadly, that's the best place for kids. It's safe, there's good schools.

They'll be encouraged there. Right. They're going to have a good future. And I think that evangelicals didn't ask good questions about that. They just sort of went along with it.

It's not that they had no choices. I want to argue, and I do in the book, that they made those choices. Right. This is a conscious choice. They could have selected to live elsewhere.

They're in New York, they're in Philadelphia, they're in Chicago, they're in Boston. But something happens by the second half of the 20th century that a lot of those institutions and people will. Now they're outside the city.

They've made that choice.

So what were those factors that really influenced the suburban growth to move from the city out to the suburbs? I mean, you mentioned World War II, but there were a lot of other factors that were involved. What were some of those?

Right. One is the. The piece of race and class. So cities are becoming more diverse in the beginning of the 20th century.

And so a lot of white Americans just broadly don't want to be around that diversity. So they start moving to the suburbs, which are wealthier and whiter. Part of it is housing demand.

After World War II, where is all the new housing being built? Well, it's out in the suburbs, and it's often far cheaper.

I was just reading a recent book on the history of the Levitt towns outside New York City and Philadelphia, and you could get a new house with a cheaper mortgage than renting in the city. Right. So if you're a young family, you're coming off of World War II. Why wouldn't you take that opportunity? That's where the growth is happening.

You don't even have to go into the city for many of those opportunities now.

So as we're talking about this, I mean, this is such a fascinating subject that we don't think about. Why do you think we just miss this? That we don't think about how our place influences our theological expressions?

I'm working with a colleague, Ben Norquist. We're working on another book, so this will be the one after this one, where we're trying to get.

Get at that theology of place that American Christians tend to have. And we would argue that for many evangelicals, place just isn't a relevant category. It's not something that we think about often.

One of the chapters at the end of Sanctifying Suburbia look at how Billy Graham thinks about places. And he talks very much about heaven being a real place. Right. There's something in the future. But his commentary about current places is mixed.

He has a lot of concerns about what's going on, particularly in cities. He doesn't say a whole lot about suburbs.

Even though much of his audience is moving that direction or is being influenced by that, it tends to follow. Like, if you had a list of priorities for evangelicals, like, your place or your context would be way down the list.

It's just not as important as maybe your personal faith, maybe evangelism, maybe creating your church community.

Do you think, though, that what Covid did, it seem to exacerbate people's feelings of being disconnected and there's this overwhelming desire to belong and be a part? And even though technology isolates, we are much more mobile. We've had this. But do you feel like people are.

Like, the pendulum's gone one way and now it's starting to swing back and people are saying, oh, we need to try to find place now? Are you seeing that in any of the data? I don't even know how you figure that out.

Yes, maybe. So if you look at Right after World War II, it's arguably when Americans are most geographically mobile.

They have data from the census that says something like almost 20% of Americans move every year in those early decades after World War II. I mean, just people are moving all over the place. Right. There's opportunities, it's relatively cheap. The cost of doing so is relatively low.

We're actually at a point now where it's a little bit over 10% of Americans move every year. That geographic mobility has slowed. But I don't know that that necessarily means people are more invested in their current surroundings.

Because with that technology you can self select or you can sort yourself into all sorts of interest communities that don't have to be geographical, proximate or in church communities, how much of that focus is on a neighborhood or a community as opposed to. No, we draw from a wider area or if people are watching via streaming or there's other ways to connect that.

Again, the geography often just doesn't even come up. Right. We're sort of indifferent to it. I wouldn't even say most of the time we're actively not thinking about it.

It's just, it's not a relevant category. Often for evangelicals schools, it is a relevant category.

Just it doesn't come to mind is what you're saying.

Right, right.

So, so here's the question that I have then. How are these suburban norms around race and class? Because let's get really honest.

Like I, I grew up in a small town of about 2,000 people in east central Illinois, and there were 14 churches, nine of which were Mennonite.

Right.

And one of the things that I used to, to do to notice about the churches is that it didn't come down to what people believed, no matter how much they protested. It came down to social class.

It came down to certain teachers went to this church, the poor went to that church, the really wealthy went to that church. And then there were delineations between them. But what you started noticing is people cared much more about who they belong to.

And so you see a little bit of this drawn out in your research is that people were not wanting that diversity. They were feeling threatened for whatever reason. And we're human creatures, okay? We want to belong.

So if we feel like people are not supporting the life that we know or speaking our common, common language or our common values, we're going to find places and surround ourselves with people that do. It's part of human nature.

So how would these suburban norms and around race and class actually shaped our evangelical theology and social Engagement, especially regarding racial reconciliation. Do you have any ideas on that? I know that wasn't the point of your research, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on it.

I think the tendency in suburban communities is to seek out people who are like you. So you choose a community and you think, oh, these are people like me. These are people who are like my kids. I could see myself living here.

This is where I could easily fit in and. Or belong. So if I'm. Let's just take the Chicago area as an example. If I'm moving to this area, I'm already here.

I have over 300 suburbs I could choose to live in. There's no shortage of options. And increasingly, they present some pretty stark options. Very different kinds of communities. This.

This was my dissertation research.

If you could have three suburban communities right next to each other that if you were to look, you know, zoom out, a lot of critics of suburbia would say, well, they're all the same, right? It's a bunch of subdivisions and strip malls and shopping centers, you know, just sort of pieced together and you don't know where you are.

You're driving from one place to another. Basically, all the same, right? When you start talking to people in those communities, they have some very different ideas about what they're about.

I interviewed local leaders, I dug into the local history, which was about 150 years at that point.

And these communities had made very conscious choices of, we want to go this direction to maybe encourage more industry and we're more working class, while the community next door says, no, no, no, we're a bedroom community that prizes stability and not much going on and sort of wealthy. And another community says, no, we want to be an edge city with lots of office and retail space.

And those are very conscious decisions of selecting, well, who's our neighbor? Who do we want to be? The way I've thought about this more recently is a lot of communities, they have a sense of who their ideal resident is.

They may not verbalize that, but in terms of the decisions they make about development or local ordinances or local programming, they sort of have a sense of, well, this person's ideal, but, you know, that potential person living here, that's not who we're after. Right. They may have to go live in a different suburban area. And I suspect there's some similar things going on in churches as well. Right.

We have a sense of, you know, we like people like us, right? We're internally focused.

But there's that dual focus in Christian congregations of also acting out and pushing out and engaging with people in society around you.

And his argument in that book is evangelicalism works because there's that tension of your internally working and you're pushing out and you're getting different signals, right? You're getting pushback, you're trying to figure this out.

But many congregations, when you look at their activities, what they spend their budget on, it's mostly internally focused, right? People show up like us, that works. But that pushing out part is hard. How do we encounter people who are different?

You mentioned more pluralistic communities.

If I were to look in DuPage county, there are over 500 congregations, religious congregations, including a new set of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim congregations that have just started in the last few decades. What do churches do about that?

There's very little conversation about it, let alone a sense of, well, this is how we might work with our neighbors or treat our neighbors or reach them for Jesus.

It's harder to do. I mean, most of the ministries that we saw and interacted with and I pastored in the suburbs, right where you're at.

I mean, I know exactly the difference between them. Having lived in the city and in the suburbs and spend most of my ministry and looking at it as a template for. Because Chicago is not so different.

I mean, Chicago is its own context, Chicago land. But other characteristics can be seen in other suburban communities where you see this spring up being played out as people continue to.

I mean, as we continue to diversify, the socioeconomic status increases for different peoples and people groups. We're going to see that diversity played out.

But one of the things that I thought was very just interesting as I was thinking about your literature, I mean, thinking about the book and then thinking about my own past world experience, is that many of the churches that look back and sounded like me, they were white, like I was all seem to be kind of fighting for the same kind of evangelical pie.

I remember one pastor that was on staff at one time, we had this couple come into the church that they had driven from the next suburb over, and it took them like 45 minutes to get to church. And they walked out the door and they were Christian and they were looking for a church. And he just kind of side to himself and he's like.

He made a comment under his breath because those are the kind of people we want here. And I knew what he meant by that. He didn't just mean, oh, you know, we want, you know, we want to reach people. We wanted wealthier. He was a lawyer.

They were already kind of discipled and they already fit in. That's the kind of person that he wanted to be. And my response was, is that, yes, that's great.

I'm not going to complain that they're here, but I really want to reach the community here of the people who don't know. And that looks very, very different. But we found that most of the programming was aimed at a certain idealistic, this idealistic framework.

And you notice this within your book. You talk about this and as though the culture is shifting. Evangelicals living in suburbs are becoming more ethnically and religiously diverse.

What challenges and opportunities does this demographic shift present for suburban churches?

To put it positively, I mean, there are a tremendous amount of opportunities to carry out the things that evangelicals say that they regularly care about. So to evangelize to people around them, to meet their spiritual needs, meet their physical needs.

Personally, I'm consistently challenged by the book of James, which has a lot to say about this.

Or I often come back to what's sometimes called Jesus's first sermon there in Luke 4, where he reads from Isaiah and sort of tells his home community, this is what I'm up to. And they don't particularly like it.

But what he talks about is serving the needy, freeing the prisoner, bringing sight to the blind in ways that we might not often think about in suburbia because we have this sense often that, oh, it's just wealthy people are self sufficient, right? They're going to show up at church and they've got particular concerns. But that's not true anymore in the suburbs, right?

The amount of people living in poverty in the suburbs has increased. People who face severe issues for food, housing, work and so on is on the rise.

And there's a tremendous opportunity for churches who are already there, who have often been there for decades, depending on what part of the country you're in, maybe even centuries already as congregations, to say, hey, we can help. We want you in our community. We want to be welcoming.

It's not just enough that we would welcome you in the doors on Sunday morning, but we maybe we even want you as a neighbor, right? We'd be okay with you going to school with our kids. We'd want to have a long term relationship with you.

We want to work with you, we want to learn from you.

You know, one of the things you mentioned as you were talking, I was thinking about one of the books. Is it Gerardo Marti's book? He's a sociologist. They've written a book, he and another sociologist. One is at Davidson and the other one's at Calvin.

Right. And they're talking about the business. Was Robert Schuller in the business of Christianity? How he took marketing techniques and he really.

To make the church more relevant. It's so far. I'm reading the book right now. I hope to have him on the show. Great conversation. Yes.

But what I'm looking at is as these churches are thinking about how to engage the communities around them, to do that is going to take a different shift.

I mean, what I think what you're saying, and tell me if I'm wrong here, is as suburbia continues to diversify, we're going to have to have a different gospel expression. One that I think is much more holistic and biblical in that it fully orbs out.

It doesn't just assume things anymore about where people are at and they're self sufficient, that we can actually be able to truly engage where they're at. Is that a accurate assessment or no?

Yeah, that sounds right. It's one. It's paying attention more to your local context. But then I would argue it's be.

It's living into those ways that I think the church was intended to be from the beginning. If we read about the New Testament church, they were unique because they were cutting across social class.

They were including people from different ethnic and geographic backgrounds. They were doing things in ways that the Romans, the Greeks around them were not. Right. That's why they stood out.

Where you mentioned that Jesus was walking three to four miles per hour, but in suburbia it's 50 to 60 miles per hour.

Yes.

It's a different. It's a different rhythm of life. It's a different rhythm of life.

But as we continue to do this, as we see this, you talk about this moral minimalism of suburban community life. How does this kind of ethos of moral minimalism impact our discipleship, our accountability and spiritual formation in suburban evangelical contexts?

And conflict is difficult. And that's not why people are in suburbia. When conflict did arise, the suburbanites tended to lean on third parties.

So like an example that they use, the sociologist uses in the book, you know, let's say your neighbor's having a party, you think the music is too loud. Instead of being able to go next door and just say, hey, you know, do you mind turning it down? You know, this is a neighborhood.

You'd call the police and say, well, there's a local noise ordinance, right, and hope that somebody would step in and address it, but not you. You would not have a conversation necessarily with your neighbor face to face about that.

And so thinking about the church context, are we willing to have the kinds of relationships where we're vulnerable, where you know each other? If you're living at three to four miles per hour, you just don't do things fast. It's about getting to know each other.

That comes from a documentary NT Wright's quoted in there in a documentary called Godspeed, which I recommend, it's available online, where an American pastor, he's in Scotland and he's assigned to a local parish. And it's very much a small town where everybody knows everybody, the houses all have names.

And he as an American just sort of wants to come in and deliver this great sermon every week. And he keeps being cautioned of, no, you need to get to know people, people.

And once you know the people and you know the community, then that sermon is really going to be you and you talking to the people like you would to a friend or some of you, you know, as opposed to more of a, well, I'm lecturing or I'm providing you some of the knowledge that you may not have. And so at the end of the documentary, I hope there's a follow up at some point.

He comes back to Washington state, which I think is where he's originally from, and says, how am I going to live this out now in an American context where it's fast, people don't know their neighbors, they may not be interested. But that's sort of the hopeful note it ends on, well, why can't we do this here as well?

Well, I wonder if.

So I'm in a community that's growing rapidly, houses are going up left and right and it, it intrigued me and drew me in because this exact mindset because so many of the churches that came in, many of the megachurches, and they grow really quick and I know after looking at some of Ryan Burgess data basically says, hey, almost all these, all the mega churches, they basically captured a wave. They're not growing in blighted or Stagnant communities. They're growing in places where everybody moves. Well, good for them. Okay, that's.

That's great. But there is kind of an expression, you know, when the tide comes in, all the boats rise. So all the churches should grow that are here.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm saying is let's just make sure that we have it in context, because as that continues to happen and it grows, it can't grow forever.

Eventually it has to solidify as that community. It's no longer building, it's no longer growing. It goes past that.

And these churches have to find real root to develop these relationships in the communities.

What I find is that many of us, for a variety of reasons, and Kristen Smith talks about this, the mobility, the digital revolution, these are all kind of forces that create this big web that have all kind of captured us in various ways and. But we don't have the ability or we are losing the ability to develop really relational capital with the people around us.

And some of our gospel expressions have been so reduced that it's much more transactional because we just kind of, you know, go on and like, okay, I'm going to go on to the next person. Go on the next person. We don't take the time to develop that any longer because we really. We don't know how. I think that's part of it.

Do you think, though, that this. This shift that we're starting to see within suburbia is going to allow for more of those relational elements to be developed? Or No.

I guess I don't like being in the business of prediction. So I guess I get it. We'll have to wait and see. My sense is that could happen. I'm thinking of.

My previous book with Robert Brennaman was about buildings and church buildings. And one of the reasons we got into this is because both of us had experiences growing up in Christian groups that said buildings were not important.

Right. It's just, you know, a church is a gathering of people, right? And wherever the people are, God's there and so on.

And yet I think about that building that we meet in, or what you want to construct in suburbia or the place you're renting, how does that shape you when you worship? So if I'm going to walk into the typical suburban evangelical church, what are we communicating to people? What are they feeling?

What should they focus on?

And there's opportunities there to really make something unique, really to anchor yourself as opposed to having, you know, more, maybe a more Anonymous multifunctional structure that could be anything. Right?

So that movement of several decades ago of lowering those barriers to getting people into church, that's understandable, but it does something to the settings where, well, what keeps people there then, right? If. If church A looks the same as church B down the street and you're. You describe this wave, right?

When that wave ends, well, what's to stop them to going to the other building and thinking about, well, what makes you distinct? What's in this setting, in this place that would draw people in, that would help them to encounter a God?

And not just verbally, but sort of structurally, physically, relationally, that anchor people in a community, in a setting.

What's the name of that book?

That's called Building Faith.

Building Faith.

I'm really curious about that, because one of the things that I remember doing research on years ago was that just how architecture was designed, I mean, much church architecture and these great cathedrals were designed to facilitate a certain view of God. And of course, a lot of those places are vacant now.

But even what we're seeing is so many of these different churches, they're becoming mosques and Hindu temples and apartment buildings and discotheques and things like that. And that, you know, that leads to a greater question, like what. What is happening? What is happening culturally?

What's going on with religious structures? What. What are all these different things that are underneath the service? One of the things that I thought you. You brought to the.

The table and talking about, you talked about an evangelical cultural toolkit, or eventual toolkits shaped by place and culture. Can you explain what you mean by an evangelical cultural toolkit?

So a cultural toolkit, in sociological terms, is the sort of behaviors and presuppositions and ideas we'd bring to a social situation.

But Americans also regularly hold this idea that marriage is a covenant bond and it's meant to be enduring, and it's supposed to go through sickness and different conditions. Right.

And her work was looking at as a couple in a marriage, how do you negotiate those two possible toolkits, which we all kind of hold often within us, and how do you deploy them in different situations?

So the way I think about toolkits here regarding suburbia is evangelicals have a particular way of engaging with the world that is partly about their theological beliefs, partly about their belonging, but it's also about their practices. And how does that get overlaid with or sort of coincide with suburbs? And as I argue in the book, I think a lot of it overlaps quite a bit, right?

That sort of emphasis on family, that emphasis on individual lives, that emphasis on. On single family homes in ways that make that intersection of the two. It makes sense in some ways, right? It's an easy mix, but it does.

That cultural toolkit can change over time. Swidler argues that what's particularly interesting for sociologists is when your cultural toolkit doesn't quite meet the new situation.

She calls these unsettled times. So you've got this way of approaching the world. Most of us are on default.

You know, it's just sort of information goes into your head, you process experiences, but then you're hit with something new or something you haven't encountered. You think, wait, does my current toolkit fit the situation I'm now in? Maybe it does, but maybe you need to adjust it.

Maybe that toolkit needs to be reworked. Maybe there's ideas and practices to borrow from others that could work.

As those toolkits continue to be shaped and reshaped. What is the. The church's role in helping fill those toolkits?

That's a great question. Often I think it comes down to sort of formation and discipleship. What are we helping people become as Christians?

So once you become part of the faith, you've acknowledged that Jesus is Lord, you want to be part of these Christian communities and congregations. Who do we want to be? Who do we think God wants us to be?

Another one of the ideas I often use that Jesus mentions all the time is what could the kingdom of God look like in our suburban settings? So, you know, it's not here yet, clearly the full kingdom of God. But Jesus says, in some ways it's here, right? It's arriving.

It's with me, I'm starting something. And so just to imagine ourselves, like, what would our churches look like if the community of the kingdom of God was fully realized?

What would be different? Would people talk differently? Would it feel different? Would it smell different? What does that experience like?

If the kingdom of God was fully here or in our communities, what if a suburb was fully realized as the kingdom of God?

I'm not making any claims that heaven will look like a suburb city and so on, but if we're serious about that kingdom of God idea, where is it breaking in?

In typical suburbia, you know, if someone were to follow me around, hopefully in a research way and not a creepy way, you know, would they see that God is present? Right. Would they see things that look different, that as a Christian I'm committed to or does.

Do I just look like every other suburbanite who's sort of doing their suburban things?

And maybe occasionally some Christian things break in here or there, or it's more of a private faith commitment that, yeah, you kind of do on the side or you do on Sunday morning. Where does the kingdom of God show up in our suburban communities and churches?

I think we have examples of it, but we're not trained often to think that way of, no, this is something new, different, a new possibility.

What I'm seeing. And again, you said you're not in the business of predictions.

But what I'm seeing is that it seems to be that the pendulum went one way for a period of time. And I feel like Covid has accelerated some things to move back.

All I hear right now are questions of formation, of discipleship, of counter liturgy, but no one knows how exactly how to implement that according to the realities that people face. Because many of them have been conditioned to just have church be an add on.

And I think Christian Smith has really kind of argued for that, that it's there, but it's been, in his terminology, crowded out by all of these different elements.

However, as I do talk to so many different pastors, they're coming back to the idea of health, they're coming out back the idea of being holistic, and they're starting to identify these different cultural forces that are influencing them. Now, again, that's not across the board. I'm sure that the pendulum is still over here in many different contexts.

But I'm hearing more and more of this, which I think is actually a good thing, because people are starting to say, wait a minute, what is this that God is calling us to really be and do? Who are we becoming in the process of this? And I see some are done with this idea of kind of a transactionary view of God.

They're saying, no, God wants the entirety of our being. Who are we becoming in the middle of this? I'm seeing a lot of authors right on that and I think the churches will catch up.

But as we're talking about this.

We.

See there's been historically kind of an anti urban sentiment with evangelicals and having kind of fled cities. You talk about the white flight that took place over a period of time.

Some people don't like to look at it in that Period, or in that way, or that terminology, that description. But there still is a reality of that kind of that present anti urban sentiment that is still within the church.

What does that mean for the church's mission in urban and suburban settings today? As people have fled, they're still out in suburbia. Do we see even a difference anymore? Or are we seeing a regulation that's there?

I mean, what context? How do we do we view these two very different contexts?

Yeah, I think it's tied to something you were just talking about there. Thinking about that maybe recent trend towards formation and discipleship.

My caution would be how much of that formation and discipleship is primarily individualistic. So it's about forming individual Christians, which is good. People should be formed as individuals.

But how do we do that communal piece where people have a sense that we are growing not just by myself, but we're growing together. The kingdom of God is not just me as an individual, it's us as a church, a body of Christ doing something different.

So if I'm in a city and I'm in a suburban area, you can do that sort of individualistic formation in either place. You could do that in a small town. The context are going to look different.

But when I get excited about thinking about churches and suburbs or in cities or in other places, I tend to think of, well, what does that church as a whole look like in terms of formation and discipleship? What would mark them as a full community? Is a congregation just a collection of individuals or is it more of. It's greater than the sum of its parts.

It's able to do things as a group or an institution that individuals just can't do. They don't have the resources, they don't have the capacities. Using the metaphor of Paul and the body. They have the pieces. Right.

But you've got to put them together so the body can operate well. So if we're thinking about suburbs and cities, how come churches aren't even interacting with each other across those two different contexts? Right.

There's plenty of congregations, say in Chicago, in the Chicago suburbs. Do they ever talk? Do they ever converse? Do they ever share what God is doing in their communities and neighborhoods?

Do they share what their needs are? Or are they more sort of inwardly focused on? Well, this is what my congregation needs. This is what we're facing right now, that can be good.

But that bigger sense of what's God doing across Chicagoland, I don't know exactly what that would look like or how that gets put together. When you've got all these different Christian traditions and different groups.

But that's often when I think about this kingdom of God being this linking of people across congregations, neighborhoods where we realize we've got common ground. But yes, we can help each other, we can learn from each other.

We have pieces of what we know about God, what we experience about God, what we're seeing that we don't even know we're missing. Until you have some of those conversations, you have some of those interactions, and.

You can't have those interactions just out of nowhere. It has to be somehow developed.

I know having pastored in the, both in the city and in the suburbs, like I saw attempts of people trying to do that, but it became very paternalistic and where one was dependent upon the other and then it wasn't a reciprocal relationship. To do that requires a lot of understanding, it requires a lot of listening, it requires a different attitude shift the paradigm shift.

It's not enough just to have people meet. I mean, that's a great step. But to actually develop the relational component takes a lot of, like you said, listening, observing, analyzing.

And there's so much that people are doing today that it's like, I just don't have time to do that. They're so caught up in making, you know, they're market driven in some respect. It's time is money. Let's go.

I've got to get, I've got Sundays coming, I've got this. I don't have time to develop on that kind of thing right now. I've got money.

And what strikes me in that is we, we've lost this sense of what does a long term commitment look like? So how do you plan for ministry possibilities 5, 10, 15 years down the road when everybody wants answers now?

Or you can say, well, I can fill out my preaching schedule, you know, maybe for a series, the next six months, maybe the school year. But where is that congregation going over 5, 10, 15 years is a hard question for any organization, right?

But be able to think that way and think, yeah, what do we actually want to aim at? Not just short term, let's help people be formed and be discipled. But 10 or 15 years, what are we going to be known for?

As you noted, those relationships don't happen overnight, right? You have to plan for them, you have to think about them. You have to think about what you're willing not to do in the meantime, right?

Because you've decided to, to go that direction. What are those opportunity costs? But having those conversations would be a good step, right?

A starting point of saying, yeah, we're here, there are possibilities. Is God asking us to do those things? And if so, how do we start down that path?

Well, this is where I find so much is driven by the financial constraints of our situations. And looking at how people have bypassed.

In our digital world, people have so many people have bypassed traditional institutions to find a quick listen and their audience and people.

And so many people are driven by a particular view of status and accomplishment that the suburbs then affords them that opportunity to fulfill that need. So they're not thinking long term, they're thinking quick, how do I grow? How do I do this, how do I do that?

But I think what we're seeing over time is that whether we realize it or not, we're intentionally or unintentionally forming our people or catechizing them to a certain view of life. And this is where the religious structures, I think, play a huge role.

Because we may not even realize that we're perpetuating a certain kind of mindset. But I find that people just are.

That even as they look to the scriptures, they might say, hey, I'm looking to the word of God to do everything I'm doing.

But you still have underneath it a religious structure that moves you to a certain kind of gospel expression that is very individual based, that is very much catering to a market theology. You're not thinking about formation over the long haul. You're thinking about how to keep people there over time.

Because some people are so individually focused and they're so allergic to some type of accountability or long term commitment.

However, I think as if churches were to choose to do something else, I think people would respond to that because I don't think people have a problem giving up something for if they think it's worthy. I think that many within the church don't see it as worthy.

A lot of it strikes me as how do you cast that vision that would capture people's attention that say, God has this long term view? The story of scripture, the story of God's people, is a long term process, right?

If you look at Old Testament through the New Testament, we're talking decades, centuries of formation. How do you encourage people to buy into that one? Another opportunity might be that for many suburban communities, they're aging, right?

This is another feature of suburbs. And population growth is slowing in many parts of the United States. So take Robert Shuler, for example.

There are suburbs now that are 50, 100, 150 years old, where there is a history there, right. They're not quick growth anymore. Some still are. There still are those communities. But what would it look like to participate here in the long term?

We used to only think about some of these questions about cities, perhaps, right? Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New York. They have this long history.

You've got the congregations that have been there for hundreds of years, but why not be the congregation in your community that's there for 50, 75, 100 years, that is faithful, that's having that long term vision that's saying we're here for the long haul, we'll be here for the community. Yes, things will change, our pastor will change, the context will change things around us, but we're still here following God.

That's not an easy reality, though, that I think that's not a vision too many people want to think about. We're in an instapot society, not a crockpot. And everyone wants instantaneous results and they feel that result.

I mean, even now you can go online and post some video and get a million views on that video. So people want results now. They don't want to build. The slow and steady wins the race again.

This is where that market kind of economy has influenced our theological expressions. And I think that we have catered to that to a point where we've reduced the gospel and stripped it.

So now that it's completely crowded out or become irrelevant, I think we have to recapture some of that countercultural language that pushes back against some of these reducing powers, if you will, that are continually trying to get us to reduce the gospel and shorn it of its countercultural peace, that we need to really rethink it. Let me try to move into a slightly different direction here as we've talked about churches in the suburbs.

But how can pastors and church leaders learn from your findings to avoid kind of the suburban environment which has a tendency to lull their people to sleep amid this kind of suburban comfort that they find all around them?

A great point to start at would just be to listen. Listen to people in your congregation, in your community, of what are they facing, what do they need?

What are their fears, what are their hopes when they come to church, when they're living out their faith on a weekly basis, what does that look like to them in a suburban setting? I mean, we have ideas about this, right?

And a lot of the books and the programming is sort of, as you mentioned earlier, sort of pushed at a particular idealistic model, perhaps. But how do we be responsive to the people around us? In sociology, we would often call this need based assessment. Right? What does the community need?

And then you provide it as opposed to you give what you think it needs and then you find out that need may or may not be there. Right? You may be great at doing it.

But if the community doesn't need that or it's not, it's not enticing to them, was it worth the time and the effort? That's one point to start at. And broadly, it's a difficult task. But how do we lean into being truly present in our community?

If you're drawing people from a fairly broad geographic area, how do you be a church community? How do you be a congregation that is for your community, not just broadly for God, but, you know, what does that look like?

Does that like, look like being involved in maybe the local school district? Does it mean partnering with some other ministries that are local? What is it exactly that would help you be part of the community?

People would say, yes, God is moving here in my community. I see it in the lives of not just individuals, but I see it in the lives of this congregation. Who really cares about this being a place.

That is, that is, it's such an important thing, I think, that we have been so disembodied for so long that you can't continue to do that. I interviewed Mark Sayers, who's kind of a cultural theorist, he's a pastor out of Australia and wrote this book called Platforms to Pillars.

And in it he's examining what he calls the platform mentality. And the problem with platform mentality is that it, it leads to certain ideas of life but that can't meet real world needs.

And at the end of the day, we are going, we have to be embodied. You know, you can do a lot of stuff online, we all do, but there's this overwhelming shadow of loneliness that's cast over so many people.

As, as we do increase in our technological understanding of different things, there is a greater isolation because we've been saturated. As Neil Postman argued. And so it becomes very imperative for the church to reconsider some of these environments or theology as a place.

I'm very curious on how your work's going to play out. Is it going to draw on any.

And then I know you're looking at data, not necessarily a philosophical idea behind it, but is there kind of a Wendell Berry idea underneath some of the research that you're doing?

We do engage with Barry a bit.

What we thought about often was like, what kind of metaphors could we use that would help people think about what communities of Christian communities could look like in places? And so we came up with four that were in the literature of different scholars, theologians have come up with over the years, the last couple decades.

And the four we have is land is gift, Land is places as gift. So these are things that God gives to his people. And with gifts, you want to steward them, you want to use them wisely. And they are gods, Right.

They are not ours, ultimately. So that's how we should treat places. Another metaphor or theme was land is sacrament. So its places are opportunities of where you encounter God.

Right. So in your daily life in suburbia, what would that look like? Where do people have opportunities to find God?

That may be more spontaneous, but also how do you set up structures and places that help people do that, that reduce that distance between our suburban settings and the kingdom of God? The third one we had was Land as Kin or places as Kin.

This comes out of more indigenous Christian theology where places were partnering with places as humans, Right? God made both. And instead of saying, well, humans are just above that. So places and earth.

And, you know, that doesn't really matter in the long run because humans matter of all creations working together to glorify God in ways that we should partner with it. Right. It's not we're just taking care of it or in charge of it. It's all of creation is going to be redeemed.

And then the last one was land or place as home. So thinking of God as being the homemaker, he set up earth as to be a home for his people. He wants to dwell with his people. How do we.

How do we think about homemaking as Christianity? Christians now, not just in individual homes, but sort of all of earth being home for God and his people.

That I'm looking forward to when that book comes out. What's the. When are you hoping to have that done?

That is a great question.

We're in the work of revising things with Intervarsity, but the title we've got Right now is working with Is Every Somewhere Sacred Rescuing A Theology of Place in the American Imagination.

I look forward to reading that when it comes out as we're talking about it. And I want to kind of finish up with this.

If they wanted to get this book, what would you hope that they would gain from reading Sanctifying Suburbia?

A couple things. One, you've mentioned a number of times just how much place and context shapes who we are. I think we tend to underplay that.

As a sociologist, I'm always thinking about that. The settings that we're in, often the structures that we've set up for ourselves shape us more than we know.

Our ability as individuals is limited to push back against those structures. You can, but it's hard, right. When you set up these structures, these institutions, they tend to be formative.

So if we think more about how places, buildings, congregations shape us, there's a huge level of responsibility there to try to do that well, to really dig into that and think these are long standing. They're going to outlive us as individuals. They have the power to shape people.

The other thing it would have to do with the cultural toolkits is that evangelical cultural toolkits are not necessarily fixed. They have developed over time. That's. I spent a lot of time in that.

The books are saying, like, how did evangelicals come to the point where they have this cultural toolkit? Whereas now we can say this is what it is, but that's not locked in. Situations change, the world changes around us. Christians change to some degree.

What toolkit would we want people in our congregations to have when they encounter places and issues and their faith? Do we even think of that as sort of the bundle of things that they get in their faith? Right. A package?

Or how do we deploy them as opposed to thinking of them maybe more as, like, things that are set. Like you've got your doctrines which are just set right, and you can just sort of say them.

But a lot of the Christian life is figuring out, how do I put this into practice? How do I deal with the situation in my family or with my neighbor, in the workplace or in my community? And that toolkit is adaptable.

We can pull on it, we can use it, we can work with it together. And when we're thinking about formation and discipleship, how do we do that communally?

You can develop some spiritual disciplines. You can address some of the issues that suburbs raise. I would say that's not enough. Why do we aim just for individuals?

Why don't we work on this together? Why can't we be the sorts of places, as you mentioned, sort of countercultural? They're different. In suburbia, I go to church because it's.

It.

It pushes me to a different kind of life. God is asking different things of us than just to live the nice, comfortable Christian life.

Those are good thoughts. And I'm going to say that's probably the water bottle that we're going to leave people with today. It's a fascinating book. It really is.

And it's something that I think contributes well to the conversation, especially for us to see how our environments shape us. I do recommend it for other people that are pastors that are out there. You need this in your library, especially if you're in suburbia.

If you're not in suburbia, probably not as much, but it does help you understand just kind of the psychological or even the structures that are underlying it. And actually giving shape to a gospel expression in a given place and helps you to see what breathes and what doesn't breathe.

I just wanted to thank you, Brian, for coming on the show and sharing with us.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us.

For this conversation with Brian J. Miller. It's simple. The place we live affects our gospel expression.

We all know this. But if we really want to live.

Out the fullness of what God has for us, we need to expand our horizons, which means traveling, interacting with people from different environments. Because where we live might actually inhibit what God has for us in his word. There are so many things that affect.

Us in ways we don't even realize. But thankfully, God is bigger and he.

Wants us to grow. He wants to form us in greater and deeper ways.

While this week we talked about our how our physical environment shape us, I want you to tune in next week because we're going to be talking about our digital environments.

Join me next week as I chat with Brett McCracken, who's back on the show to talk with his colleague Ivan Mesa about their book Scrolling Ourselves to Death and join our next Blueprint cohort that's coming up really soon. It's based on my book, Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

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