Interview with Al Hsu Dave Goetz

For half a century many Americans have sought the Good Life in suburbia. We wanted to explore the impact of suburban cultural values on Christian faith and practice, so we  tapped two expert thinkers, writers and editors. Al Hsu is an associate editor at IVP Books and the author of IVP’s The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty. Dave Goetz is a veteran editor and writer whose latest book is Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul (HarperSanFrancisco). Al and Dave live near each other, but the following dialogue was conducted virtually.

YouthWorker Journal: What motivated both of you to explore the topic of faith in the suburbs?

Al Hsu: I’m a lifelong suburbanite. I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, not far from the country’s first indoor shopping mall, and I now live in the Chicago suburbs. Some years ago, when interacting with friends from rural and urban contexts, I began to see the different ways that suburbia had shaped me, for good and for bad — ways that I didn’t even notice because it was so much the air I breathed. I was grateful for the opportunities of suburbia but was chagrined about the sense of privilege and entitlement I often found in myself. So I wanted to understand suburbia on its own terms. The better we understand how suburbia affects us, the better we’ll be able to affect suburbia for God’s kingdom purposes.

Dave Goetz: I grew up in rural communities on the Northern Plains, and so when I moved to the Chicagoland ‘burbs, I felt, emotionally, the change in values.

YWJ: How did your approaches differ? Or maybe better: What do each of you like or disagree with concerning the other author’s book?

Hsu: Dave and I both say that Christians shouldn’t flee the suburbs, that we can find authentic Christian spiritual life here. We both emphasize the fact that Christians should live intentionally and Christianly in suburbia. Suburbia needs Christians, and I’m encouraged that there are more of us addressing the topic these days.

This is an oversimplification, but Dave has focused on the psychology of suburbia, while I’m particularly interested in the history, geography and sociology of suburbia. He’s done a lot of thinking about how suburban people get caught up in issues of status and comparison and the like. A lot of my research has been about the structural and socio-cultural forces, like physical land-use patterns or consumer branding, and their practical implications for our community and church life.

Goetz: I think we both are trying to grapple with what it means to love Jesus amid enormous wealth and comfort.

I wanted to capture an emotional or psychographic niche — a way of thinking that shapes attitudes and behaviors; a spiritual geography. While I read much of the literature on the sociology of the suburbs, I spent more time reading the monastics from the Middle Ages onward. Death by Suburb is a book about spirituality. I also wrote the book primarily in the first person singular and with a sarcastic edge. A pastor in his thirties said the book reminded him of “The Simpsons,” the TV sitcom. I wanted to mock what I held so dear while at the same time holding out hope for living more reflectively. I wanted the book to provoke a response.

YWJ: Do you feel that suburbia holds more benefits for the spiritual lives of today’s Christians, or more dangers?

Hsu: I’d say that suburbia is both a threat and an opportunity for the spiritual lives of suburban Christians. The fact that suburbia is a land of abundance cuts both ways. Suburban Christians have more access to material and spiritual resources, but we’ve become numbed to physical and spiritual needs both at home and around the world. There’s so much potential for suburban Christians to do remarkable, counter-cultural things with our affluence and influence, but there’s also the spiritual danger that we’ll just turn inward and build our own empires rather than seek the welfare of others.

The challenge we face is how to wield our resources strategically to advance Christian mission, champion the poor and the marginalized and advocate for justice and peace.

Goetz:: I think to stay in the ’burbs and to thrive spiritually requires a continual mending of your life. It seems cliché to say, “You must be intentional,” but there’s no other way, really, to say it. I included at least one story in each chapter of someone doing it right. I’ve watched quite a few in our church live a quiet but intentional life that I would describe as the “deeper life.”

These folks are enormously generous — not just with their money but with their time, which is more valued, at least in my suburb, than money is.

We need to strip our “Christian activities” down to silence (prayer) and service in the world, within the context of a vital Christian community, of course.

YWJ: How do the cultural values of suburbia impact youth ministry?

Hsu: First, suburbia tends to be a commuter culture. So suburban youth groups can easily have teens from eighteen different high schools, meaning that no one local high school has a critical mass of youth group members. And many youth workers are frazzled, commuting between a dozen schools to keep up with their students’ activities. This might be beyond the youth worker’s control, but churches could recover a local parish mindset and aim to have members concentrate as much as possible in immediate local neighborhoods and schools.

Second, suburbia tends to be a busy culture. Some youth groups feed the frenzy by constantly scheduling more and more events for their teens. But many teens are so overscheduled that the last thing they need is more activities. So I applaud the contemplative youth ministry movement and folks like Mark Yaconelli and Mike King’s Presence-Centered Youth

Ministry, where youth group is a quiet space for solitude and silence.

Third, suburbia tends to be a consumer culture — suburbia is almost always a place of consumption rather than that of production. So a Christian alternative would be for youth
workers to find ways to cultivate spiritual disciplines of creativity, simplicity and generosity. One Christian high school of 575 teens chose to give up Starbucks coffee, pizzas and prom dresses in order to raise money to fight AIDS in Africa. Over the course of a couple of years, they gave several hundred thousand dollars of their own money to build a medical clinic and provide medicine and health care materials to a village. They had caught the vision of giving up some of their consumer nonessentials on behalf of others who were in far more desperate need.

Goetz: The last 25 years have seen a rise in “experience discipleship”— missions trips and “leadership” adventure trips, for example. Some might criticize the expense, but one
positive outcome is the exposure to the wider world and what God is up to.

One danger is that some successful youth programs tend to attract students of the same type or economic station in life. Somehow student pastors must build a ministry that cuts
through the socio-economic structures of today’s high schools. Many high schools reflect the culture in which they are located, and so a ministry committed to Christ’s mission
will not simply mirror what exists in the high school.

YWJ: What are the main differences between those kids who grow up in suburbia and attend suburban youth programs and those kids who don’t?

Hsu: Maybe the safest thing to say is that suburbia can amplify and intensify some aspects found in American society at large — if America tends to be individualistic, suburbia can be all the more individualistic. All of American culture is materialistic and consumeristic, and that’s hyper-accelerated in suburbia.

Goetz: Effective student ministries seem to produce students with a strong sense of mission in this world. The downside of programming is the risk of creating consumers, not
disciples of Christ. Also, programming often requires, in essence, students to “come to church” for the activities — as opposed to experiencing their faith in the culture itself. Spirituality without service in the world is a form of narcissism.

YWJ: What can you say about how suburban kids define the good life?

Hsu: To oversimplify things, suburbia tends to be a material world. So suburbanites tend to define the good life in material terms, with all the requisite brand-name markers of clothing, possessions, technology and the like. Or we define the good life as the achieving life, or the popular life, or the busy life.

Youthworkers can challenge these suburban visions first by simply naming them and exposing them for what they are. And then they can hold up, live out and embody Christian
alternatives: for example, the truly good life is a generous life that gives away rather than acquires for one’s self. The truly good life is a contemplative life that is reflective and not just active or busy, or a life of service that is focused on ministry to others.

Goetz: My experience is with only those students in my faith community, so I can’t make general statements. And students, of course, define the good life differently. Often there is a primary driver: For some it’s athletics, for others it’s grades. For some the good life seems more relational and more focused on life in the present. A friend has a son who embraces the Emo values, and his good-life values are so different from the “smart” or athletic crowd.

I’ve always found it interesting how some students embrace the suburban values of their parents, buying into the grades and sports values, while other students completely chuck them.

Parents tend to feel good if their kids are part of the grades and sports groups but worried if their students are part of an alternative crowd. You wonder if the grades and sports students end up worse off, spiritually, because they view themselves as healthy or normal. But they are simply absorbed into the culture.

Normal takes on new meaning in the kingdom of God.

YWJ: What are stories/groups/programs that illustrate the best of suburban ministry?

Goetz: We both explored this, but I found that the best student ministries creatively figure out a way to cut through the socioeconomic structures of suburbia. They are not defined by size. There are effective large church student ministries; there are effective small church student ministries. They are ministries built not around the homogeneity principle but around grace and around a deep sense of mission in this world. The best student ministries are led by pastors who are struggling to learn how to pray and build silence into their lives.

They themselves work at swimming upstream against the suburban current of efficiency, control and incessant activity.

———————————————–

Al Hsu is the author of several books, he lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and two sons, and he and his wife serve as worship leaders at their suburban church plant. His blog is thesuburbanchristian.blogspot.com.

Dave Goetz is president of CZ Marketing (www.czmarketing.com), a brand and strategy firm for the service and nonprofit sectors. He has written for Christianity Today and Christian History magazines and was the general editor for The Pastor Soul Series (Bethany House Publishers). He lives in Wheaton, Illinois, with his wife and three children.

For additional resources on suburban spirituality, go to www.deathbysuburb.net.