Posted on 08/21/2005 11:22:09 AM PDT by Lorianne
Churches give their blessing to 'New Urbanism,' a move toward small, walkable communities ___ Eric Jacobsen speaks passionately about things like sidewalks and storefronts. But he's not an architect or developer. He's a Presbyterian pastor.
As Jacobsen sees it, city planning has an important influence on religious experience. He is an advocate for New Urbanism, the architecture movement that calls for interdependence among residents, with neighborhoods where shops and homes coexist, streets that are pedestrian-friendly and parks that are gathering places for residents.
New Urbanism has become a mantra for people interested in restoring urban centers and reconfiguring suburban sprawl. Its designs have sprouted across the country, from new towns like Seaside, Fla., to redevelopment in existing places like Gaithersburg, Md.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and the Uptown neighborhood of Dallas.
The Congress for the New Urbanism started small 12 years ago and now has more than 2,300 architects, developers, planners and urban designers.
Now Christian leaders are adopting the movement. They say the philosophy behind New Urbanism is a possible antidote to the isolation experienced by many churches and Christians. Across the country, influential Christians are thinking theologically about urban design and applying its principles to the church. They advocate New Urbanist concepts because they force people to share with one another, dwell among their neighbors and allow for a healthy exchange of ideas.
The national advocates for New Urbanism include Randy Frazee, a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, a trend-setting Illinois megachurch attended by more than 20,000 people. Frazee says there's a "movement brewing" in which Christians are striving to capture the values of New Urbanism because of an urgent need.
Frazee compared megachurches to castles surrounded by moats. A few times a year the drawbridge is lowered to let people in, where they become a subculture separate from the outside world. They become so involved in church life that they are not involved in their neighborhoods, he said.
"You have to disengage from your community to be involved in the church," Frazee said, describing the problem. "Now the church has become irrelevant to the community."
Willow Creek is a laboratory for new ideas in the evangelical world. Frazee said the push for New Urbanism will include the 10,500 churches in the Willow Creek Association, which links smaller congregations that share the megachurch's philosophy of ministry.
Jacobsen, 38, was associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Missoula, Mont., when he became interested in urban design. He wrote the book Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, and is now earning a Ph.D. in theology of the built environment at Fuller Theological Seminary, one of the largest seminaries in the country.
On a recent weekday, Jacobsen wore a blue dress shirt and tucked the cuffs of his gray slacks into his socks, so they wouldn't snag the chain of his bicycle. He rode to the Zona Rosa Caffe, a cozy coffee house located a half block from Colorado Boulevard, where the sun-drenched city holds its annual New Year's Day parade.
Over a cup of coffee, Jacobsen extolled the virtues of the location, which bustled with passers-by. The shop's entrance abuts the wide sidewalk instead of being separated from it by a parking lot. And only a pedestrian could appreciate the stained-glass artistry of a neighboring building, he said. Someone in a car would miss its beauty.
Jacobsen said places like Zona Rosa might make an ideal "third place," the term New Urbanists use for a location where a person spends time that is not his home or place of employment. The third place is an important part of a community, he said. It's where people from diverse backgrounds learn to interact.
For Christians, the third place also provides opportunity for spontaneous ministry, he said. Jesus did much of his ministry in the context of everyday life. Jacobsen notes that, in one Bible story, Jesus was on his way to heal the daughter of a synagogue ruler named Jarius when a sick woman touched his cloak and was healed.
Today's ministers might not have noticed the sick woman because their ministries are too structured, Jacobsen said. "She's not going to call for an appointment," he said.
Christians must see their ministry "as not just supporting the programs inside your church but also caring about the whole neighborhood," Jacobsen said.
Christian advocates of New Urbanism are not in the majority. In fact, Jacobsen said many Christians resist or ignore his appeals to architecture and design. But that doesn't dampen his evangelistic fervor. He says part of the challenge is the historical propensity of Protestants to dismiss architecture. The saying is "The church is the people, not the building."
"That slogan obscures the fact that the building influences how people relate," Jacobsen said.
Christian advocates of New Urbanism cite suburban sprawl as an isolating factor for many churches. The sprawl began in part because of federal subsidies after World War II, said Philip Bess, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. Bess, who has a master's degree in church history, is a Roman Catholic and New Urbanist. The low-interest housing loans the government provided GIs returning from the war applied only to new houses. Meanwhile, the government was funding the interstate highway system; zoning laws separated communities into their commercial, industrial and residential uses.
The suburbs were born, neatly dividing people by economic class and forcing them to drive everywhere -- to the market, to work and to church.
Churches followed people into the suburbs. Bess said they also adapted suburban development patterns, buying sizable plots of land, erecting a church and surrounding it with a surface parking lot. Churches then offered multiple programs to draw members, who drove to the site, leaving neighborhoods behind.
Sprawl makes it more difficult for churches to achieve their objectives, Bess said. For example, anyone who can't operate a vehicle -- the young, old or disabled -- is disenfranchised, he said.
"Just as a matter of social justice, it's arguably better to make mixed-use, walkable environments," Bess said.
First Presbyterian Church of Spokane, Wash., is an urban church where leaders realized that low-income neighbors were almost absent from the congregation, said Kevin Finch, the church's associate pastor of mission and evangelism.
A few families from the church took the radical step of moving into "Felony Flats," a crime-prone area within a mile of the church. While Felony Flats is a rough neighborhood, Finch said, it also promotes community interaction. There are sidewalks, and the homes face the street. One of the families that moved to the area hung a hammock in front of their house, and the home soon became a gathering spot for neighborhood children, Finch said.
Now the church is planning to form a nonprofit organization to create New Urbanist-style affordable housing throughout the area, Finch said.
"I see some of the principles of New Urbanism as a perfect parallel for what I think the church should be involved in," Finch said. "And not just the church, but anyone with a heart for the city."
BTTT
I've been to Willow Creek. The church has a food court which includes a Starbucks.
This is interesting. Ambitious, but intersting.
Silly idea, IMO.
Preaching the Word of God is what counts, not location, walkability, or "programs".
As far as I know, few sane people prefer to have the draconian New Urbanist restrictions on the size of their house, yard, or garages; to have restrictions on their ability to park and drive their cars; to rely on little mom-and-pop shops mostly within walking distance (and what businessman thinks operating such a "convenience" store in this kind of off-the-beaten-track location is so profitable anyway?).
It's almost laughable that New Urbanists seem to think the businesses in these little enclaves will somehow stock almost everything you buy now in supermarkets and specialty shops or that the prices in them will not be exorbitant. That businesses like bakeries, cafes, and small grocery stores (that sell fresh fruit and vegetables - another HA!) will thrive on the business of everyone within walking distance (which, from observation, is about one block these days).
As for the religious enclave idea, what will these preachers do if Muslims move into their community or even [shudder] atheists? Or do they intend to exclude members of other religions or even other Christian sects that differ from their own? How about racial or ideological exclusion, is that okay too? What happens when every little New Urbanist enclave looks just like every other urban city block that people have moved away from for the last 50 years?
(one for the GRPL list?)
Another line that I noticed:
>>Willow Creek is a laboratory for new ideas in the evangelical world.<<
Ah, yes. "New ideas".
If we say that we need to implement "new ideas" (meaning methods that are not already mentioned in the Bible - or else why would they be labeled "new"?) then we are also saying a few other things about not only our faith, but how we view our call to spread the gospel.
To suggest that "new ideas" are needed is also to suggest that new circumstances have developed in our culture that God did not plan for, ie, the argument that "It's a different culture now! You need newer, catchy-er methods to get 'em in the door! Your grandfather's way of preaching isn't enough anymore!", et al. To suggest such things means:
1) God is therefore not all knowing, since He failed to plan effectively for the necessary means of saving lost souls in our present day and time.
2) God is therefore not all powerful, since saving souls now requires man's "new" input, ideas, marketing, and salesmanship.
3) God is a liar for saying that scripture is sufficient alone for man to be complete and to come to a saving knowledge of Christ, if in fact these new means are of any use at all.
4) Man is in fact more knowledgeable and responsible for the salvation of souls than is God, since man came to understand and use the necessary means to save souls, and God failed to do so.
The Bible is our tool, no other "new ideas" are needed to reach the lost.
Whether it's called New Urbanism, Sustainable Living, Sustainable Development, or Smart Growth, to me it's still the same old crap from the United Nations.
(I'm too lazy today to use HTML to make these hot links, but the URLs are there if you want to read about any of this.)
Congress for New Urbanism [CNU]
http://www.cnu.org
CNU Charter
http://www.cnu.org/aboutcnu/index.cfm?formAction=charter
United Nations Division for Sustainable Development
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev
Center for Livable Communities
http://www.lgc.org/clc
Smart Growth
http://www.smartgrowth.org/about/default.asp
Sustainable Development
http://www.earthfuture.com/stormyweather/
It is sad that our church leaders cannot understand the power of God but must rely upon the devices of men. Somehow church leaders believe they can abolish poverty but wasn’t it our Lord Jesus who said we will always have the poor with us?
Ping to the GRPL for a thoughtful article.
The elitists just cannot bring it to admit that free businessmen and free consumers in the free marketplace will make better decisions than the elitist planners can make for the people they pretend to speak for. in Chicago, repeatedly the neighborhood people would denounce the elitist planners and the elitist planners would enlist the help of the elitist clergy to convince the people that this time the elitist planners would get it right.
I don't want to get lost on their point, but has anyone thought about looking into the percentage of people who are Christians in rural areas vs. densely packed cities? This is just another tangent for liberal theology to get hooked on. If its not gay marriage or envirnmentalism, it might as well be zoning issues or real estate development. Sheesh.....
Hi, I’m new to this site and don’t know what sort of folks are frequent contributors, but I wanted to say a word in defense of my friends Eric Jacobsen and Philip Bess. Both are thoughtful, committed Christians (though from different traditions) who have written wonderful books about how our faith ought to be expressed in the way we build our cities. This may strike you as strange if your faith culture is totally focused on saving souls, but I believe that Jesus Christ is lord of all of creation, including the places where we live and work. I recommend both their books (”Sidewalks in the Kingdom” and “Till We Have Built Jerusalem”) to you for some thought-provoking discussion. I am pretty sure that neither of them is a Commie, a U.N. delegate or a homosexual, although I suspect that both would treat any of the latter in a more Christlike manner than some of the posters on this thread. Anyway, here’s to a more thoughtful and less knee-jerk discussion of this important topic.
To a large extent, the single-zoned suburbs where residential, commercial and industrial uses are all distinct from one another is mostly a creation of elitist urban planners post-WWII.
WASPy urban planners from the Ivy League liked to keep things neat and separate- they did not like the concept of a mixed-use neighborhood, which they considered to be an ugly facet of urabn, "ethnic" life (such as in Little Italy or other immigrant communities). Also, single-use urban planning in brand-new communities made it easier to keep "undesireables" (Catholics, Jews, blacks) out of certain communities.
The rise of the suburbs is not a result of some organic actions by Americans- it was a well-planned regime of urban-planning by American elites to serve certain social, political and ideological goals.
I'm not an objective observer- I grew up in Toronto, which is one of the most liveable cities in the world. I had the misfortune of spending some time living in an upscale, but typical, American suburb in Michigan and I can see why a lot of people have a complaint with such a living arrangement.
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