suburban house church movement. wow. i think you're on to something. my community has managed to stuff ourselves into a large home before… never thought of it as a movement, but you're definitely making me think!

You've got so many great ideas Jake! i've talked to people about mom & pop shops, but people love their box stores, myself sometimes included. things definitely need to move more local, while leveraging what we can globally. there's something in the suburbs, where we 'go somewhere else' and 'get'…. rather than staying and creating.

people don't often begin changing till they have to… ie. if you look at global warming, which is already a little late. i wonder if there's a way we can start revealing to church's in the suburbs that though everything may seem neat and pretty, we're in dire circumstances!

We need businesses…and not big-box stores. Mom and Pop hardware stores, local restaurants, etc. We need community events…and not just some cheezy Canada Day fireworks. What about local arts and music festivals? There's all kinds of people, as you say, locked up in the suburbs. How can we free them?`

I think it's great that so many churches are focusing on urban centers—they really are important—but we can't forget the suburbs either. There's a bit of tension here because we want to work in cooperation with other churches, but at the same time the megachurch facility in the suburbs is not a really helpful presence. There are lots of big houses in the suburbs…maybe a suburban house-church movement is something to consider. It will take some really intense and focused efforts to build community, and what better place to root that in than the church.

how do we bring transformation here? I think we need a multiple route strategy… i've put some thought into converting a house, but again, those darn zoning laws. it's easy to say everyone's got to flee the suburbs and move into a commune, but I wonder if there's a way of leveraging what's there.

suburbia seems to communicate via 'networks' rather than geography… maybe there's some good in this even if people don't fully know the extent of who we are.

that above image is so disturbing to me… there's something we've got to be able to change about the actual aesthetics and physical space of our communities at the same time… I'm at a loss of what's really doable at the moment though…

We've talked about suburbia in the past, and so you already know a lot of my thoughts on it. Is there a way we can transform or renew the mess that we see in the photo above? …Perhaps it's a little ironic that suburbia is such a mess when it actually as the appearance of being so neat and clean cut. I guess order births chaos in some instances. What could we do, though? What if we bought a house somewhere in the middle of a suburban neighborhood and turned it into a coffeeshop, a place where a community could begin to form? Could it be that simple? Well, simple could be an understatement…I'm sure those ghetto zoning laws would prohibit it.

Just some thoughts. We've got to face the problem.

I really like your insight as well as to our identity becoming fragmented. It used to be that you lived, worked, went to school, and went to church all in the same community. I think that forms a much stronger and cohesive identity than living life all over the place. Compound this with the identity problem that arises with the social-networking revolution and this turns into a much bigger issue than people realize, I think.