Sermon Illustrations on the Suburbs

Sermon illustrations

The Suburbs

The Car and Suburban Sprawl

Cars have allowed us to spread out our living patterns significantly. Historically, cities have had a natural limit set by how far people could comfortably walk from place to place. Then, with the development of streetcars, settlement spread in conjunction with the streetcar tracks. Slowly, with the onset of the automobile, the limits on sprawl were all but obliterated.

As cars freed up drivers to live, work, shop, and play between farther and farther distances, these great distances became a fixed part of the landscape, making the car necessary for full participation in society.

The shift has been subtle, but unmistakable, as we’ve moved from thinking of the car as a convenience to considering it a necessity. This arrangement, at best, grants independence to one particular segment of our population while leaving many out. Youth who are too young to drive are completely dependent upon their parents to get them place to place.

There once was a time when a young person could walk to the corner store to get a treat, walk to the local park for baseball practice, and even walk to school. Now many kids need to be driven to each of these settings—putting additional pressure on parents, who must serve as their chauffeurs.

Eric O. Jacobsen, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith.

The Christian Self-Actualization Plan

In her excellent book on following Jesus in the suburbs, Ashley Hales describes one of the ways in which our discipleship has been influenced by modern secular trends such as the desire for self-actualization:

There’s also a particularly Christian version of the self-actualization narrative: it’s found in hearing how the salvation story revolved around me and God’s wonderful plan for my life. This story wound its way around us so that mission trips were validations for the goodness of a soul. It grew a vocabulary around a person’s seriousness about living for Jesus, and a subsequent call to “change the world” by doing big, exotic things.

This story found a liturgy in the hours of personal Bible study and puritanical evaluation of the dark nights of the soul. It’s not that these activities are wrong but that Christian piety, belief, and practice continue to be wrapped up in a narrative of the self, where the I is the key to unlocking faith.

God does have a wonderful plan for your life, but blessedly that is not the point. Redemption is not, in fact, all about you. Freedom is not about you at all. It is not a freedom from—an “escape from the constraints of community” (Berry again)—but a freedom for. Freedom is a far grander story than a suburban bootstrapperism, where your worth is measured in square footage.

Taken from Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much by Ashley Hales Copyright (c) 2018 by Ashley Hales. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

Life in the Suburbs

More than 50 percent of Americans live in suburbs, and many of them desire to live a Christian life. Yet often the suburbs are ignored (“Your place doesn’t matter, we’re all going to heaven anyway”), denigrated and demeaned (“You’re selfish if you live in a suburb; you only care about your own safety and advancement”), or seen as a cop-out to a faithful Christian life (“If you really loved God, you’d move to Africa or work in an impoverished area”).

From books to Hollywood jokes, the suburbs aren’t supposed to be good for our souls. Even David Goetz’s popular book, Death by Suburb, though helpful, presumes suburban life is toxic for your soul—as if suburbia were uniquely broken by the weight of sin. The suburbs—like any place—exhibit both the goodness of God’s creative acts (in desiring to foster community, beauty, rest, hospitality, family) and sin (in focusing on image, materialism, and individualism to the exclusion of others). We cannot be quick to dismiss the suburbs out of hand.

… But each suburb in its own way evangelizes for the good life: a life of safety, beauty, comfort, and ease. Suburbs, like all places, reflect both our good, God-given desires to create home, and also the brokenness of a place in their geography, entry systems, and laws. Thankfully, the good news of the gospel is never defined by a ZIP code.

Retail Therapy

Retail therapy gives us the thrill of the hunt and a hit of dopamine (the love hormone) as we anticipate a purchase, but it cannot feed our hungers. We know this. But we return each time, hoping it will. We buy and we window shop because we aren’t captivated by a better way, a better story. The process of finding holy in the suburbs is not necessarily eschewing Target runs, but it starts by waking up to our hungers in the first place.

Our hunger is human: we want to be filled. We desire abundance and satiety. We want to belong to a people and a place. In the suburbs we settle for consumerism to answer our hunger to be whole. “There is an intimate and indissoluble link between suburbia and buying,” writes Roger Silverstone. Buying has become our favorite form of worship.