I'm a suburban Christian. Are you?

I'm not an early adopter of new technology or gadgetry. My wife and I got a cell phone just a few years ago after we had our first son and thought we might need a phone in case of emergencies. Even so, we only have one cell phone between the two of us, and it's one of those prepaid pay-as-you-go kind, since we don't use it enough to warrant a monthly plan. Our PC is six years old and has a paltry (by today's standards) 4 gigs of memory, we still have dial-up internet service rather than broadband, and we've never subscribed to cable TV.

All this to say that I finally decided to join the blogosphere. It seems like everybody I know has a blog, and I began to wonder if I should have one too. One of the most interesting things to me about the blog world is browsing completely disconnected blogs and reading posts and seeing names of people I recognize from totally different circles. I'm an E on the Myers-Briggs, so I'm fascinated by the idea of connecting and networking with multiple people from various areas of life.

But what to blog on? What's my excuse for blogging? Well, this morning I realized, aha, I have a book being published this summer called The Suburban Christian, and I thought hey, that makes sense. I'll blog about suburban Christianity. That's general enough to work as an umbrella category. I'm a suburban Christian, so my posts will likely reflect the experience of suburban Christianity. Great.

So I click on Blogger's "Get Your Own Blog" link, work through the sign-up process and try "Suburban Christian" for the name of a blog. Sorry, that name is taken. I go to that blog just to see what it's about, and it looks like the blog was just started today. So someone else had the exact same idea as me. If I'd had the idea yesterday, I could have snagged suburbanchristian.blogspot.com, but I missed out and had to settle for thesuburbanchristian.blogspot.com. Oh, well. Such is life.

At any rate, I've lived in suburbia for most of my life, and I've spent the last couple of years researching the history and sociology of suburbia. I've come across some interesting stuff on how suburban land-use patterns, commuter culture and the like affect our daily lives, and I'll share some of that here in bits and pieces. I'm interested in how different Christians experience suburbia, and what churches can do to contextualize their ministries in a suburban context. So if you're interested in these same kinds of things, great! I'm glad to have companions on this suburban journey.