Justice in the Burbs review

The new book Justice in the Burbs: Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live by Will and Lisa Samson has just been released. I met Will a few years ago and just saw him a couple times in the past two weeks. Will is a doctoral student in sociology, and Lisa is an award-winning novelist in the Christian market. They both bring their skills and expertise to their joint book, half of which is an engaging fictional narrative about a suburban couple exploring justice issues, and the other alternating half is nonfiction exposition and commentary about the topics at hand. Here's a key paragraph:

. . . doing missions means doing the work of the kingdom wherever you are sent. And the best place to think about where you have been sent is to see where you are. God is a being of great economy. He works before you even realize it and before you sign on, and he's placed you where you are today for a reason. If you find yourself in the suburbs, welcome to your mission field.

The book, especially the later chapters, have lots of practical ideas for missional suburban living, in terms of better use of resources, decisions in eating and transportation, connecting with latchkey kids, practicing simplicity, purchasing fair trade, etc. They provide a realistic portrait of challenges and obstacles to suburban justice, and they point out that there is no "silver bullet" or "quick fix." Rather, justice requires commitment for the long haul and long-term investment in our neighborhoods and communities. This is itself countercultural considering how transient suburban culture is.

This book deserves a wide reading. The title is somewhat of a misnomer - the Samsons aren't just talking about suburban justice; they're really discussing the totality of holistic suburban life and discipleship. There's a danger that the book will read mostly by a self-selecting audience of those who are already concerned about justice issues. Really it's for any suburbanite who has a sense that the suburban life is not as it should be and that something must be done about it.

One minor quibble or critique is that despite the title, the majority of the narrative seems to focus on justice in urban contexts or rural settings, whether urban ministries or mountaintop mining issues. Comparatively less space is given to discussing justice in actual suburban areas. Much of the book seems to assume that most suburban Christians are fairly affluent and need to be investing themselves in justice issues elsewhere. While this may be true, I would have liked to have seen more material and analysis about the increasing issues of suburban poverty. I read an article recently about how food shelves in suburban areas have seen increased demand of 300% in recent years (while food pantries in urban contexts have had roughly the same amount of demand and need).

David Fitch argues that "new forms of poverty are taking over the suburbs as thousands have been talked into sub-prime mortgages and various other enslavements which leave them with little or no money for other necessities despite having a suburban home to live in." Julie Clawson made these perceptive comments on David's blog:

Out here in the far west Chicago suburbs I see this all the time. Kendall County is the third fastest growing county in the nation. We have tons of those cheaply built cookie-cutter homes that create the "house poor" culture out here. We are too rich as a county to get any government aid, so social services are nonexistent.

I see this with the moms in playgroup all the time. They got the house but they have no connection to anything. No phone, no TV, no internet. Their husbands won't give them money for gas so they are stuck in their big homes with no connection to anyone. More and more these moms are "homeschooling" (no real education, just basically having the kids at home) so they they don't have to pay all the fees of public school (which are quite hefty out here). If our playgroup happens to meet on their block they show up and stay hours longer because they are desperate for some contact with people.

Every other house in some of these 2-3 year old neighborhoods has a "for sale" (read foreclosure) sign on it. I've heard countless stories of the men just disappearing to escape it all and leaving the mom who has been out of the workforce for a number of years stranded with a few kids, a big house, and a lot of debt.

These are real issues of suburban injustice - predatory lending, lack of social services, as well as denial on the part of local municipalities regarding suburban poverty and homelessness. I hope that readers of Justice in the Burbs will be motivated and mobilized to pursue justice at home in their suburban neighborhoods as well as wherever God may lead them - urban, rural, global, wherever!

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy came out a few years ago but I just now have gotten around to reading it. If you liked books like Fast Food Nation or Nickel and Dimed, you'll appreciate the narrative approach in this book. Author Pietra Rivoli takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the life cycle of a T-shirt, from cotton farms in Texas to factories in China as well as lobbyists and interest groups arguing in the halls of Congress and how shirts are reused after being donated to Salvation Army bins. It's a fascinating read, and it heightens the complexity of economics and consumer choices in a globalized world.

The author gives an unvarnished portrait of worker conditions in factory sweatshops, but also provides historical perspective and shows how things are actually much better today than they have been in many comparable eras of history. She also argues that the main problems in international trade are not with the markets, but with the politics that govern them.

Lots of fascinating tidbits. From the cotton farming side: It takes about a third of a pound of cotton to make a T-shirt, about fifteen cents' worth. Did you know that cottonseed oil is used in peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, Girl Scout cookies and almost any kind of crispy snack food, like chips? It's also used in soaps and detergents. The meal from cottonseeds is used to feed horses, hogs, chickens, sheep and catfish. And leftover cotton fuzz is sold to be used in throw pillows, candlewicks, twine, medical supplies and tree-free toilet paper. Nothing goes to waste.

At the Chinese factories: Yes, it's low pay, long hours, poor working conditions, cramped living quarters, etc. But it's steady pay and far better than rural life on the farm, which is usually more backbreaking and has little financial return or security. Rivoli notes that generations of activists have "changed the rules of the race and raised the bottom, making it a much better place than it used to be." Young women now have more financial options and are less likely to be trapped in poverty or prostitution.

When Americans clean out their closets and donate old clothes to charity (to make room for an endless stream of new clothes), most of the clothes are bundled off and sold to exporters, who cull through them for items that can be sold to particular markets. A vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt can go for $300 in the collector's market. Mickey Mouse T-shirts and Levis jeans are sold to Japanese markets. The clothes are further divided. Some can be resold in bulk, usually to Africa, in huge bales containing several thousand articles of clothing. These eventually find their way to local entrepreneurs in village marketplaces, where a newish Gap shirt might go for $3.00, but shirts from family reunions and fun runs go two for a penny. Other shirts are cut and made into rags, or shredded into "shoddy," which can become raw material for carpet pads, mattresses, insulation and low-grade yarn that can be remade into cheap clothing. Again, nothing is wasted.

The sheer size of the textile industry is staggering, especially the amount of clothing that is purchased and discarded every year. Rivoli notes that American women buy far more new clothes than men and also throw away more clothes as well - bales arriving from the Salvation Army contain two or three times as much women's clothing as men's. Men not only buy less clothing but wear it longer, so the men's clothes that are donated are usually in more ragtag shape than women's clothing. So Western purchases provide the overseas resale market with about seven times more women's clothing in good condition than men's.

Reading this book made me think through my own closets. I rarely buy new clothes, and I tend to only buy to replace something that has worn out. I rotate through maybe five or six dress shirts and three main pairs of Dockers or slacks, and I own three pairs of shoes - brown shoes for the office, black shoes for special occasions and white Reeboks for everything else. In terms of T-shirts, I only buy shirts to commemorate particular events (Urbana or the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for example), and I often find myself getting new shirts for free from trade shows or whatever. I'm pretty ambivalent about my clothing, mostly because these days I don't care a whole lot about fashion or what I look like, as long as things are clean and functional. Even though my default setting is to purchase as little as possible, it's worth remembering that every purchase does at least benefit some worker in some factory (and various middlemen along the way), and discarded, donated clothing also benefits not only some local charity but probably some entrepreneurial merchant in some village overseas. Such is the interconnected nature of global commerce, for good and for bad.

The Small-Mart Revolution

This weekend I finished reading The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition by Michael Shuman. The book documents how it is far healthier for local communities and economies when people buy and shop at locally owned businesses. Dollars that are spent at independent mom-and-pop stores tend to be recycled throughout the community with other local vendors, while dollars spent at big box and chain stores tend to be siphoned away to corporate headquarters and national or multinational vendors.

What's interesting is that I was reading this book while in a small town in Wisconsin for a family reunion on my wife's side of the family. Just before the reunion I took our younger son to a local haircut place for a haircut, and while we were out we browsed several local independent bookstores and bought a few items there. I also got a carwash at a fundraiser in a local church's parking lot. The Small-Mart book was on my mind, so I was feeling virtuous about supporting this small town's local economy with my out-of-town dollars.

But then I noticed that I was more intentional about buying locally as an out-of-town visitor than I am at home, where it's all too easy to buy at chains for convenience reasons. Or at least in some ways rather than others. I never shop at Wal-Mart and pretty much always shop at Target. But Shuman isn't impressed with Target either (though it's better). It's just hard to consciously go to independents for everyday supplies.

But we can all pick certain areas that we'll be intentional in. While at ICRS last week, my friend Jana happened to ask me where I'm purchasing my copy of the last Harry Potter book, and I told her I was going to buy it from a local independent bookstore that carries both used and new books. The thrifty shopper in me is tempted by Target, which is selling Harry Potter for almost half off the cover price, but I happen to have some used book trade-in credit at the independent bookstore that can be applied to a new book. So I get the best of both worlds - supporting a local retailer and getting a bargain. (But I'm not sure if I'll be able to go to any midnight Harry Potter parties since the Midwest Emergent Gathering is taking place this same weekend.)

Recycling bins and volunteering

Trade shows and conventions are notorious for being expensive and wasteful. A bottle of water costs $4.00, and there aren't usually any recycling bins around, so all the plastic just ends up in the garbage. But here at ICRS this week, Ampelon Publishing has placed recycling bins around the convention center so that recyclables can be collected. Ampelon is the publisher of Tri Robinson's book Saving God's Green Earth: Rediscovering the Church's Responsibility to Environmental Stewardship. Ampelon's recycling bins are a refreshing contrast to all the various promotional giveaways on the sales floor. I was very encouraged to see a publisher live out their book's message in such a practical way. Support them and buy their book!

And a random item from USA Today:

If you live in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City or Austin, you're more likely to volunteer in your community than if you live in other metro areas, says a report out today by the Corporation for National and Community Service. It's not that people in those cities are necessarily kinder or gentler. They just have the right circumstances for volunteering: They feel connected to their communities, have more education, own their own homes, spend less time commuting and have more opportunities to give back, the report says.

Residents of cities where people spend a lot of time commuting or live in apartments, by contrast, tend to feel less connected to their communities, so they don't volunteer as much. Cities that ranked lowest are New York, Miami and Las Vegas. Residents of rural areas volunteer more than urban areas, the report says.

This correlates well with what Robert Putnam reported, that the more commuting you do, the less time you have for civic involvement or community service. To the extent that suburbia tends to be a commuter culture, suburban Christians should be aware of how commuting tends to diminish volunteering. (I was glad to see that my hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked #1 in the study, with 40.5% of residents doing volunteer work. Chicago ranks #32, with 27.4%. Last on the list at #50 is Las Vegas with 14.4%. See the article for the full list.)

The 2007 Christian Book Awards go to . . .

Ellen and I attended the CBA/ECPA Christian Book Awards ceremony last night, which is the Christian publishing world's equivalent of the Oscars or Emmys. IVP had three finalists: Praying by J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom in the Inspiration & Gift category, The IVP Atlas of Bible History in the Bible Reference & Study category, and Finding God Beyond Harvard by Kelly Monroe Kullberg in the Christian Life category. I was particularly excited about Kelly's book being a finalist because I was the project editor for that book, and the other books in the category were by folks like Philip Yancey, Bill Hybels, Larry Crabb and John Piper. Quite the competition, and it's an honor just to be in the running.

And we were thrilled to find out that one of our books won in its category! The winners are:

Bibles: Archaeological Study Bible NIV (Zondervan)
Bible Reference & Study: The IVP Atlas of Bible History by Paul Lawrence (InterVarsity Press)
Children & Youth: Sexy Girls by Hayley DiMarco (Revell/Baker)
Inspiration & Gift: Pearls of Great Price by Joni Eareckson Tada (Zondervan)
Christian Life: What Jesus Demands from the World by John Piper (Crossway)
Fiction: When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin (Thomas Nelson)
ECPA Christian Book of the Year: Ever After by Karen Kingsbury (Zondervan)

(Last year a 900-page dictionary of theological interpretation won the book of the year, and they changed the rules so that any of the finalists in any of the six categories could be book of the year. Sales numbers are now weighed as one of the factors in determining the overall winner. Which is why a theological dictionary did not win this year.)

In addition, Packer & Nystrom's Praying also won a Logos Book Award from the Logos Bookstores chain in the Devotional/Spirituality category. Congrats to the authors!

Hi from the International Christian Retail Show, Atlanta

After a horribly long travel day with all sorts of delays and frustrations, I'm in Atlanta now for the International Christian Retail Show, where Christian retailers, book publishers, music labels, gift companies and the like gather to buy, sell, order and promote new Christian stuff. Every year visitors and observers try to identify the most outrageous Jesus junk to ridicule, whether it's Jesus bobbleheads with glow-in-the-dark miracle healing hands or whatever. It's always interesting to browse and see what new books are being released. Here are a few random things that caught my eye today:

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, edited by Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt, which came out a few months ago. Chatted with both of them briefly here and lamented with Tony that his paper won't be included in IVP's Wheaton Theology Conference compendium.

Jerusha Clark's Inside a Cutter's Mind: Understanding and Helping Those Who Self-Injure. I had e-mailed and talked with Jerusha in the past, but it was nice to connect in person.

Chatted with Lori Smith, author of The Single Truth, which quotes my book Singles at the Crossroads. She told me that she was one of my fans, and I said, "I have fans?" Lori is also the author of the forthcoming A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith. She told me that to research the book, she traveled to visit key locations in Jane Austen's life and saw her birthplace, house and gravesite. Sounds fascinating.

A few months back, during the whole Youth Specialties/Skit Guys controversy, I interacted online with Christian Asian American chick lit author Camy Tang. Her new book Sushi for One? just debuted here at the show. At her signing, her publisher handed out chopsticks as well as fortune cookies that said inside, 'You will receive a fortune (cookie)."

The Giant Leaf by Davy Liu, a Taiwanese American illustrator and animator who has worked on classic Disney films like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Mulan. This children's book is a fresh retelling of a familiar story, and it has fantastic art. Check it out.

The floor just closed, so I'll wrap up. More later.

Sojourners: "Jesus of the Cul-de-Sac"

The July 07 issue of Sojourners magazine has a fine article by Valerie Weaver-Zercher called "Jesus of the Cul-de-Sac," in which she probes the challenges and opportunities of the suburban landscape, especially as it relates to discipleship, poverty and justice issues. I was interviewed by the writer and we had a good chat about our respective suburban journeys. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Even if certain distinctions still exist, "every place—city, country, suburb—is more diverse than we generally like to imagine," says Al Hsu, author of the recent book The Suburban Christian. The increasing complexity of the metropolitan terrain, along with its sprawling ubiquity, raises disturbing questions for Christians who live there. If where we live forms who we are, and if where we live is largely commercial, alienated, status-driven, and car-dependent, is it even possible to be a faithful Christian here? Was my 20something instinct correct: that justice-seeking Christianity can only be practiced in the few remaining places that are either clearly "wilderness" or "city"?

Hsu doesn't think so. He and the authors of two other recent or forthcoming books on Christianity and the suburbs (David Goetz in Death by Suburb and Will and Lisa Samson in Justice in the Burbs) suggest that suburbia, while potentially dangerous to one's faith commitments, can also be, in Hsu's words, a "crucible … [in which] to learn the Christian disciplines of self-denial, simplicity, and generosity." Each of these authors examines answers to the question that Will Samson articulated in a recent interview: "What does it mean to be followers of Jesus after the death of the suburban narrative?"

This story of suburbia, forged in post-World War II optimism about economic betterment, security, land ownership, and social mobility, holds mythic power in Americans' imagination. People move to the suburbs for a host of reasons, but the move almost always represents a "spiritual quest," according to Hsu, with suburbia as "the setting for the fulfillment of people's hopes and dreams." Several generations into the experiment, some suburbanites aren't buying the story anymore. It didn't take Desperate Housewives to convince Americans that the suburbs are often sites of profound despair, social alienation, and hollow status-seeking; many suburbanites were figuring it out for themselves.

The article goes on to explore how Christians can seek to live faithfully in suburbia. I was particularly struck by this quote from Jenell Paris: "Living in the suburbs can be an exercise in humility," she says. "It is an unremarkable place to live. Your attempts to care for struggling people may get fewer accolades from fellow Christians [than people who work in the city]." And despite the many secular jeremiads and critiques of suburbia, a distinctive that Christians bring is hope. Because Christians have a theology of redemption, there is hope for the suburbs, just as there is hope for the city and hope for the country. May our suburban neighborhoods be visibly transformed by that hope.

Reflections on Psalm 23: "I shall not want" and nature deficit disorder

We don't go to the mall very often, but this weekend we stopped by our local mall for a food court dinner. And being there reinforced once again how easy it is to be a consumer in our society. Hey, a Cinnabon sounds good. Maybe a pretzel. Look, a coconut creme latte. And that's just the food court - never mind the stores themselves. I dropped into a gaming store and glanced at enticing new Heroclix and Star Wars miniatures before fleeing.

Several years ago while having a personal retreat experience, I meditated on Psalm 23, and even though it's such a familiar passage, the line "I shall not want" jumped out at me in a fresh way. It occurred to me that there's so much that I want. I want to try a new Frappucino flavor. I want to pick up some more comic books. I want season 3 of Lost to come out on DVD sooner. Sometimes it's material stuff, but often it's not - I want my kids to behave better, I want more time to read, I want clarity on some decisions. Regardless, I want this or that. And the psalmist says, "I shall not want."

Of course, the notion behind not wanting is directly tied to God's identity as shepherd - his provision, his protection, his guidance and care. It's because God is truly our shepherd that we truly lack for nothing. And it occurs to me that a direct implication of this is that not only should we not want, but that we should also be channels of provision for those who are in want. Just like a key practical implication of the Lord's Prayer is that if God has provided for our own daily bread, then we should extend that prayer to others who do not have daily bread and see if there are ways that we can provide daily bread for them.

Also this weekend I read an article about "nature deficit disorder" (a term popularized by Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods) and the fact that our kids spend far more time indoors playing with video games and electronics than they do outside in nature. In response, there are movements now advocating "No Child Left Inside" to get kids playing outdoors. And it occurs to me that there's a direct connection between verse 1 and verse 2 of Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. And how exactly does the Lord shepherd me? He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.

In other words, he gets us out into his good creation. For those of us surrounded by suburban consumer culture of malls and big box stores, one of the main ways that we can counteract consumer covetousness is to enjoy the natural world that God has created. We can go for walks in the woods, play in parks, breathe fresh air. That's a primary way that he restores our souls. So Ellen and I took the kids for a walk last night, and we chatted with some neighbors and played hide-and-seek in the park. That was more restorative to our souls than any consumer purchase we could have made. Thanks be to God.

Book discussion chapter 5: Branding and identity

L. L. Barkat and Charity Singleton have blogged about chapter 5 of The Suburban Christian, which is called "Status Check: How Consuming and Branding Shape Our Identity." I don't mention this in the book, but one of the things that most convicted me about brand identities and consumer culture was a speaker at Urbana 93 that mentioned how more people in the world know the name of Coca-Cola than the name of Jesus. That got me thinking about how much consumer brand identities dominate our lives. Charity makes these observations:

I think corporate branding has made us all a little lazy in how we get to know and evaluate the world and the people in it. Rather than creating our own aesthetic style in how we dress and decorate our homes, we simply shop at the Gap or Pottery Barn. And rather than taking the time to explore the character and history of our neighbors, we identify them as the man with the blue Suburban, or the family with the matching Trek bicycles.

I consider myself fairly unbranded; I buy a lot of products in bulk from a locally owned grocery store, or from farmers whose agri-businesses don't even have names. But I still identify myself with brand names when I tell people I listen to National Public Radio and shop at Trader Joe's. I don't tell them this so they can know my listening or shopping habits. I tell them this so they'll know what "type" of person I am.

As a fellow NPR listener, I resonate with Charity's comment. Branding in some ways is inescapable. But we can certainly do our best to minimize the power branding has over us, especially in terms of how it shapes our identity and sense of self-worth and status. In many ways, our consumption shapes our identity. (One of the easiest ways to decode someone's self-perception and identity is to look at the magazines on their coffee table. They usually point to identities that we desire or communities that we aspire to be part of.) The challenge is for our Christian identity to shape our consumer identities, not the other way around.

To be honest, this is the one chapter of the book I wasn't sure about including. I had plenty of stuff to say about consumer culture and it didn't seem to all fit in chapter 4, so some of it morphed into chapter 5. And my company happened to be in the midst of a rebranding process, so I had been reading up on the topic of brand identities and was thinking about a lot of these things. (Even as I resist branding in some areas of my life, I've been a diehard InterVarsity Press brand loyalist for years, buying books simply because they said IVP on the spine.) At any rate, the content is there for whatever it's worth, and I hope folks find it helpful. I'll leave you with a few questions for self-reflection or discussion:

- What sense of self-identity or community is shaping how you consume?
- How are your consumer choices shaping your identity?
- What magazines are on your coffee table, and what purchases have you made because of them?
- What brand stories or images have you bought into?
- Has a particular Christian conviction led you to change any of your patterns of consumption?
- Has your church or Christian community helped you be more accountable in your consumer choices?
- How might your church wield its collective consuming power more Christianly?

P.S. Charity also posted a follow-up to her comments on chapter 3 about commuter culture, with great observations about her experiences using the bus.

On reading Tolkien and the significance of names

I'm reading the "new" Tolkien novel The Children of Hurin. Reading Tolkien is much like visiting another country - it takes a while to get acclimated to the culture and the language, but after a bit you get used to all the local names and references. Here are the opening sentences: "Hador Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-beloved by the Eldar. He dwelt while his days lasted under the lordship of Fingolfin, who gave to him wide lands in that region of Hithlum which was called Dor-lomin. His daughter Gloredhel wedded Haldir son of Halmir, lord of the Men of Brethel; and at the same feast his son Galdor the Tall wedded Hareth, the daughter of Halmir." Whew. Fortunately, there's a glossary of names in the back.

Tolkien often sounds reminiscent of biblical narratives, which makes me think that for many newcomers to Scripture, reading the Bible may well feel as challenging as reading Tolkien. Both take a little while to get into. One of my colleagues has read The Lord of the Rings a dozen times or more, and he has a far better grasp on Tolkien's world than those of us who have read The Lord of the Rings just once. That's an argument for multiple readings of Scripture, even of familiar texts. My temptation is often to assume that I know what the Bible says since I've read it already, in a been-there-done-that kind of way.

One theme that emerges in the novel is the importance of names. Tolkien was a philologist and loved developing languages and names. The protagonist, Turin, changes his named identity almost every chapter depending on the context - when a fugitive with some outlaws, he gives his name as Neithan ("the Wronged"); in Nargothrond he is known as Agarwaen (the "Bloodstained"), and he is also called Adanedhel (the "Elf-man") and Mormegil ("Black Sword"). At a low point in his journey he calls himself Turambar, "Master of Doom."

Almost every character has multiple names or alternate titles - Turin's friend Beleg of Doriath is called Cuthalion ("Strongbow"); Hurin, Lord of Dor-lomin, is also called Thalion ("the Steadfast"). Morgoth is also Melkor or Bauglir ("the Constrainer"). Turin reveals himself to an old friend by using a name for him that only the two of them knew.

This makes me think about our contemporary practice of having multiple screen names or e-mail addresses. Sometimes lack of availability of a given name necessitates that we find an alternative. Other times we hide behind pseudonyms in an attempt to be anonymous. Some names are our own choosing, while others are chosen for us. Some reflect our self-perception of the present or experiences from the past, while others reflect our hopes or aspirations for the future. I find it significant that names' meanings often influence our destinies - I don't think it's a coincidence that Martin Luther King Jr. is named after the Reformer Martin Luther, or that Bill Clinton's middle name is Jefferson. In many cultures, the meaning of your name reflects your parents' hopes for you, which is why many Chinese kids are named Grace or Joy. (The flip side of this is the lamentable practice of babies being named after celebrities or corporate entities like Pepsi, Ikea or Lexus.)

I think Tolkien may well have understood our desire to inhabit multiple personae, to have different identities in different contexts. But Tolkien would probably tell us that our true identities always emerge. In one scene, Finduilas the daughter of Orodreth says to Turin, "I do not think that Agarwaen is your name, nor is it fit for you, Adanedhel. I call you Thurin, the Secret." At this Turin is startled, because Thurin of course sounds very much like his true name. Then later Turin's friend Gwindor reveals Turin's identity to Finduilas, and Turin rebukes Gwindor: "You have done ill to me, friend, to betray my right name, and call down my doom upon me, from which I would lie hid."

But Gwindor answered: "The doom lies in yourself, not in your name." In other words, whatever name Turin travels under and is hiding under, he can't escape who he is.

When characters are renamed, it seems to indicate a move from a false self to a true self, like Strider the ranger is really Aragorn, the High King. This is a pattern that certainly echoes biblical epics, as Jacob is renamed Israel, Simon bar Jonah becomes known as Cephas or Peter, and Saul becomes Paul. And Revelation suggests that we, too, will receive new names.

So maybe the lesson for us is to consider what names we hide behind, and what names describe who we truly are. When I was a kid, I was always "Albert," which meant "bright and noble" but felt kind of nerdy and geeky, since it always made people think of Albert Einstein. So in high school, I decided to go by "Al," which means "cheerful one" and reflected more of my self-perception. After grad school, when I started writing for publication, I always went by "Albert Y. Hsu," because it sounded more distinguished and dignified. (I wished for cool theological initials like C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, F. F. Bruce or J. I. Packer.)

But most people don't know me as "Albert" - that's too formal and stuffy. I'm just Al. So that's what's on my blog, my business card and the church directory. My Chinese name, Hsu Yihao, is more interesting - the characters mean "promise," "greatness" and "full," so all together it means "filled with great promise." So, maybe that's not as cool-sounding as Fingolfin, son of Finwe, High King of the Noldor, but it's something to live up to.

Father's Day reflections: Special needs, special love

[The following is an article that I was asked to write for BeNotAfraid.net, an online resource for parents who get prenatal diagnoses of various scary medical conditions. It's a great site with many moving and encouraging stories.]

Halfway into our second pregnancy, my wife, Ellen, and I were alerted that our unborn child had certain “abnormalities.” The doctor doing the ultrasound pointed out physical markers that seemed to indicate possible club feet, cleft palate, problems with the spine and vital organs. He suspected Trisomy 13 or 18, genetic conditions that were “incompatible with life.” He told us, “Based on this information, you can decide to terminate the pregnancy.”

We were stunned. Our first pregnancy had had no problems, and we had delivered a healthy son, Josiah. What had gone wrong this time? Would we be planning for a funeral rather than a birth?

We had an amniocentesis done, at which point they confirmed that our son would have Down syndrome, Trisomy 21. On the one hand, we were relieved that this was not as serious as the other more life-threatening conditions. On the other hand, we still faced uncertainty, likely many medical challenges, perhaps a lifetime of special needs care. We talked with a colleague who has a granddaughter with Down syndrome, and he mentioned that his first reaction was that his daughter and son-in-law may never have an empty nest. We also heard a statistic that about 90% of couples who have a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate.

We are prolife Christians, and our default ethic is to “do no harm.” We were not inclined to abort our child. But what would it mean to bring our son to term? What would it be like to raise a child with special needs? We had no idea.

We started reading books and resources about Down syndrome. We learned that about half of all babies with Down syndrome have heart conditions that require surgery. We read about the physical and mental challenges, the developmental delays, the need for early intervention and ongoing therapies. It was overwhelming. But we also learned that life with Down syndrome was not as scary as we had initially supposed. Because of better care and medical knowledge today, most people with Down syndrome can expect to have long and fruitful lives.

While learning about all of this, it occurred to me that many children throughout history in various cultures around the world had been abandoned because of having special needs. Orphanages in China and many other countries continue to take in unwanted children, and there are never enough adoptive families to meet the need.

Historically, Christians were known for rescuing abandoned babies and raising them as their own. In the early centuries of the church, Christians practiced love and hospitality, welcoming little children into their homes that would otherwise not have survived. Others said of these Christians, “They alone know the right way to live.” Their testimony of lives of compassion showed the world that God was real. Their love for the abandoned and marginalized was a concrete sign of God’s love for all of humanity.

Ellen and I realized that we had the same opportunity as those early Christians to demonstrate that same experience of God’s love. If our son had been born in other circumstances, he may well have been one of those unloved, unwanted children. He could have been abandoned along the side of a road, or thrown into a river to die. As prolife Christians, how could we not welcome this child? Come what may, regardless of whatever challenges were in store, we understood that welcoming our son was a God-given opportunity to practice the same kind of hospitality and love that Christians throughout the ages had been known for.

Even though we were already inclined to continue the pregnancy, we made a conscious choice to bring him to term and welcome him with all love and care. While he was still in utero, we decided to name him so that he was not merely an abstract concept but a named son, a real person. So we gave him the name Elijah Timothy – Elijah being a Hebrew Old Testament name meaning “The Lord is God,” and Timothy being a Greek New Testament name meaning “one who honors God.” It was our prayer that his life would honor the Lord our God, and also that we and many others would learn to love and honor God through our son’s life.

Elijah was born three weeks early on April 8, 2005. He spent several weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit as he adjusted to life on the outside. Many of the initial fears proved unfounded – he had no major organ defects, club feet or cleft palate. A minor heart valve issue resolved on its own, and the only surgery he has needed was for ear tubes. Life has been a bit more complicated than usual with multiple doctors and therapists and whatnot, but nothing unmanageable. We now cannot imagine life without Elijah.

As I write this, Elijah is a rambunctious two-year-old toddler who is always on the go. He loves to watch his Signing Time DVDs and communicates with us through a vocabulary of dozens of sign language words. He pages through his board books and signs words for pictures he recognizes. He sat in my lap briefly as I typed this, gave me a hug, smiled and laughed before scurrying off to play.

This Father’s Day, I am grateful for the gift that God has given our family through our son Elijah. It is not exactly the life we had anticipated or expected, but it is a life of joy and blessing. As we grow in our love for him, we are delighted to see his love and affection for us. And if we mere mortals have such love for our special child, how much more must God’s immeasurable love be for us! Elijah’s presence in our lives is a visible reminder that all life is sacred and that all of us are beloved by God.

When death strikes: Moving beyond the "why?" questions

Yesterday Ellen and I attended a funeral for a woman who died suddenly last week, leaving behind her husband and six children. The service was very much a worship service to God and a strong testimony to her vibrant Christian faith. Heartbreaking, though, to hear the sobs of one of her children who cried throughout the service.

The message took as its starting point the various "why?" questions - Why did she go so suddenly? Why now? Why did God let this happen? And so on. The pastor pursued this line of thinking for a while and said many typical things, including Romans 8:28, which is often cited in situations like this. And all of this left me slightly uneasy.

I've been realizing over the past few years that the "why?" questions are often rabbit trails. When bad things happen, we automatically ask why, as if finding out the answers will give us comfort and peace. We assume that the problem of suffering is an intellectual one, and that finding answers to the why question will clear things up. I don't think they actually do. In some cases, a specific answer to a why question just compounds guilt and blame. Why did he die of cancer? Well, he had a bad diet and didn't exercise. Or he lived in a toxic, carcinogenic environment. Well, what then? Knowing the answers to why questions doesn't necessarily bring us any comfort or hope.

Why questions are ultimately unanswerable. Or they can be answered quite simply, even if much is left to mystery. Why this suffering? Why this death? The simple answer: It's a fallen world. The world is broken. Bad things happen. People die. If we really want answers to the why questions, that's where they take us.

I find it very instructive that the New Testament writers don't really probe the why questions. They don't pose intellectual questions regarding the origins of the problem of suffering and evil. That's because they took for granted that they were living in a fallen world where sickness and death were normative. Why questions are modern questions, not biblical ones. We have the philosophical luxury of living in a context where suffering is unusual (and avoided). But for the vast majority of human history, death and suffering are simply the default. Everybody suffers. Everybody dies. Nobody has to ask why this happens - it just does.

The far more significant question, from a Christian standpoint, is not "Why?" but "What is God doing about it?" This is N. T. Wright's line of argument in his recent excellent book Evil and the Justice of God. He says that Scripture ultimately does not answer the why questions. But far more important is God's answer to the question "What has God done about evil, death and suffering?" And the answer there is that God has decisively acted in the person of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus' death and resurrection, God has triumphed over the power of death. He has disarmed the powers and principalities. God is redeeming all of creation. He is making all things new. He is creating a new heavens and a new earth. He is wiping away every tear.

After my father's death by suicide, I wrestled with the why questions to the point of exhaustion. And as I wrote in Grieving a Suicide, I concluded that God's answer to the problems of suffering, evil and death is not some abstract philosophical response, but decisive action. Death has lost its sting. Death itself will die. That is the heart of the Christian faith - not merely that we are going to heaven when we die, but bodily resurrection that we shall be raised to new life. As a traditional Easter liturgy puts it, "By dying he destroyed our death; by rising he restored our life."

Pastorally, we certainly stand with those who grieve and ask the why questions. But let's not dwell there indefinitely. Let's focus on what God has done in Christ. As Ruth Padilla Eldrenkamp wrote after the murder of her husband: "Brokenness is not the end of the story. Our pain is deep, but it is not all-encompassing; our loss is enormous, but it is not eternal; and death is our enemy but it does not have the final word."

Suburban blues: Teens, depression and anxiety

A few months back I came across a Psychology Today article about suburban teens and their relative propensity for depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Here's an excerpt:

A report from the suburbs has some surprising news about children growing up in the culture of affluence. It's a longitudinal study and the interesting finding is that the kids have a multitude of adjustment problems. The surprise is that they often have more problems than age-matched kids growing up in the inner city—and their problems persist despite the mental health services presumably available to them.

Beyond a certain point, the researchers found, the pursuit of status and material wealth by high-earning families (say, $120,000 and above) tends to leave skid marks on the kids, but in ways you might not have expected. Affluent suburban high schoolers not only smoke more, drink more, and use more hard drugs than typical high schoolers do—they do so more than a comparison group of inner-city kids. In addition, they have much higher rates of anxiety and, in general, higher rates of depression.

Among affluent suburban girls, rates of depression skyrocket—they are three times more likely than average teen girls to report clinically significant levels of depression. And for all problems, the troubles seem to start in the seventh grade. Before then, the affluent kids do well.

Interestingly, among the upper-middle-class suburban kids, but not among the inner-city kids, use of alcohol and drugs is linked with depression and anxiety. That raises the possibility that substance use is an attempt to self-medicate.

The article goes on to say that achievement pressures and emotional isolation from parents are some of the main factors. Parental career ambitions erode family togetherness, and frazzled schedules shuttling from one activity to another reinforce a performance mentality. High-income families have less parental accessibility and family time together than lower-income families. Affluent families can more easily afford mental health services and professional help for their children, but the irony is that this often merely outsources care and doesn't improve family attachments.

One antidote recommended by the article - eating dinner together most nights with at least one parent present. This single factor was the best predictor of teen adjustment and school performance. So let's spend more time together at the dinner table! Our kids' mental health may depend on it.

Reflections on vacations, leisure and play

We're back from a week in Hawaii, celebrating our tenth anniversary. (People told us that we didn't look old enough to have been married ten years. Kind of cool.) Ellen had been to Hawaii for a Continentals trip one summer during college; my only time there before was a stop at the Honolulu airport on my way to Taiwan years ago. This was basically our first non-work-related trip by ourselves since our kids were born.

We were on four of the islands: Oahu, Hawaii, Maui and Kauai. We visited Volcanoes National Park, Waimea Canyon, Pearl Harbor and various waterfalls and beaches. Fantastic weather, of course, apart from a brief rainshower on Kauai while we were at a fern grotto on the Wailua River. (I am incapable of appreciating nature without taking pictures; I took over 800 pictures during the week. See some of the pictures here.)

Part of me was conflicted about the expense of the trip. At times it felt rather self-indulgent to be spending all this money on ourselves. So much of the tourist experience is bound up with consumption and consumerism of some form or another, whether of tours or meals or knickknacks. The sheer number of tourist trap shops, by their very ubiquity, sucked us into buying souvenirs and gifts that we probably didn't really need. (One odd sighting - at Pearl Harbor, our tour guide made the point that this was a memorial, not an attraction, that we should be sober in remembering those who died there. But in the gift shop, there were things like a U.S.S. Arizona Memorial Rubik's Cube. Weird.)

On the flight home, I started wondering to myself, "What's a Christian approach to vacations?" It occurred to me that there aren't biblical examples of vacations per se. Not really the kind of thing that nomadic Ancient Near Eastern peoples had the luxury of taking. But while Scripture doesn't talk about "vacations," it certainly speaks much about sabbath. And Christian tradition would certainly acknowledge a theology and spirituality of sabbath rest as a regular rhythm of reconnecting with God, others and the world around us.

Early on in my experience as a parent, I realized that my young son was helping me rediscover the delight and joy of play. Child development folks talk about the importance of unstructured play. I realized that perhaps just as important as meaningful work is meaningful play. In our workaholic society, sabbath rest, play and leisure can be countercultural (as long as they don't become idols of their own).

So anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed our trip, not only as a time for celebrating our marriage but also as an opportunity to experience God's good creation, to see oceans and mountains and lava flows. The best moments were not spent in gift shops, but swimming or hiking and delighting in the world God created. My theory is that in the fullness of the kingdom of God and the new heavens and the new earth, all of the physical locations of the entire world will be redeemed, restored and preserved for continued exploration and enjoyment. After all, his creation is all very good, and there's no way we can get to everything in this lifetime. So I hope and expect that we'll have all eternity to travel and visit all the places that we have always wanted to visit - and see them in all their beauty and glory, the way God intended them to be.

Book discussion chapter 4: Consumer culture vs. Christian creativity

I'm about to leave for a week, but before I go, let me note that L.L. Barkat and Charity Singleton have blogged about chapter 4 of The Suburban Christian, on how suburban consumer culture works and what we Christians can do as alternatives. My main thesis here is that suburbia tends to be a commercial culture, that we are consumers, not producers. L.L. comments:

When this is our approach to life, we are engaged in "financial transactions rather than exchanges of mutual relationships." (p.77) Hsu discusses the consequent adverse effects, including a system which can more easily abuse workers across the globe. But it struck me that we also suffer in this setup.

We suffer a loss of connection, to people and the meaning of work. We suffer with a diminished sense of our own purpose. (Thus being highly attracted to books that offer a purpose-driven life.) We suffer from lack of volition and creativity.

Good thoughts, L.L. I suspect that all of us have a stronger sense of vocation, calling and purpose when we are engaged in the work of making culture rather than consuming culture, as Andy Crouch might put it. I think one of the ways that we can counter consumerism is by practicing the discipline of creativity. The opposite of consumption is production. L.L. says that it's the difference between going to a movie and making one's own. She models this by posting a great little pictorial slide show that her kids made. And here are Charity's reflections:

I remember my growing up places as being centers of production, allowing for both creativity and creation. We always had a large garden, and even when I was very young, my parents set aside a small space for me to grow some vegetables. (It wasn't until later in life that I appreciated the work involved with gardening, however!) The food we couldn't eat during the growing season was canned or frozen for winter, and must of the things we ate every day were prepared from their most basic ingredients. But more than that, most of my clothing was homemade; even some of our furniture was built by my dad or handed down from previous relatives who had constructed things with care. And I was given great latitude to create from paper and wood and string all the wonderful things children are wont to make.

This kind of lifestyle was one suggestion that Al shared in The Suburban Christian for countering the cultural influence of consumerism. Rather than being chiefly identified as consumers, we should try to become creators or producers in as many ways as we can. This not only takes us out of the consumer cycle, which always has a newer or better product for us to buy. It also helps us bear God's image to each other and the culture at large.

Of course we aren't all going to be able to raise chickens or spin wool, but we can exercise our creativity by creating and building things, even things we need. I have a small garden which will provide for some of my own food over the summer; I also try to make my own bread when possible. My mom makes all of her own greeting cards (like Al's wife, as he mentions in the book). And my dad has made several pieces of furniture for his own home and mine. I have friends who knit and crochet, making practical items for themselves and others. Another friend made all the window coverings in her home.

As Al says, "All of us have different ways that we express our creativity; all of us can be makers of one thing or another" (TSC, pg. 88).

Thanks again, Charity and L.L., for engaging with these ideas. In many ways, consumption is unavoidable for many of us suburban Christians, and we need to find ways of consuming more Christianly as well as ways of countering consumerism with creativity, simplicity and generosity. And as I've blogged previously, there is hope for us shifting from a consumer culture to a producer culture. What other kinds of creative, creational alternatives to consumption do you practice?

Book review: Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

It seems like every year there's a particular book from the fields of social science, business or cultural analysis with a big concept that captures my imagination and makes me rethink things. A few years ago it was The Tipping Point; last year it was The Long Tail. I think this year it might be Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. If your work involves communicating ideas and hoping they stick, whether as an author or teacher or pastor or marketer or advertiser or parent or blogger, you need to read this book.

The basic concept is that certain ideas have a stickiness that stays with people, while others don't. Urban legends, like waking up in a bathtub full of ice and missing a kidney, or razor blades in Halloween candy, are sticky. Some commonly held sticky myths are that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from space (I believed this) or that you only use 10 percent of your brain. Other false sticky ideas that persist are the notions that the Chinese character for "crisis" also means "opportunity," or that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, as Nathan Bierma has debunked.

More important, non-sticky ideas can be made sticky. Here's an example. A typical bag of movie popcorn used to have 37 grams of saturated fat. A true fact, but rather abstract. Nobody knows what that means. So in 1992 a scientist called a press conference declaring that a medium bag of popcorn has more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries at lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings - combined! With all the visuals in front of the cameras, this press conference presented a sticky idea that made sense and changed the movie popcorn industry.

Another example: It's one thing to say that among business employees, only one in five are enthusiastic about their team's goals and that only 37 percent know their organization's goals. It's another thing to say, as Stephen Covey does, that if this were a soccer team, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they're supposed to play. That kind of concrete analogy makes the truth of the idea far more sticky.

The Heaths show and tell that to be sticky, ideas need to be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and use stories. We see this in movie pitches: Speed is "Die Hard on a bus." 13 Going on 30 was Big for girls. I've used this kind of shorthand in my own presentations of book proposals: More Than Serving Tea is like a Christian Joy Luck Club. A forthcoming book, Conversations with C. S. Lewis, is like Tuesdays with Morrie except with C. S. Lewis.

Other cultural examples of sticky ideas: Jared, the guy who lost hundreds of pounds eating at Subway. "Don't Mess with Texas," which began as an anti-littering campaign and took on a life of its own about what it means to be Texan. JFK's goal to put a man on the moon. Churches can create sticky ideas; one example that the Heaths cite is Saddleback Sam and Samantha, which Saddleback Church has fleshed out as who they want to reach. Willow Creek likewise did the same with Unchurched Harry and Mary. Having concrete, sticky ideas of who they're ministering to helped these churches become what they are today. Fundraising appeals are more effective when personalized by stories of specific children or people who are being affected. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

In my own writing and speaking, I realize that I tend to overdo the exposition and lack sticky illustrations and applications. At the retreat I spoke at last weekend, I talked about how witness in suburban contexts needs to be both contextualized and countercultural. Kind of abstract. But the illustration that got the most positive response was this one:

A church in Cincinnati gives free car washes. They have big banners in their parking lot - “Free car wash!” and another banner underneath - “No, really!” And people come by and look a little skeptical and ask them why they’re doing this, and they answer, “We’re showing God’s love in a practical way.” And they’ll wash the cars, and people will try to pay them, they think it’s a fundraiser, but they just refuse them nicely, tell them God loves them and send them on their way.

Now, one car came through and the driver asked them why they were doing this and they said, “We’re showing God’s love in a practical way, we’re washing cars for free.” And the driver thought for a second and said, “Oh, I get it. Back in Jesus’ day, they walked around, so he washed their feet. Today, we drive, so you wash cars.”

Washing feet makes no sense today. But washing cars fits the context of our commuter culture, and it’s also counterculturally Christian. And this illustration stuck with people because it was simple, concrete and practical, and it was a brief story that could be remembered.

Of course, a lot of this is nothing new - Jesus' parables were sticky precisely because they were simple, concrete, surprising, emotive stories that captured people's imaginations. But it's great to have modern-day examples of what this looks like in our culture. The Heaths live out their principles; the book is filled with dozens of concrete, practical stories and examples to show readers how ideas can be made sticky. They have great before-and-after exercises and illustrations to show how you go from "in a typical year, there are only 0.4 fatalities from shark attacks" to "Q: Which of these animals is more likely to kill you? A SHARK or A DEER? A: The deer is 300 times more likely to kill you (via a collision with your car)."

Made to Stick challenged me to rethink how I guide my authors' in their writing, how I write back cover copy, how we publicize and market those books. It should also have application for anybody involved in teaching or preaching. Basically, if you liked The Tipping Point, you'll love this book. Check it out.

Book discussion chapter 3: Countering commuter culture

While I was out at the end of last week, I missed the fact that Charity Singleton and L. L. Barkat have posted their latest blog reflections discussing my book, specifically chapter 3 about suburban commuter culture. Charity is already living out many of the things I recommend. Here are some of her thoughts:

Having my home, church, work, shops, library, and coffee shop all within a five-mile radius is no accident, and most of my daily activity happens within an even smaller two-mile radius. Many of my closest friends also live within the larger radius, and most within a 15-minute drive. As Al Hsu, in The Suburban Christian, would say, I am living with a parish mind-set.

In chapter three of The Suburban Christian, Al discusses the role of the automobile in shaping the suburbs. As cars became more and more predominant, people could live further and further away from their jobs and churches. The suburbs just kept expanding. As the suburbs expanded, however, the people living in them spent more and more time in their car and less and less time with other people, especially their families.

My decision to keep myself and my daily activities all close together is much simpler for me as a single person who lives alone. . . . Long commutes between work, church, shopping and home don't just keep people away from their families. All this driving time means that people are exercising less and are generally less involved in civic and church activities. Al cites a stastistic that for every 10 minutes of daily commute, outside involvements are cut 10 percent.

Closely connected with these automotive issues are the ever-looming environmental concerns. All that time spent in traffic means more emissions, more wear and tear on roads and the vehicles themselves, more need to build new highways. Even in my little parish life in which most of my time is spent in a relatively small area, I still drive more than I would like. The part of the city I live in was not designed to encourage walking or bike riding.

. . . How does my relationship with Jesus come to bear on these issues of transportation? Several friends and I have been trying to carpool to social and church events. It saves on all of us driving, and it also gives us more time together in the car. Instead of driving to the park in the evenings, which takes 15 minutes because it's rush hour, I've started walking my dog in the neighborhood behind me. And more than anything, I'm realizing that driving and all its implications is an idol in my life -- or at the very least, an addiction.

At the Fire retreat this past weekend, after I talked about some of these commuting issues, several folks chatted with me afterward and pushed back a bit. Many folks in this group commute half an hour or more to church because the church is such a dynamic, awesome community that it's worth the drive to them, despite the commute time. I understand that, and obviously all of our circumstances vary and I can't make blanket one-size-fits-all suggestions for everyone. But I do challenge folks that if they're spending most of their time quite a distance away from their place of residence (especially if they're commuting a ways to reach their Christian community), to consider ways to either relocate closer to that community or to bring some of that community closer to home, whether getting together with a bunch of Christian friends to live intentionally in the same apartment complex or neighborhood or whatnot.

One fellow was a bit defensive, saying that his circumstances require him to have long days commuting various distances and places, but that because he's young and single he can manage it, and it actually enables him to minister and serve the community in ways that most other folks can't. So I affirmed him in his ministry and encouraged him to continue to serve his church and deploy his resources strategically, while at the same time giving a bit of a caution of living an extreme commuter lifestyle indefinitely. After all, there are stewardship issues involved (gas in Chicagoland is now at $3.64 a gallon!), and at some point being on the road all the time just becomes unsustainable. All of us have different thresholds of how much is too much, but in general, our lives are healthier when we do what we can to minimize our time commuting.

Being faithful, being missional

I just got back from speaking at a weekend retreat at a camp in New Hampshire with Fire, the young adults ministry of Grace Chapel in the suburbs of Boston. Despite some drippy weather, it was an excellent weekend, a hundred twentysomethings and thirtysomethings gathering to worship and experience God and grow in Christian community. I talked on some of my suburbs stuff as well as some of my singles stuff. And what struck me was that this group is already living out the things I was talking about, being a healthy community that is intentional about ministry and helping people get to know Jesus. The highlight of the weekend was witnessing eight baptisms (in a cold lake!) and celebrating the testimonies of lives that have been changed and transformed by the grace and power of God. It was a privilege to be part of this community for the weekend and see what God is doing among them. Here are some of my thoughts from my intro talk:

The theme for the weekend is “Being Faithful, Being Missional.” Here’s where I’m going with this. It’s hard to be Christians in today’s culture, for lots of reasons. We’re going to look at how culture shapes us and affects us in various ways. The challenge is not only how can we be faithful Christians in our culture, but how we can be missional Christians to our culture. Being faithful means that we live out the Christian faith in the midst of our culture, that we’re true to what Jesus has called us to be. Being missional means that it’s not just about us, but that we’re intentional about looking outward, influencing others and society.

Being faithful and being missional are two sides of the same coin. We need to be both. Being faithful is an internal thing; it’s about our personal faith and discipleship. Being missional is an external thing; it’s about how we can impact others and transform society. We need both.

Some Christians are faithful but not missional. They might be afraid of being affected by culture, tainted by culture, so they withdraw. They live godly Christian lives but keep to themselves and don’t influence the culture.

Other Christians are missional but not faithful. They want to change the world, and they throw themselves into mission and ministry. But in their zeal, they lose some aspects of faithfulness. Maybe they compromise personal integrity or active faith, or they don't do things in Christian ways. They get caught up in doing and lose track of being.

So we’re going to look at how our culture affects us, especially suburban culture, for good and for bad, and how we can live faithfully and missionally in light of our culture. Some Christians complain about how bad culture is, but they don’t do anything about it. It’s not just that culture shapes us. It’s also that we can shape our culture. We can influence our culture by creating a vibrant Christian community that is a distinct counterculture.

How many new Christian books are there?

[This is a post I wrote for IVP's Behind the Books blog.]

A few months ago an industry friend e-mailed me and asked if I knew how many new Christian books are published each year. I wasn't sure. I know that overall, in terms of total new English language books published in North America, the number has ballooned from about 55,000 a year when I started in publishing in the mid-90s to 178,000 (as of 2005) or perhaps even over 200,000 now. The growth is largely a result of print-on-demand technologies and self-publishing vehicles being much more available. And something like 70,000 new publishers have cropped up in the last few years. Some of those are things like alumni associations publishing a book of alumni reflections, but even so, there are a lot more independent small publishers now. I have also heard a figure of something like 8,000 or 9,000 new religion titles published each year, the vast majority of which are Christian, but I haven't been able to nail that down.

Well, in an article in Publishers Weekly, I finally saw some concrete numbers. PW quotes Mark Kuyper, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, as saying that ECPA publishers published about 7,500 new books in 2005, but that number has declined to about 5,900 new titles in 2006. "Most of our publishers are trying to figure out how to get more out of fewer books," he said.

Whatever the number, the sheer quantities are still staggering. That's a lot of books fighting for shelf space and media attention. IVP publishes about 100 books a year, not including paperback editions of previously released hardcovers or other reprints. That's less than 2% of all the new Christian titles each year. I'm personally responsible for the acquisition, development and publication of about 12 to 15 of IVP's titles each year. It's humbling to think about how much work goes into the publishing of a book, and then to realize that that book is barely a drop in the ocean.

The same issue of PW quotes an author who says that if authors are feeling cocky and self-important about their work, all you have to do is go to a bookstore - "Tolstoy could go into a bookstore and say, 'Wow, nobody needs War and Peace; there's plenty of stuff to read!' If the bookstore doesn't depress you, go to BEA [BookExpo America, the annual trade show for the American bookselling industry]: it'll be very clear how unimportant your work is."

Despite the numbers, what keeps us going and keeps us publishing is that our books seem to be making contributions that people find helpful. I get a kick out of searching for our book titles on Blogger and seeing who's reading our books. We know that folks have infinite options for their discretionary time these days, not just the multitudes of books but all forms of entertainment media, so we are honored when people choose to spend time with our books. We try hard to make them worth your while, and we hope that they're helpful to you.

Going green

I was quoted in an article about environmental stewardship in the May/June '07 issue of Today's Christian magazine:
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Where once there was a gaping hole in the conversational landscape, Christian voices are ringing out across the country.

"I remember that on Earth Day 1990, my local church didn't mention it at all," says Albert Hsu, associate editor of InterVarsity Press and author of The Suburban Christian. "My pastor later told me it wasn't a Christian thing to care about. That was a wake-up call. I think a lot of this goes back to Gnosticism, when people thought the physical world was evil. Those ideas can lead to bad stewardship. Certain denominations believe this world will be destroyed in the end times so we needn't bother caring for it. But God declared this world good and calls us to take care of it."

. . . Even so, says Hsu, with so many American Christians living in the "land of plenty," it's difficult to keep the environment at the forefront of one's mind. "Suburbia is a consumer culture," he says. "If we need something, we buy it and use it, instead of finding alternatives. One of the problems in suburbia is that it's a place of abundance where we don't see the scarcity and limitation of resources."
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The article also has this handy list of ten things Christians can do (adapted from Matthew Sleeth's Serve God, Save the Planet):

1. Turn off the faucet while shaving, brushing teeth, and washing hands.

2. Pre-cycle by buying minimally packaged goods and choosing reusable over disposable.

3. Buy only "tree free" toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues made from recycled paper.

4. Bike, walk, carpool, or use public transportation instead of driving.

5. Change at least five light bulbs to compact fluorescents.

6. Install low-flow showerheads.

7. Caulk and weather strip around windows and doors to plug air leaks.

8. Use no pesticides or chemicals on your lawn or garden.

9. Pick one endangered species and do something to help save it.

10. Pray for people whose forests and habitats have been destroyed by material consumption.

I have 44 friends: On Facebook and friendship

I joined Facebook last week, after receiving an invitation from DJ Chuang. I'm still figuring things out, and I'm not sure how much I will use it, but it's been interesting thus far and has already burned up a lot of my time. I've "friended" a number of my IVP authors and various InterVarsity staff, as well as folks from college and work. Fascinating to find out who knows who.

Andy Crouch, who also joined recently, gave me a helpful guideline - he said that he is only officially being friends with people he has actually met in person. That makes a lot of sense to me. But then I was conflicted over whether to befriend some of my authors whom I have never physically met. I've interacted with some mostly via e-mail and snail mail and have never even talked on the phone with some! And yet I feel like I know them, despite the lack of an embodied relationship.

All this makes me wonder how Facebook, MySpace, the blogosphere and online technology in general is changing the nature of friendship. Besides the grammatical devolution that "friend' has now become a verb, it does seem that social networking sites can both enhance as well as detract from human relationality. Just as every communication medium has its own pros and cons, Facebook is very useful in connecting and updating people's status. Great for checking in with old friends and finding lost classmates. And it's helpful to see what groups and networks my friends are in, because many of them are interested in the same issues and concerns that I gravitate toward. But generally, these sites don't seem to be a good forum for in-depth heart-to-heart talks or extended discussion or discourse.

The question of intimacy and distance is interesting, too. I can see people's photo albums of family members, weddings, vacations, etc., but this feels odd if I've never been over to their house and they've not shown me a physical photo album. Without the embodied relationship to mediate and guide me through the pictures ("this is my mom, this is my cousin," etc.), it almost feels voyeuristic and intrusive to look at people's photos.

I also think the quantification of friendship is disconcerting. Before last week, I haven't really wondered, "Hmmm, how many friends do I have?" If I sat down and wrote out lists, I could quantify my high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, work friends, church friends, etc. And I have a general sense each Christmas of how many cards and letters need to be mailed. But now Facebook tells me I have a specific number of "friends." And I am tempted to estimate my worth in terms of how many friends I have. I want to collect as many as possible. Like Pokemon - gotta catch 'em all. Does this commodify the human relationship?

And at what point does collecting friends become unwieldy and unmanagable? I've seen profiles of folks with 700+ friends. It takes a long time to scroll through even a few of the pages. Even the greatest extrovert in the world (or "connector," to use Malcolm Gladwell's word) can't really maintain meaningful relationships with that many people, can they? Maybe, maybe not. When I see lists of hundreds of names, whether friends or blog links, my eyes glaze over. I lose a sense of perspective and the discernment to say which of these folks I need to be connecting with.

We are tribal people, and while the blogosphere and social networking sites help us keep in touch with our tribes, there's a danger of dispersing ourselves amongst too many contacts. Extroverts are often described as having broad but shallow contacts, while introverts tend to have few but deep relationships. Facebook seems to be making virtual extroverts of us all (even as we hide behind our screens!). In some ways, collecting hundreds of friends dilutes the very concept of friendship. If I'm friends with everybody, am I really friends with anybody?

The reality, of course, is that all of us have degrees of friendship: many acquaintances, some buddies, and a precious few real friends. And Facebook doesn't have a way of weighting these differences - it's not like it would say, "You have 189 casual friends that you could talk to at a party, 45 friends you would hang out with on Friday nights, 12 good friends that you can cry with at two in the morning and 2 best friends that know all your deepest, darkest secrets and love you anyway."

I don't doubt that Facebook could have technology to rank friends based on our traffic and how many interactions, messages or wall posts we have, just like Google ranks search results to find the most helpful links. But that would be scary, to have a page that ranks your friends from best to worst.

This also makes me wonder how much the numbers-counting of "I have 93 friends" ties into the evangelical tendency to want to quantify our church numbers, attendance, visitors, growth, etc. It's a similar reductionistic bean-counting impulse to measure by quantity rather than by quality or depth of commitment.

Anyway, there's much more that could be said (and indeed, there are a slew of new parenting and youth ministry books this year about the possibilities and pitfalls of MySpace and the like). These are just my first impressions as a Facebook newbie. While Facebook may be an helpful resource to some degree, I should be cautious about letting it suck up gobs of time. Ultimately, I need to remember that it's not just the number and quantity of friends that are important; it's the overall nature and quality of all the relationships in my life.

$100 update: What happens when you bury your money in the ground

I've blogged about the $100 project a few times. My fellow Calvin seminar participant Al Haley just blogged these reflections on the $100 he buried in the ground seven months ago:
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■ When burying money, especially cash, always protect it well. The Zip-loc bag I used was a good start, but… The bag should have been put inside some kind of metal or plastic box. Something mysteriously sliced a hole in the bag (a money grubbing grub?) and water got into it. The money that emerged 210 days later was dirty and damp and spotted with mold. There is abundant biblical truth in this. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy…” Matt: 6:19. It was a good object lesson to see the money so degraded. It made me feel almost physically ill as I tried to wipe off the currency and in my mind contrasted it with the crisp bills that had gone into the bag. What had I done? I had almost wasted everything.

■ The longer your money, your gifts, your opportunities are deferred, the easier it is to forget about them. For the first few months, not a week would go by without my thinking, “The money! I need to do something about the money.” This thought irritated me. It prompted me to scan possibilities for ways to spend the funds with something akin to divine wisdom. I thought (mistakenly) that hiding the money would function like having a rock beneath my pillow. I ought not be able to ignore it if I ever wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Instead, as I should have realized, the most human thing happened: I habituated to the money’s absence. Several months into my experiment it might occasionally come to mind, and then I would realize with a start that I hadn’t thought about it in weeks and I had been sleeping very well, thank you. If this continued, I might soon forget that shallow grave altogether.

■ What you do for God isn’t nearly as important as just doing something. Most of the time I’ve been involved in this project I believed that the only form of “success” would be to spend the money on some original idea that would somehow become self-perpetuating as it inspired others to do likewise. Just as Joonna and others expressed, the last thing I wanted to do was simply hand over the money to a homeless person or donate it to a charitable cause. Truthfully, once I read their accounts on this blog, I wanted to be like Debra and Nick and Al Hsu. I wanted to generate excitement and service to others and unexpected twists in the rendition of my plan that made it even better than anything I could have strategized. However, my wishing only led to a deep-valleyed procrastination as I insisted on doing things at a particular level of attainment that I now see was all about making myself feel good and important. Of course, I planned to give God credit, but everyone else would see that He had chosen me to do this great thing and…what hogwash.

■ Working together at this awkward thing known as the “church” often means supporting others who have already stumbled upon or been granted great ideas. I now believe a worthy way to spend the stash of money would be to shamelessly copy Debra and recruit students to teach poetry to disadvantaged kids. Or I could purchase Nathan’s book as Nick did and start a book study in our adult Sunday school class. Or I could play “tag” like Al. The point is that I don’t need to come up with anything new. All I need to do is find someone else who is already doing something brave and loving that “salts” humanity in places where people need it. [click here for the rest]
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BTW, I still have an envelope with $100 sitting on my dresser. The only thing I've done with it since last November is to exchange a twenty for a ten and two fives because I needed change. And it occurs to me that I've blogged about this five or six times, but I haven't actually done anything with it. I'm all talk, no walk. The deadline for doing something with it is June 2007. What should I do?

The missional suburban church

Suburban pastor and seminarian Todd Hiestand recently posted his paper The Gospel and the God Forsaken: The Challenge of the Missional Church in Suburbia, which is also available as a PDF. He's done some solid thinking about contextual ministry in a suburban setting. I applaud his work, not just because he quotes my book, but I resonate with and affirm his conclusions. Here is his summary of four areas the suburban church must address (the paper has lengthier sections discussing each of these four items), as well as his conclusion:
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So what is the answer for the church in the suburbs? There are at least four main ways the default suburban lifestyle needs to be challenged. First, we need to speak out against the suburban value of extreme individualism and call Christians back to community. Second, we need to deconstruct the value of consumerism in way that leads instead to sacrificial living. Third we need to question the suburban value of safety and comfort and judge it against the call of the gospel. Finally, we need to understand how our individualism and consumerism lead us to neglect the hurting and needy people in our neighborhoods and cities. . . .

We have a monumental challenge if we are going to contextualize the gospel and live as missional communities of faith throughout suburban America. We cannot flee. We cannot get out of here. This is where we live. This is where God has called us. And this “God-forsaken place” that we have been called to desperately needs the Church to stand up and be the Church. We need to be a Church that truly exists for the sake of others. We need a Church that gives up luxury so that others may have necessity. We need a Church that rejects the lone ranger mentality and lives in sacrificial and compassionate community. We need a Church that views money as a resource of God’s Kingdom and not an object to be consumed. We need a Church that trusts the Spirit and takes risks for the sake of the Gospel. We need a Church that comes together to care for the poor in their backyards as well as those in the city.

Perhaps, if we are careful to listen to the voice of the Spirit’s leading, we will see the power of the cross and the Resurrection can transform a place as cold and hard to the gospel as suburban America.

Book discussion, chapter 2: Housing size and mortgages

This week Charity Singleton and L.L. Barkat are discussing chapter 2 of The Suburban Christian, "Living in Suburbia: The Pursuit of the Promised Land," which talks about such topics as the American dream, Western individualism and single-family housing. Both of them comment about the nature and size of suburban housing. I blogged about the question of how much space do we need a few months back, saying,

we had had some default assumptions about kids each having their own rooms, which is a fairly individualistic, Western notion of privacy and personal space. American houses are larger by far than those in other societies - the average size of an American single-family home has increased from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,329 square feet today. The typical American has 718 square feet of living space per person, compared to 442 square feet in Canada and just 170 square feet in Japan. Most American suburban homes, if set in other parts of the world, would be used to house multiple families. The authors of Suburban Nation write, "There is not another nation on earth that houses its citizens as we do, and few could afford to."

Here's Charity's response to some of this:

How does my Christian faith and a concern for God's kingdom intersect with my otherwise responsible pursuit of the American dream? Even though my house is very modest at 1,200 square feet, since I live alone, I have almost double the average 718 square-feet-per-person of most Americans. And I have 10 times more square feet for myself than the average person in Japan who lives in just 170 square feet. Is all this space dedicated just to me actually a sign of greed and wastefulness in my life?

Also, Spiritual Birdwatching has chimed in. Her thoughts on chapter 1 are here, and now she comments on the suburban ideal having a home of one's own, saying: "The received wisdom is that a house is the average family's biggest investment, so get as much as you can afford. The price we pay goes well beyond the monthly mortgage payments; it's the second job or both parents working, the hours spent commuting, how hard we work to fill all that space with stuff. What if a house was just that -- a place to live, not the nexus of my sense of well-being in the world? Or more, an opportunity to explore what it means to live Christianly in my community?"

Good thoughts, everybody. I didn't cite this in the book, but I appreciate Rodney Clapp's thoughts in the last chapter of Families at the Crossroads where he contrasts the notion of the home as a haven with the idea of the home as a mission station. In other words, housing is not to escape from the world but a means to minister to the world with welcome and hospitality. I think that helps us envision our homes not as private mansions or fortresses, but as space that we are called to be good stewards of, space that we can use missionally. (Some more on that is in chapter 6, so stay tuned.)

Also, here's something else I didn't say in the book regarding the home mortgage industry. Naturally, lenders try to maximize the amount of house that potential buyers buy - it's good for business to have larger loans. But about those mortgage calculators that suggest how much house folks can afford - when you input your income, etc., they never assume a Christian lifestyle of tithing and giving, or of saving. They assume a standard lifestyle of consumption and maximal debt. So these mortgage calculators end up saying that we can "afford" a home far bigger or more expensive than is healthy for most Christians who want to practice generosity and frugality. So beware the mortgage calculators! And don't believe them when they give you big numbers of how much house you can afford. Cut it by 25% or more, and you'll find something much more realistic.

Commuting gridlock

U.S. News & World Report has some good articles about gridlock and possible solutions. Here are some interesting snippets:
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The status of the City of Angels as a commuting hell is nothing new. But by 2030, according to some estimates, driving in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and nine other urban areas will be worse than present-day Los Angeles.

Americans spent 3.7 billion hours in traffic in 2003, the last year for which such figures are available-more than a fivefold increase from just 21 years earlier. The amount of free-flowing travel is less than half what it was in the '80s, and the average commuter now loses 47 hours to congested traffic every year.

The issue mainly boils down to population growth outpacing road building. America has about 70 million more people than it did a quarter century ago, but highway miles have increased by a little more than 5 percent in that time. The Department of Transportation estimates that the demand for ground transportation-either by road or rail-will be 2½ times as great by 2050, while highway capacity is projected to increase by only 10 percent during that time.

Commuters to New York City increasingly call the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, two hours away, home, while workers in Washington have streamed into Gettysburg, Pa., a full 85 miles away. Folks in places like these are considered "extreme commuters," those traveling 90 minutes or more to work every day. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 3 million people-about 2.8 percent of workers- now have such commutes, a 95 percent increase from 1990.

. . . London Mayor Ken Livingstone's solution: a congestion-charge zone. In 2003, with the support of the business community, he surrounded 8 square miles of central London with traffic cameras and began charging cars and trucks about $16 a day to enter. The cameras photograph the vehicles and match license plates against payments made in advance.

Daily traffic into central London fell by 20 percent (70,000 fewer vehicles). Emissions were cut about 15 percent. Average speeds inched up from 8.5 mph to 10 mph. And last year, the fee generated some $212 million in profits, which funded better bus services.