Chapter Two

WHAT ARE WEIRD CITIES TELLING US?

Suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety —dullness, in other words.

REM KOOLHAAS

Fostering a Christian form of eccentricity is essential, as we’ve seen. It’s the direct result of dethroning ourselves as the center of our own universes, and it provides forums for creative eccentrics to innovate and push the church forward.

But there’s another reason for embracing off-centeredness. The world is yearning for it. In mirroring the cultural blandness of contemporary life, many churches are signing their own death warrants, because the kids and now the grandkids of baby boomers desire something more diverse, more interesting, more culturally rich than the mildness that dominates the cultural landscape. Eccentric Christianity needs to lead the way in shaping the future rather than wedding itself to the increasingly outmoded forms of culture. The church should be teaching the world to be weird in the way of Jesus.

In calling this book Keep Christianity Weird, I’m riffing off the slogan used by a number of American cities that are intentionally trying to combat the worst impulses of suburban culture. Cities like Portland and Austin are holding out against consumerism and overdevelopment and championing environmentalism and social justice. Their example can help us recover the church’s eccentric capacity to defy the worst aspects of what’s disparagingly called “Generica.”

VISIONS OF GENERICA

Maybe you remember Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands and its devastating depiction of American suburban culture. Burton dreamed up the story of the freakish kid with scissors for hands trying to fit in to bland suburbia when he was just a teenager struggling with his own sense of isolation and his inability to communicate with people around him as a kid.

Burton grew up in Burbank, California, a suburban community in the greater Los Angeles area. By the time he was thirty-two and finally filming the story, Burbank had changed too much to be used as the set for the movie, so production moved to Tampa Bay, Florida, where production designer Bo Welch found “a kind of generic, plain-wrap suburb, which we made even more characterless by painting all the houses in faded pastels, and reducing the window sizes to make it look a little more paranoid.”[17]

If you watch the film now, it’s hard to believe it was actually a real neighborhood and not a fake movie set. The identical double-fronted houses are each painted a different color —pastel green, pink, yellow, and blue. Or as Welch called them, “sea-foam green, dirty flesh, butter, and dirty blue.”[18] Each house has a pastel-colored car in the driveway, but not one that matches the house. A pink house will have a green car, and a blue house a yellow car, and so forth. The suburban housewives in the film also wear pastels in four shades. And of course, all the houses are enveloped in perfectly manicured lawns and neatly trimmed sidewalks.

It was all designed to depict suburban life as relentlessly bland, featureless, and uniform.

This was suburbia in the 1960s and 1970s, and the apotheosis of its blandness during this era was undoubtedly the ubiquitous American strip mall. Strip malls really are the ultimate expression of post-war suburbia —nondescript, beige, single-story, automobile-friendly shopping centers built along the main roads, a line of shops standing shoulder to shoulder, bravely facing their sprawling parking lots. There’s really nothing like them anywhere else in the world. And for good reason. Only the most car-addicted nation in the world could invent the strip mall.

This is the world Tim Burton grew up in, but by the time he was depicting that world in Edward Scissorhands, suburban planning was changing. In the 1990s, the principles of what became known as New Urbanism were becoming popular. Recognizing the ways post-war Modernism had destroyed neighborhoods, the New Urbanists tried to create a different kind of suburb, a more community-minded neighborhood. Designer Chris DeWolf defines New Urbanism this way:

Since the early 1990s New Urbanism has slowly gathered strength, a building storm that finally burst onto the American mainstream only a few years ago. Its “neotraditional” principles —wide sidewalks and narrow streets, front porches and rear garages, central squares and shopping districts —garnered attention across Canada and the United States. Some of the communities that resulted tried to emulate small towns while others resembled urban neighbourhoods. In the end, however, their goal was the same: create new developments that are community- and people-oriented.[19]

To see what they had in mind, we can turn to another film, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. Made in 1998, The Truman Show stars Jim Carrey as a man raised from childhood by a corporation inside a huge Hollywood soundstage, designed to be the fictitious seaside village of Seahaven. Weir envisioned Seahaven to be an entirely artificial community, a brand-new version of a Norman Rockwell painting. Seahaven was to be quainter than quaint. Initially, Weir thought he would need to create the sets on a soundstage, until he was told about the real-life suburb of Seaside, a master-planned estate in Florida. Seaside was one of the first built-to-order New Urbanist communities —it stood in for the banality and fake nostalgic imagery of Seahaven perfectly.

Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, seems happy enough in the perfectly perfect town of Seahaven, but the underlying premise of the film is that he’s trapped in his gilded cage. We the audience find ourselves willing him to escape, to fly to Fiji (his ultimate dream), or to sail his small boat to freedom, to discover the world beyond the dome.

It was somewhat brazen of Peter Weir to make a film that parodies New Urbanism in its darling project of Seaside. People-oriented housing developments can’t be bad, can they? But if you’ve ever visited a New Urbanist development, you’ll know there’s something pretty Trumanesque about them. They’re faux towns trying to resemble prewar small towns, full of brick townhouses, white picket fences, and Colonial homes. You can eat at a pizza restaurant that looks like a renovated and repurposed old fire station, except you know it was built that way to begin with. There’s a man-made lake in the middle of town that looks and feels, well, man-made. In other words, New Urbanism creates a contrived atmosphere. DeWolf concludes, “Instead of actually being successful urban neighbourhoods, New Urbanist developments simply look like urban neighbourhoods” (emphasis added).[20]

If the worst of Tim Burton’s suburban nightmare is the strip mall, the worst expression of New Urbanism is the faux town square. Sometimes styled a “suburban lifestyle center,” these town squares usually come replete with a fountain, outdoor dining for franchised restaurants, and Euro-style townhouses. Hey, it looks much better than a strip mall, but it seems to create no more community. Faux town squares are usually empty, especially during the day.

In fact, architect Michael Sorkin called New Urbanism “the acceptable face of sprawl,” and wrote that it “reproduces many of the worst aspects of the modernism it seeks to replace. . . . [It] promotes another style of universality that . . . is similarly overreliant on visual cues in attempting to produce social effects.”[21]

In other words, whether it’s the old Tim Burton version or the new Seahaven version, suburbia hasn’t changed much in half a century.

I find it interesting that while we watch films like these —and we could add Pleasantville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and television shows like Desperate Housewives and many more to the list —and find ourselves laughing condescendingly at vapid suburban life, the fact is that most Americans grow up in suburbs. Forty-four million Americans live in the nation’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million live in their suburbs. In other words, nearly three quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs, not urban centers. And not just the predominantly white suburbs of Edward Scissorhands or The Truman Show. According to the Washington Post, “One-third of suburbanites across the country are racial or ethnic minorities, up from 19 percent in 1990. Students in suburban public schools are 20 percent Hispanic, 15 percent African American, and 6 percent Asian American.”[22] For better or worse, the suburbs are a reflection of America.

In fact, suburbia has been so popular that, according to the American Farmland Trust, the United States loses more than forty acres of farmland every hour to new development. Between 1982 and 2010, new development devoured the equivalent acreage of Indiana and Rhode Island combined.[23]

Because of the rapid growth and cultural normalization of the suburban experience, the suburbs became the overwhelmingly dominant mission field of new churches. Most of the churches across America were planted and grown in the soil of postwar suburbia. The whole idea of the American suburb was created by two complementary forces. One was the desperate need to provide housing for the millions of servicemen returning from the war. The other was the development of the interstate highway system. These two things made Americans more mobile and housing more available. People could now work in one part of a city and live in another. There’s much that could be said about how housing developers and car manufacturers have totally altered the American landscape —physically, environmentally, socially, politically, sexually, and racially. But allow me to say that the popular depictions of suburbia we’ve looked at present it pretty much as a place of conformity, complacency, conservatism, and boredom.

But things are changing. Like Truman, there are thousands of people who grew up in suburbs and want to get out. Like Truman, they want to be explorers. They want to visit Fiji —or their version of Fiji, which may not be an island in the middle of the Pacific. It could be just across the country in one of the increasing number of cities that are eschewing the master-planned nature of Generica.

A number of cities across the US are figuring out that more and more people who grew up in Pleasantville want something, well, weirder.

PROMOTING WEIRDNESS

In 2000, Austin, Texas, adopted as its slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” Generated as a grassroots movement, “Keep Austin Weird” became a rallying cry for local business, a sense of neighborhood, and a zone for creative resistance.[24] The slogan, or variations of it (like “Keep Knoxville Shabby”), have since been appropriated by Santa Cruz, Portland, and a bunch of other cities across the US.

Initially just a promotional tagline, “Keep [enter city name] Weird” was more seriously interrogated by Joshua Long in his 2010 book, Weird City. He defined the Weird City doctrine as a combination of attachment to a sense of place, more socially and environmentally responsible consumption patterns, sustainable development, and urban politics. The Weird City doctrine values such things as the beautification of the built environment, resistance to gentrification, the promotion of boutique local industries, being a refuge for alternative lifestyles, addressing homelessness in more meaningful ways, and generally defying the cultural trends that make many other American cities virtually interchangeable.

Of course, the most obvious question to ask is: What are they keeping Austin weird from? What was trying to unweird the city? In his book, Long lists a set of weird values the residents of Austin were eager to hold on to:

From this list you can see that for the Weird Cities movement, the enemies of weirdness are materialism, conformity, homogeneity, environmental unsustainability, political conservatism, and corporate America (particularly housing developers). In other words, it can be seen as a direct reaction to the values of suburbia.

Of course, over the years, the Weird City reputation has been lampooned as a blend of drum circles, kooky politics, surfing Santas, and the guy in Portland who rides a unicycle while playing a flaming bagpipe. But at its best, Weird City thinking is a resistance to the Generica of big-box stores, identical strip malls, and color-coordinated housing developments. It is similar to social movements like the slow-food movement, the farm-to-table movement, and other antiglobalization and anticonsumerism initiatives. And young people are streaming to weird cities like Austin, Portland, and Santa Cruz, as well as towns embracing their emerging weirdness like Asheville, North Carolina; Boulder, Colorado; and Ithaca, New York. Similar cities like Forth Worth, Kansas City, and Denver are also seeing a renaissance.

The kids who grew up in planned suburbs, shopping at strip malls or hanging out at fake town squares want to live in places that are real. They want community-oriented neighborhoods. They want diverse, connected, creative, energizing places to live. They want to shop in local stores, owned and managed by locals, selling locally (or close to locally) produced goods. They want environmentally friendly neighborhoods that connect them to the geography around them.

I suspect they don’t want weirdness in the Austin sense of the term, but they want their city to be, well, weird.

And they’re voting with their feet. Or their wallets.

The movement of young adults out of the suburbs is now contributing to what economists and urban planners are calling the early stages of the death of suburbia. And the symptoms of its demise are pretty obvious. They include the following economic indicators:

No one wants a McMansion anymore

In August 2016, Bloomberg quoted the real-estate site Trulia saying that sales of huge (between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet), cheaply constructed, off-the-plan mansions have dropped dramatically in 85 of the country’s 100 biggest cities. In one cited example, in Fort Lauderdale, the extra money that buyers were expected to be willing to pay to own a McMansion fell by 84 percent from 2012 to 2016.[26] A Business Insider article recently stated that “the youngest generations of homebuyers tend to value efficiency more than ever before and feel that McMansions are impractical and wasteful.”[27] Also, with family sizes becoming much smaller, the idea of living in a cavernous mansion has been dismissed as ridiculous.

Malls have become ghost towns

Maybe you’ve visited a suburban mall recently and wondered where all the people are. Or where all the stores are. Empty shop-fronts aren’t just bad for mall ambience; they signal a shift in where younger people like to shop. And it’s not just the closure of small retailers that mall owners have to worry about. Department stores like Macy’s, Sears, and JCPenney are referred to in commercial speak as “anchor stores.” It’s always been believed if a mall has a couple of anchor stores it can’t fail. But all three of those aforementioned department stores are currently closing hundreds of locations. CoStar, a real estate firm, predicts that “nearly a quarter of malls in the US, or roughly 310 of the nation’s 1,300 shopping malls, are at high risk of losing an anchor store.”[28]

Millennials have discovered their kitchens

While boomers loved eating out and remained intensely loyal to their favorite casual dining chains, millennials want to prepare healthier food at home.

As a result, the casual-dining industry is in freefall. In 2017, Ruby Tuesday sold ninety-five restaurants. Outback Steakhouse and Carrabba’s Italian Grill are in big trouble. Buffalo Wild Wings is seeing sales plummet. And if shopping malls keep failing, we can say goodbye to food-court mainstays like Sbarro, Cinnabon, Jamba Juice, and Panda Express.

All the while, most of my favorite podcasts are being sponsored by businesses like Blue Apron. Maybe you’ve heard your favorite podcasters reading their commercials about how they’ll design your menu and send you “perfectly portioned ingredients and step-by-step recipes” so you can “cook healthy food, sustainably sourced, and at a better price.” Blue Apron might be the best-known meal delivery service, but right behind them are recent start-ups like Plated, Hello Fresh, and a bunch of others, who know that millennials don’t want to eat regularly at The Cheesecake Factory or Red Lobster.

In saying this, I’m not suggesting that these meal delivery services are the way of the future. Neither am I saying they are necessarily ethically superior to chain restaurants. And every time I hear an announcer promoting one of these services by salivating about braised butternut squash pasta with miso kale, farro, persimmon, and goat cheese salad, I can’t help thinking how elitist it all sounds. It’s essentially a perpetual catering service for young professionals. But it does signal their desire to get cooking.

Some years ago, I stayed in the home of a couple of baby-boomer empty nesters. Their kitchen pantry was almost completely empty. When I jokingly commented on this to the male partner, he laughed and told me they ate out all the time. Then he opened the pristinely clean oven to reveal a beautifully wrapped gift box. He told me he was hiding his wife’s birthday present there because he knew she’d never find it.

It’s people like them that keep suburban restaurant chains going, but their kids aren’t the same.

Country clubs are closing down

No one’s taking up golf anymore. That standard pastime of suburban life is under real stress, with over 800 golf courses shutting down across the country in the past decade. People between the ages of eighteen and thirty just aren’t interested, which means suburban residential golf estates are in trouble too. Selling houses based on the availability of a practice putting green or lessons with the resident golf pro is less and less successful.

Corporations want a city address

“In the past several years, a handful of America’s largest corporations have joined a mass exodus from their suburban headquarters to new home bases in the city, and millennials seem to be the driving force,” wrote Business Insider’s Chris Weller.[29]

He lists McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, General Electric, and ConAgra Foods as all leaving suburbia in order to headquarter downtown. Swiss bank UBS recently established a New York City headquarters, abandoning Stamford, Connecticut, after fifteen years. According to Chris Weller, the reason was because “UBS realized much of its top talent lived or wanted to live 35 miles south, in Manhattan.”[30]

KEEP THE CHURCH WEIRD

In the very early 2000s, the Euclid Square shopping mall in suburban Cleveland went broke. The fountains and escalators were turned off. The stores were all shuttered. Weeds grew in cracks throughout the parking lot. Paint started peeling from the façades. For nearly a decade, Euclid Square was a big, sad, dead mall.

But then, a number of small churches started renting the vacant stores in the 687,000-square-foot shopping center. The Grace and Mercy Church of the Living God rented the old Foot Locker; God’s Way Gospel Church took over a Dollar Tree; House of Elohim in Jesus Christ meets in the old Diamond’s Men’s Shop; Crown of Life is in a Fashion Bug; and Faith Baptist Church took over an empty beauty parlor. At its peak, nearly one-quarter of the 100 empty storefront spaces in Euclid Square was rented for Sunday worship and weekday Bible studies. It was like an ecclesial outlet mall.

The owners of the mall were happy. They got to offer these small congregations reasonable month-to-month leases —$500 to $1,000 —on spaces that would have otherwise just been collecting dust. And the churches were happy. They got reasonable rent on some property until they were big enough to buy or rent more permanent facilities.

And presumably potential congregation members were happy too. They could quite conveniently browse the twenty-four churches like they do clothing or furniture stores, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “church shopping.”

But it couldn’t last. The small rental return didn’t match the cost of maintaining the huge facility, and in 2016, the city of Euclid ordered the owners to close the mall due to safety concerns.

There isn’t a more powerful metaphor for the suburban church than the closure of Euclid Square and the eviction of those twenty-four congregations. Baby boomers have so connected church culture to the culture of American suburbia that as suburbia dies, churches are dying with it. Along with the local shopping mall, Outback Steakhouse, and the golf club, we are now routinely talking about the demise of the suburban church. Ed Stetzer reports that 80 to 85 percent of American churches are on the downside of their life cycle, thirty-five hundred to four thousand churches close each year, and the number of unchurched has almost doubled from 1990 to 2004.[31]

It’s another reason why we need to keep Christianity weird. Not only for the reasons we looked at in the previous chapter, but because our culture is telling us something about the values of the emerging generation of so-called millennials. They want their church to be weird in many of the same ways Austin or Santa Cruz or Portland are weird because many of those ways mirror biblical values. For them, a weird form of Christianity would include at least the following elements:

Connection to place

Running parallel to the decline of anchor stores and chain restaurants is the growth of localism —farm-to-table restaurants, locally brewed beers, and conspicuous community involvement by locally owned establishments. Set alongside these innovations, a church that seems like a franchise can simultaneously seem like a betrayal of these values. Younger people are leery of churches that have no connection to its immediate place; that isn’t engaged in the life of the city that hosts it; that doesn’t support local businesses; that isn’t concerned with artistic expression and experimentation. There’s a desire for a more indigenous, rooted, authentic community of faith to spring up in the soil in which it’s planted.

Too many suburban churches are hermetically sealed boxes, air-conditioned 24–7, with massive parking lots that encourage members to drive from long distances away to attend services. Some of them come equipped with bookstores, coffee shops, and fitness centers. I visited one that had a beauty salon off the foyer. To the generation that loves the Weird Cities doctrine, these kinds of churches are like the religious version of the strip mall or the faux town square.

Alan Roxburgh bemoans that such churches seem to be attempting to “act like vacuum cleaners, sucking people out of their neighborhoods into a sort of Christian supermarket.”[32] He continues, urging us to see the importance of locally focused, incarnational missional communities:

Our culture does not need any more churches run like corporations; it needs local communities empowered by the gospel vision of a transforming Christ who addresses the needs of the context and changes the polis into a place of hope and wholeness. The corporation churches we are cloning across the land cannot birth this transformational vision, because they have no investment in context or place; they are centers of expressive individualism with a truncated gospel of personal salvation and little else.[33]

Environmental sustainability

Not only are such franchise-model churches out of sync with broader societal currents, they’re costly to create and maintain —not only financially but environmentally. Personally, I’ve attended too many events in suburban churches where I’ve been served coffee in plastic cups and meals in Styrofoam boxes, with the sandwich, the muffin, and the chips all separately sealed in plastic. The trash cans can’t contain the amount of nonbiodegradable packaging that gets thrown out at the end of the event. The generation that is done with Generica is also done with unsustainable practices in the church. Followers of the creator God should be at the forefront of the environmental movement, working toward energy efficiency in their properties and places of worship, teaching and encouraging their members to adopt environmentally sustainable lifestyles as a dimension of their spiritual practice.

And yet a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life poll found that “only 34% of America’s white evangelical Protestants accepted there is solid evidence that global warming is real and that it is attributable to humans.”[34] No surprise, the same study revealed that there is a yawning gap between the views of younger and older Christians: “More than half of people under age 30 (54%) believe that the earth is warming mostly because of human activity compared with only 37% of those ages 65 and older.”[35]

Doesn’t look like the kids are going to have much luck banning high-wattage incandescent light bulbs or getting “no idling” signs installed around the church parking lot. And they can forget about the church buying its energy from green energy sources or providing eco-friendly biocompostable paper products at all their events. Imagine how disorienting it must be for people to be told in every area of life to conserve and reduce their footprint except in church. Is this the kind of counterculture we mean by eccentric? Or is it tone-deafness?

Open to the views of all, especially the marginalized

There’s less interest among emerging generations in a form of Christianity in which a handful of people have all the say and the vast majority get to say nothing. Especially when those with all the say are exclusively white men. Emerging generations have been raised on interactive learning methods and social media. They expect to be able to voice their opinions and hear the opinions of others. They want to hear the voices of those who’ve got nothing to lose by holding those opinions —the outcast, the marginalized, and especially, women’s voices. The phenomenal and surprising effectiveness of the recent #MeToo social media movement illustrates this. After decades of ignoring or silencing the voices of women who have routinely experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault in every area of society, the floodgates opened after several high-profile cases came to light. The relatively newfound mantra “believe the victim” illustrates my point. In a similar vein, several high-profile conference speakers and preachers have signed “the panel pledge,” a commitment not to present at events at which there is not gender and ethnic diversity in the speaker lineup. It feels like there’s a cultural shift toward acknowledging the voiceless and honoring those who have been silenced, as well as a desire to confront issues, even if they are uncomfortable for us.

Churches that don’t encourage questions, that can’t cope with doubt, or that blanch when the “wrong” thing is said, no matter how tentatively, are increasingly out of step with their culture.

Ethnic diversity

New Testament scholar Scot McKnight has declared, “The church God wants is one brimming with difference.” That’s the church emerging generations want too. In his book A Fellowship of Differents, McKnight continues,

We’ve made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.[36]

It’s been nearly ten years since theologian Soong-Chan Rah released The Next Evangelicalism, calling for the church to break free from limiting and exclusive paradigms and fully embrace the dramatic cultural diversity that is rapidly defining the twenty-first century in the United States. Sadly, the suburban church continues to reinforce Martin Luther King’s scathing assessment that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the American week.

WEIRD CITIES AREN’T PERFECT

The Weird Cities movement hasn’t created completely safe, perfectly harmonious urban communities. While the intentions might be good, things in places like Portland and Austin get spoiled by human greed and self-interest. For example, Portland currently finds itself in the grip of clashes between left-wing so-called “antifas” (antifascists) and white nationalist groups. Protests and counterprotests are ratchetting up the violence across the city.

Furthermore, weird cities have not been effective in guarding against gentrification, which has only added to preexisting social inequities. Back in the 1990s, social scientists coined the term “food desert” to describe urban and suburban communities where easy access to nutritious food was limited. These were the neighborhoods where you could easily buy junk food at local corner stores and fast-food outlets but getting to a market for fresh fruit and vegetables was a challenge. In response to this, the US government helped raise $1 billion, including $170 million in grants, to end food deserts. They funded new stores and farmers markets. Weird Cities like Portland and Austin embraced the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, providing loans, grants, and tax breaks to grocery stores willing to set up in neighborhoods that qualify as food deserts. Businesses preferred by urban professionals, stores like Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and New Seasons, started popping up in these communities. The food deserts disappeared. Neighborhoods that previously didn’t have access to fresh vegetables now had hipster grocery stores selling ten different types of lettuce. At premium prices. Portland is now faced with a more concerning outcome —food mirages. In his alarming article, “The Depressing Truth about Hipster Food Towns,” Stephen Tucker Paulsen concluded,

As urban neighborhoods gentrify, a new kind of disparity has emerged. Many experts, including some federal researchers, stress that high local grocery prices —not simply distance —prevent lower-income households from eating well. . . . While “conventionally defined food deserts are rare in Portland,” a pair of researchers concluded in a 2013 paper, “food mirages, by contrast, cover much of the city.”[37]

We could go on, listing the failed experiments and broken promises of the Weird City movement. These cities tend to wrestle with an exclusivity, a cliquishness, that exiles “normals” —anyone who can’t live up to (or afford) the agreed-upon quirkiness. Weird Christianity needs to be contrasted with the kind of privileged weirdness the weird cities promote. The solution to a domesticated Christianity isn’t to banish the normal but to affirm and empower the weird. Christian weirdness is not an exclusivity but a kind of hospitality, a making room for eccentricity.

Cities like Portland and a host of others are an expression of yearning —deep yearning —among young people for greater commitment to social justice, community development, responsible business practices, environmentalism, conviviality, and hospitality. And which of those things could Christians say they are not also deeply committed to? When I call on you to keep Christianity weird, I’m asking you to reject materialism, foster community, promote diversity, share resources, protect the environment, start ethical businesses, feed the hungry, play beautiful music, bring peace and joy and life back to our cities. Portland and Austin and Santa Cruz and a hundred cities across America can’t do this in and of themselves, but eccentric followers of an eccentric God can lead the way.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

  1. Think of a city that is featured in a film or television show you’ve watched recently. What was weird about that city? What appealed to you about it? What about it made you nervous?
  2. Would you characterize the place you live as “conventional” or “crazy”? Why? What would you say are real distinctives of your city?
  3. Beyond the zanier aspects of the Weird City movement, which of its values do you find most compelling? Where do you see overlap between its values and Christian values? Where do you see a parting of the ways?
  4. What’s the difference between being responsive, as a person or community of faith, to the values and priorities of your neighbors and maintaining a distinct Christian witness? How have you seen those two priorities handled well?