Our Vision: Gospel Reorientation to the Suburbs
The title of this post, “Bringing Gospel Reorientation to the Suburbs”, that’s our vision statement as a church. A vision is something you want to see take place. We want Waypoint Church to be part of bringing Gospel Reorientation to our part of town. What do we mean by that?
There is one overarching plot line for the history of all of life. It’s God’s story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation.
God’s good creation was disrupted by the Fall. However, through Christ’s Redemption, God is at work restoring that disruption, eventually completing it in the Consummation.
And all of us, Christian or not, try to make sense of the world with our own stories of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation.
The suburbs tell their own story along that plot line:
“Creation”: The suburbs carry this nostalgia for neighborhoods like Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show, free of crime (except for the occasional passing vagrant), where everyone knows each other, and with a bit of sweat equity, all needs and wants were met.
“The Fall”: Crowded cities began to produce crime, unemployment, and stagnant growth.
“Redemption”: The suburbs are presented as the solution, a way to restore the disruption. Comprising communities of nuclear families, where everyone receives their desired square footage, commutes into their big city jobs, and happily retreats to the quiet life at day’s end.
“Consummation”: The “end goal”, when we can finally build gates high enough to keep out crime and disorder, getting promoted to a level that pays us enough to fulfill our every desire.
But decades later, the suburbs have left us with neighborhoods where no one knows their neighbors, a commuter mentality without a sense of place, and an over reliance on ourselves without connection to any community. So many suburbanites are stuck in an endless cycle of striving, proving, trying, achieving. But to what end?
The suburban expressions of “the good life” is actually full of brokenness from the fall. We’re living restless lives from the constant need to prove our worth, busyness from striving that leaves us isolated and lonely, a need to present false images of ourselves to others, a need to join ideological tribes (like politics) to make up for a lack of community, finding a lack of purpose and meaning from our work.
The suburb solution failed to deliver the “Redemption,” the restoration toward the good way that it originally promised. We’re searching for happiness and fulfillment in places where it was never meant to be found.
But the gospel offers a better way—identity, belonging, hope, and deep purpose in Christ. The answer to the brokenness of the suburbs is found only in restored relationship with God.
Unfortunately, there is a version of Christianity that decided not to challenge the brokenness of the suburbs but instead adapted to it and became complicit in furthering its painful disarray. As people became voracious consumers, churches began to compete to produce the best consumable content. As people desired autonomous individuality, the church created environments where you can consume without being known, or without having to endure the mess of others. As the suburbs valued achievement and a polished image, church structures itself to award achievements and promote superficiality. Sadly, this picture of Christianity is far from what we find in the Bible.
The Bible shows us a better story: it offers us a better picture of the good way, and promotes a way to actually find it through the gospel.
We were created in the Garden of Eden to be with God as his beloved creation. The fall disrupted that relationship with God and broke the world around us. But through Christ we have been restored back to our loving father and sent out by him on his mission to bring restoration to this world. And we look forward to the day when we will be with him fully in the consummated new heavens and new earth.
As restored, beloved sons and daughters, we no longer have to live in this world as orphans stuck in this suburban cycle of striving, proving, trying and achieving. We can find rest in the gospel. A rest that allows us to slow down and cultivate community with those around us. And we can find renewed meaning and purpose in our work, as God works through us to care for the world and herald in his kingdom. We desire to see people in our target area begin to live into this better biblical story.
That’s what we want Waypoint Church to be all about—bringing gospel reorientation to the suburbs. That’s our vision for how we want to impact the Woodman/Powers part of town.
Rather than adopt the values of the suburbs into our church, we want to let the Bible help people see the ways that suburban life can never fill our deeper longings put there by God. Deeper longings that will only be fulfilled as we find our rest, life, and purpose in Christ.
