Beginning of Something

Editor's Note: The following post is the beginning of something I hope to build into a full-scale presentation. It is about community, something I have been blessed to learn a great deal about from a group of guys I meet with every Tuesday night. The tone of the article now is serious, but I will change it later to be substantially more funny.

In 1994, the Walt Disney company took a parcel of land near its theme park in Orlando and developed it. The goal was to build a community from the ground up. It would be a safe community. It would be a small community (about 3000 people), and everyone would live in nicely designed homes within a mile from a nicely designed downtown area. It was an experiment following from Walt Disney's original vision for EPCOT, which reportedly included a residential component. Some call it "new urbanism" or "new modernism" or "futurism." Regardless, it was going to be a place where people could come to finally, really find community.

Now, first of all, Celebration is a gorgeous place. It's architecture is reminiscent of Charleston and Savannah, two of the more beautiful and eye-catching cities in the nation. It's streets are clean. There are fun festivals every couple of months. It's got great schools. Not surprisingly, the property values are shockingly high - akin to the Bay Area. A standard house costs about $700,000 - 1 million dollars.

People are really willing to pay to get into this ideal community where the people are nice, the streets are clean, the lake is shimmering, and downtown is pristine. People walk their dogs and ride their segways. It's a better life. For you. For your kids. And it's so close to the Happiest Place on Earth that it's hard not to feel like this place is like a little slice of heaven. This is a place with values - reminiscent of an earlier time when kids could play outside without parents worrying.

Sounds great.

Now, to be honest, as a parent, this kind of thing seems great. What dad wouldn't want his kid to be safe? What mom wouldn't want to live where her kids could play with other nice kids? What family wouldn't want that?

Celebration, Florida fascinates me because the impulses that caused its creation are the same impulses that I see at work in a great deal of modern American Christianity. And - this is where I'm going to probably piss some people off - I not only don't think it's a great life, I think it's probably a great path to hell. And I think one of the reasons that Jesus came to Earth and died was to free people from the very impulses that Celebration, Florida is trying to inculcate.

Impulse 1: Build a Better Society
There is an underlying lie in Modern Christianity that is also present in Celebration, Florida. The idea is that if we can just get nice, good people with strong values together, then we can eliminate so many of the problems that other, more dangerous, less civiilized cities have to deal with.

You see this in modern Christianity. It says, there is a ranking of sin. God hates, most acutely, the following types of people

1. People who are homosexual.
2. People who don't want to immediately ban all abortions
3. People who don't believe in Creation Science
4. People who oppose, in any way, legislative moves to make America a more "Christian" nation
5. People who are Democrats or liberal or both.

The problem with this is that God doesn't rank sin that way. And you certainly can't get away from sin by moving. Jesus says that apparently, the only way to really get away from sin is to kill yourself. Willingly die. Kill yourself. And then be born again, as a new person. You are the problem, Jesus says. And it's time for you to go.

To look at other people as the problem leads to an attitude which Jesus condemns. In fact, He might just call you a "son of hell."

Impulse 2: Community Means Common
Celebration, Florida is an exclusive community. First of all, you have to be wealthy. And second of all, according to the 2004 census, 93.7 percent of the population is white. Not a lot of diversity. A lot of people think that community means finding people who are similiar to you and then building strong friendships with them. This is a common idea.

Archeologists and academic scholars have studied the time around Christ’s birth pretty extensively. The culture Jesus was born into was the Jewish culture and the Jewish religion whose teachers were called “rabbis.” Scholars have examined rabbinical writings around the year 0 to see what kinds of things they were teaching and what the hot topics were in the first century. 3 topics really stood out as hot button issues during the time of Christ:
1. Dietary restrictions
2. Keeping the Sabbath
3. Circumcision

Why do you think that was the case? I think it was because at this point in history, the Jews didn’t have a home country. They didn’t have a nation. Their unique culture was being challenged from the Romans and the Greeks and all the other people groups within the Roman Empire. And so the pressing question for people who were Jewish was “What makes a Jew a Jew?” And the answer from the rabbis was?
1. What you do with your food
2. What you do with your Saturday
3. What you do with your foreskin

Nothing about God. Nothing about reading Scripture. Nothing about how you love your neighbor. Just 3 items seemed to really matter. Why? Because the question was “Who is a Jew and who is Not?” And the easiest way to figure that question out is to set limits and rules. Set boundaries that everyone can clearly see. People can fake taking God’s word seriously. But it’s easy to see what they’re eating. So these 3 topics served as ways for people to decide who’s “In” and who’s “Out” of the group.

This is mankind's biggest struggle. We want to delineate, very easily, a check-off list of who's in and who's out. It's an ego thing. It started at the lunch table in elemenatary school. Who is sitting with whom? Who gets picked first in kickball. Who's in. Who's out. And the goal is to somehow get into the "in" circle. In fact, if you examine it, the early church's biggest controversies were all about "who's in."

One thing is certain from the New Testament - Jesus didn't play favorites with people. Jesus is not at all about that. He opens the circle of admission so wide, it pisses off his followers. He lets in hookers. And tax collectors. Liars, theives, and cheats. He let in a terrorist and murderer named Saul. And then he had the audacity to let in non-Jews. This nearly broke the church. Them? You're going to let them in? Jesus said, "Yep. They love me. I love them. I want you to love them."

The battle, I think, is between two ideas that are very different.

Intentional Relocation - Celebration, Florida (and much of American Christianity) is based upon the idea of intentional relocation. I am going to pack up my things and go to a place that is safe. The goal is to move away from the ickiness. Move away from bad things.

Christians do this too. We need to get together and huddle. We need to escape from the world and its evil, especially in the media. I was reading this article from Wired Magazine today about a new website called "Conservapedia." Some conservatives thought that Wikipedia was too "liberal" and was "anti-American" and "anti-Religion." So they started their own online encyclopedia. One of the entries, under George Washington identifies the first U.S. president as "the person other than Jesus who declined enormous worldly power ... by voluntarily stepping aside as the ruler of a prosperous nation."

Seriously. That's what it said. Nice to see there's no false idols in this crowd. The idea around

Intentional Displacement - In the face of intentional relocation is the idea of intentional displacement. Jesus calls his followers to go to places and find people who they have nothing in common with. He commiserates with Samaritans women, and tells stories about Samaritans too. It's as though Jesus is saying, "Go find people you have nothing in common with save the fact that you are both my children and made in my image. And then go love them."

I was reading a quote the other day in Relevant Magazine from an article by Rob Bell, a pastor I adore in Grand Rapids. This is what he said about his community:

"In our city they're shutting down community pools because they say there isn't funding for it. So there are all these kids, especially in the urban center of Grand Rapids, who won't be able to swim in the summer. We think that would piss Jesus off. For us it's not right that on one side of town they're building pools and on the other side of town they're shutting them down. That's an injustice. We think Jesus is about pools."

That's inclusive community. And that rocks.

Fraternity vs. Fraternal Love

Let me give you a prime example of the difference between Intentional Relocation and Intentional Displacement. The following story is important to me for a number of reasons. First of all, it is a story about my alma mater, DePauw University. DePauw is a great school with a ton of great professors, but it had some huge problems. First of all, when I attended the school was about 85 percent Greek, which meant that about 85 percent of the people lived in fraternity or sorority houses and belonged to an established Greek system with Greek letter and Greek chants.

I won't get into my personal experience with this here, but to give you a taste, I want to refer you to an article from the New York Times about one of the sororities there, Delta Zeta.

Delta Zeta is a sorority that had a problem - its membership numbers were declining because it couldn't actively recruit enough girls. Why? Because Delta Zeta didn't have enough cool, hot girls. And everyone knows, girls aren't going to want to join a place with slightly weird, socially awkward, not hot girls. So Delta Zeta's national leadership team came in to the sorority and booted out an overwhelming majority of the girls it the sorority in order to "start fresh."

What was the criteria? You had to be a hot girl. Only 6 girls out of about 50 were left.

This story astounds me. My best friend Jon Fortt, who experienced life at DePauw with me, blogged about it too.

This is the EXACT OPPOSITE kind of community that Jesus was trying to build.


Next post...tune in as Dave tackles the primary motivator for Celebration, Florida - building a community that is "Safe for our Kids" and how that desire, though natural, is terribly unhealthy.