Here are some recent reflections from Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, on the obstacles to community in highly diverse towns and cities:

What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

What is your experience? Do diverse places foster alienation and isolation?

HT:RF

1. Half of your core team will leave you in the first year. I heard other church planters say this, but I didn’t believe it. Going into year two I had already lived it. At present we only have one couple from our original core group. Some moved out of town…others lost the vision…others never got it in the first place.

2. Never pick staff from outside the church. I kept trying to bring in staff members from the outside. They were already “ruined” by other churches and just couldn’t grasp the concept of what God called us to do. We have had much better luck by recruiting staff from within Compass Point.

More…

When you pick a restrauant to dine at, do you primarily choose it based on quality of food or favorable atmosphere? If push comes to shove, will you select a place to eat that is more liking to your palate or to your preferred ambiance?

Many have observed that Western culture and economics is not what it used to be. Forty percent of the workforce in 1900-1950 was comprised of the Working Class, a class only registering at about 25%. What happened? The Creative Class, a class that has catapulted Western economies past a scarcity-based economy, one whose primary aim was to provide food, shelter, and clothing, to post-materialist, experience-driven economy. Commenting on the pitfalls of the post-scarcity, experience-driven culture of the Creative Class, Richard Florida comments:

If we crave experiences we will be sold experiences, and in the process we may find ourselves buying a bill of goods. The final pitfall is that even in the attempt to avoid packaged-and-sold experiences, we may pack our lives so full that we overdo it. While we scorn the couch potatoes hooked on TV, the desire for constant stimulation and experiences can itself come close to looking like addiction.

What is your experience of experience? Are there dangers here?

An earlier post explored some of these ideas, which have now been significantly expanded and edited to produce a new article. Acts 29 has just epublished “How Missional is Your Church?: Keeping the Global in Missional” Hopefully, a missiology journal will also pick up this article for publication, as it is currently being reviewed by journal editors.

May God grant us passion and intention to keep the global in missional.