Part 1: Shapes and Trends of the Coming Millennium
Chapter 1
Keeping Up with the Joneses : Shifting Faces and
Places
Traffic congestion after the New Year's Day Rose Bowl game in Pasadena slowed travel to a snail's pace. So my college-age son, T.J. and his friend amused themselves by bantering back and forth with people in cars stuck in adjacent lanes. T.J. was sure to get a response — if only a bewildered look or a blank stare — for he would gaze intently at a person in a neighboring vehicle and quizzically intone, "Who are you?"
While it served to pass some otherwise boring time, the question is also a good one to ask ourselves as we pace toward 2001.
Who are you? Where are you? Where have you come from? Where are you headed? And how soon will you get there?
Who are we? As individuals and as family. As America — as a people and a nation and as a country of diverse races, faiths, values, and cultures.
In order to understand the forces shaping America's religious future, we need an overview; we need to grasp the big picture, and to provide a frame in which to mount the picture. Let's start by
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examining the root forces that have brought us to our unique position on this planet called Earth.
"Rurbanization"
America's roots are in her soil, but they have been transplanted from the farm to the city. Two hundred years ago our population was nearly 95 percent rural. By 1880, the first year the U.S. Census Bureau distinguished farmers from rural nonfarmers in its reporting, 44 percent of Americans were farmers. Today, that figure is only about 2 percent and is predicted to shrink even more. In two centuries the setting for the American family has flip-flopped, from 95 percent farm to 98 percent nonfarm.1
The most dramatic swing, however, has been going on since World War II. Sociologists call it the "rurbanization" of America: rural values in transition to urban values. The shift has brought not only a tremendous change in family tasks, roles, needs, and expectations, but is also producing a movement away from what church growth expert Frank Tillapaugh calls the essentially rural values of status quo, sameness, harmony, smallness, and establishment to the urban values of change, diversity, conflict management, bigness, and mobility.2
Seeking the Sun and the Sea and the Good Life
Mobility has indeed been a moving force behind Americans since 1950 when our nation began to follow the sun. Seeking the seacoasts and chasing "quality living," over the next four decades Americans bought 300 million automobiles and traveled along 42,798 miles of interstate highways. First, the South headed north; then the North headed south. But always the East headed west. So, according to the 1990 census, thriving coastal metropolitan areas like Seattle and Los Angeles have gained at the expense of rural areas like the Mississippi River delta, the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, and the high plains of North Dakota.3
As a result, Gary Farley, a Southern Baptist specialist in rural and urban missions, worries about rural decay and poverty:
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I see Corn Belt towns that were strong in my youth, now hard hit by family farm crises — stores closed and boarded up, few signs of economic activity, and vacant houses. I see "oil patch" towns that look much the same on the surface but whose spirits are bruised because they have known boom and bust. And I see cynical mill towns in the Southeast, the factories they stole from places like Ohio now being stolen by places like Korea. And I see coal field towns in the process of decay. And I wonder if anyone cares.4
About fifty miles out on the perimeter of a dozen regional cities across the nation, rural areas are becoming urban. They are a strange mix of traditional agricultural, small-town or mountain folks, and city-bred people who like the amenties — and often the lower housing costs — of rural life.
These Farley sees as signs of hope: new and revitalized communities; affluent towns being developed for retirees; old farm service towns in mountains and near lakes being revitalized for tourists and fun-seekers.
Having snoozed for decades, some of these "retirement destination" communities suddenly find themselves in the vortex of a population boom triggered by, among other things, a technological revolution that is turning country villages into fiber-optic suburbs. There a new breed of home-based workers, free to live where they choose, are linked by personal computers to city offices through "telecommuting," while fax machines and Federal Express keep them in touch with "downtown" and the rest of the world.
Disenchanted Urbanites
"The megatrend of the next millennium," says Megatrends author John Naisbitt, "is laying the groundwork for the decline of cities." The American Home Business Association predicts there will be 20.7 million full-time home-based businesses by 1995, and by 2010 one-third to one-half of the middle class will live outside metropolitan and suburban areas.5
Christian leaders are seizing opportunities for church planting as well as revitalizing rural and resort congregations. For example, at
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Outdoor Resorts of America in Palm Springs, California, one of the nation's largest and most beautiful recreational vehicle parks, the Rev. William Gwinn directs a volunteer ministry that includes weekly worship services in the desert resort's clubhouse. He also makes hospital calls and counsels the residents, most of whom are retired and affluent and spend weekends or the entire winter in this sunny pleasure destination. The services Gwinn conducts (Sunday morning Chapel) are informal and reach folks who feel comfortable dropping in before golf but who wouldn't seek out an established church. Bill Gwinn envisions this kind of ministry springing up in mobile home parks and RV centers across the country as more and more Americans hitch their homes to their wheels.6
Also, a growing flock of disenchanted urbanites is fleeing the congestion, crime, and high costs of big cities — trading proximity to work for affordable homes, fresh air, and lower taxes on the rural fringes.
For some, however, getting to work has almost become a full-time job in itself. People "want to get out of the rat race," says Ken Munsell of the Small Towns Institute. "But they're still in it if they're going to commute two to three hours each way."7
Consider Tom Sparandera, a thirty-three-year-old computer repairman who moved his family from Staten Island to the Pocono town of Tobyhanna in the summer of 1990. They found a three-bedroom house for less than $100,000, but the five- and one-half-hour commute has taken its toll. Sparandera sees his young daughter only on weekends.
Despite such marathon commuting, says Tom's neighbor Matanda Sabwa — who boards a bus for New York City at 6:30 every morning — the Poconos are "heaven" compared with Manhattan's "hell." Brande Mark-Falzett, township supervisor in nearby Coolbaugh, calls the newcomers "our modern-day pioneers. Instead of Conestoga wagons, they've packed up the station wagon and set out for the woods to really change their lives."8
The migration is also changing their new hometowns, spreading a pall of suburban sprawl, straining services and schools, and clashing with old-time lifestyles. Local fire departments, to cite but one example, can no longer rely on an all-volunteer force. The newcomers are far away in the city during the day and often too tired
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when they come home to respond to anything but dinner and bed. Nor can neighborhood churches count on urban transplants to fit in with time-honored programs and customs. Meanwhile, rural old-timers resent shakeups to accommodate citified "outsiders."
At the same time, those who have migrated tend to reflect the culture of the communities to which they have moved. Indeed, as church growth expert Elmer Towns has observed, the movement of Americans — and one in five moves every year — may affect their lifestyle more than their church affects it.9
Where Are We Growing?
Despite the centrifugal forces spiraling the population outward as we near 2001, most big cities will keep on growing. Nearly four out of five Americans still live in metropolitan areas, including the populous suburbs. (Only one out of four would choose city life if they had a choice, however.) But since the 1980s fewer people live in each residence, reflecting the mushrooming singles population and accounting for periodic housing booms.10
During the last decade the nation grew by 10 percent, reaching almost 250 million. The biggest growth has been in the Sun Belt, where cities are being forced to add infrastructure. Slower gains were measured elsewhere, while Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia lost population.
In the coming century, entire sections of northeastern and mid-western cities will become vacant, while southern and western cities will face chronic housing deficits.11
Thus, urban planners predict, a city's "quality of life" will be the best indicator of its ability to attract skilled employees.
The states expected to grow the fastest between now and the dawning of 2001 are Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Hawaii, and California. Five of the ten areas expecting the most growth are in California: Anaheim, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento. The others, with the exception of Denver, are in the southern half of the country: Atlanta, Dallas, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and Phoenix.12
America's West Coast states already constitute a major part of the rising Pacific Rim, where the trade cities of Los Angeles, Sydney, and
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Tokyo are taking over from the old, established Atlantic trade cities of New York, Paris, and London.13 It's not surprising, then, that California "won" the biggest numbers in the 1990 census. The state's growth surge of 6 million is nearly equal to the entire population of Oregon and Washington combined! With a current population of 30 million, the Golden State is 70 percent bigger than New York, the next largest state. And though the acceleration will ease somewhat, trend watchers predict a growth of 10 million more for California by 2010.14
Californians Are Different
California is, in fact, a Pacific Rim country, with the world's sixth largest economy. Already California leads the United States in overall foreign investment — $100 Billion annually — and one-third of the nation's high-tech and biotechnical companies are in California.15
California is a place unto itself, which translates into lifestyles and beliefs as well as demographics. Its population is younger than most of the nation, it has the highest birthrate, and it is divided into larger households, according to Stephen Levy, director of a private population study center.16
But when tall, lanky Phillip E. Hammond, professor of religious studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, started crunching numbers from his survey data on regional differences in religion — theology by geography — his eyes popped. As expected, he found Californians and other West Coast folks "rootless" and highly mobile. But he was surprised to find that about twice as high a percentage of Californians reported having no formal religious identification as the percentage of residents in states like Massachusetts, Ohio, and North Carolina.17
Hammond's study also found that Californians are particularly attracted to the religiously unorthodox. A higher percentage of the California population compared to other U.S. states practices Eastern meditation and believes in reincarnation.
"There's a lot of loose religiosity floating around," Hammond told me in an interview as we scanned pages of computer printouts. "Like more pizza chains, winter and summer sports, athletic teams, and house styles,
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California will be found to be religiously more heterogeneous, more pluralistic."18
Strategies and models to reach these unconventional Westerners with the Christian message, then, must be tailored to address their unique beliefs, lifestyles, and preferences.
Indeed, as with California, regional differences within the United States may become as pronounced during the coming millennium as the differences between national or ethnic groups outside our borders are now. That may seem a contradiction, for in light of Americans' proclivity for mobility one might expect regional differences to disappear rather than grow. But, as I mentioned earlier, people seem to adopt the cultural patterns of the communities to which they migrate.
Wave of the Future
And what of the next ten years? Census watchers think the nation will grow another 7 percent by 2001, despite the prediction that one-fourth of our states will have fewer residents than they did in 1991. The growth will occur even though the size of the average family (3.17 people in 1990) and the average household (2.64 people) will remain constant or even decline a bit.19
The main engine driving the population upward is immigration, both legal and illegal. The 7 to 9 million who streamed into the United States during the 1980s — largely from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean — represent about 40 percent of the total increase.20
Larry Rose, a Southern Baptist Missions official, told a national gathering of colleagues that "churches built on homogeneous groups who lived close together, who farmed, whose children attended the same small schools, and who shopped in the same stores will [increasingly] be facing heterogeneous people of various ethnic-social backgrounds."21
Strong and diverse urban ministries will be required to meet the spiritual needs of this complex and dramatically different world, and it won't be easy. It will mean learning to minister in both poor and affluent areas, in many more languages, and with many worship styles.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge will be mustering the resources to meet the needs of the coming minority majority. These potential "pew people" are moving into a society that is strikingly removed from the one their immigrant ancestors encountered and established.
Shifting faces in different places will erode the corporate tax base and generate what Judith Waldrop calls "service delivery nightmares." Traffic jams will take to the air as airlines double their passenger load, serving about 800 million by 2001. Unfortunately, airport expansion won't keep up, significantly increasing passenger delays at major airports.22
Overhead, the nation's air pollution is expected to increase, while on the ground carpooling and staggered work hours will help but not cure the increased travel time required as more and more people commute from the suburbs to the city.23
The future of Americans cannot be precisely deciphered by making linear projections from the present, but tracking 1990s trends and the people who influence them may help us draw a bead on what will happen after 2001. Writes Waldrop in American Demographics magazine:
Their values are being shaped by mothers who work outside the home, neighbors who speak different languages, and teachers who preach about the environment. Their destinies are being determined by the amount of money we set aside for their college education and for our own retirement. They will live in a world quite different from ours.24
