Three Pieces of Glass , livre ebook

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Eric O. Jacobsen
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2369-9
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Where Everybody Knows Your Name ix
Part 1: Definitions 1
1. What Is Belonging? 3
2. The Special Need for Civic Belonging 9
3. Signs, Instruments, and Foretastes of Belonging 18
Part 2: Kingdom Belonging 31
4. The Character of Kingdom Belonging 33
5. The Character of Worldly Belonging 45
6. The Shape of Kingdom Belonging 56
7. Strangers and Kingdom Belonging 72
8. Kingdom and Covenant Belonging 82
Part 3: The Gospel and Belonging 93
9. The Promise of Community 95
▶ E XCURSUS : Social Capital 106
10. The Promise of Homecoming 108
▶ E XCURSUS : Place Attachment 121
11. The Promise of a Good Story 124
▶ E XCURSUS : Thick and Thin Language 136
Part 4: A Crisis of Belonging 137
12. Three Pieces of Glass: The Crisis of Belonging in Relationships 139
13. The Declining Civic Realm: The Crisis of Belonging in Places 148
14. Busy: The Crisis of Belonging in Story 162
Part 5: The Shapes Choices Take 171
15. Communally Shaped Choices 173
16. Policy-Shaped Choices 180
17. Liturgically Shaped Choices 189
Part 6: Encouraging Belonging 199
18. Belonging by Design 201
19. Belonging through Proximity 215
20. Belonging by Placemaking 225
21. Belonging and Local Culture 235
Conclusion: Belonging to the God Who Knows Your Name 249
Notes 253
Index 259
Back Cover 266
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge some of the conversation partners, collaborators, and encouragers who helped me with this project along the way. Hazel Borys, Mark Childs, Andy Crouch, Lee Hardy, Wendy Hoashi-Erhardt, Lance Kagey, Richard Mouw, Joseph Myers, Ron Rienstra, Laura Smit, and James K. A. Smith provided fresh insight and needed feedback as the ideas for this project began to bubble to the surface. After I took a long hiatus to focus on pastoral work, my spiritual director, Sara Singleton, helped me navigate the path back into writing again. Bob Hosack at Baker was patient and gracious in giving me time and space to let this book become what it needed to be. Lisa Williams, as always, helped me sound smarter than I actually am and helped me get the manuscript ready for the first, second, and third pitch. And project editor James Korsmo quickly caught the spirit of what I was trying to say, and his suggestions, like the rug in The Big Lebowski , “really tied the room together.”
This project went through many iterations, and it took a long time to figure out if any of it was helpful. So I am particularly grateful to those groups who gave their time and attention so I could field test the ideas. Friends at First Pres Tacoma; Colorado Springs Presbyterian Church; Providendia Church in West Palm Beach; Third Church, Richmond, VA; and the Members Christian Caucus of the Congress for the New Urbanism all listened well, asked great questions, and helped me distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
My Friday-morning guys group kept me grounded week by week and offered prayer and encouragement on those days when this project felt like a chore. My children—Kate, Peter, Emma, and Abe—were understanding when I had to skip some family time to work on this project and provided a steady supply of good excuses to set the writing aside and reengage the world. They unwittingly served as an important focus group as I watched them figure out how to find places to belong among their friends, in the church, and in our walkable neighborhood. And my wife, Liz, not only has been my faithful companion on this journey but is also the one who inspires me every day with her ability to create communities of belonging out of the most unlikely ingredients.
This book is dedicated to Judi Jacobsen, for whom every trip to the store has been a master class in civic belonging.
Introduction
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
The door opens, flooding the bar with natural light. An ordinary-looking, heavyset man appears and is greeted by a chorus of voices: “Norm!”
Thus begins the first episode of Cheers , the TV sitcom that dominated the airwaves during the 1980s. Cheers made the top-ten list of the Nielson ratings in eight of its eleven seasons. The “Norm” greeting became a standard trope for the show. It fit perfectly with the theme song’s chorus, “You want to be where everybody knows your name.”
There were many reasons for Cheers ’ popularity, but perhaps the most compelling was this theme’s resonance with audiences. Viewers remained loyal because they longed for a place where they were known well enough to be greeted on arrival by name. This was true in the ’80s and is even more so today. This longing, while ubiquitous, is not well understood.
What specifically do we long for when we want a place where everybody knows our name? Why do we seem to be moving further away from it each passing year? And how might we encourage the development of these kinds of real places so we don’t have to settle for watching people enjoy fictional ones? The answer, surprisingly enough, has to do with three pieces of glass—the car windshield, the TV, and the smartphone. These three pieces of glass represent key choices we’ve made at the societal and individual levels to devalue face-to-face contact with other people for the sake of efficiency, autonomy, and entertainment. But saying this only helps us to understand the problem. The more difficult part is to figure out how to solve the problem. This book is an attempt to do just that. But before we get into that project, let’s begin by digging a little deeper into that desire to be greeted by name.
When I arrive home, I’m greeted by people who know my name and greet me with names that betray an even more intimate connection, such as “Dad” or “Honey.” Yet I, too, long for that “Norm” experience. What Cheers (the bar) offers that my home does not is a particular kind of connection that I describe as “civic.” Additionally, the Cheers setting is quasi-public, making it a kind of forum for developing relationships with people who are different culturally and/or socioeconomically. As society becomes increasingly polarized and fragmented, settings where one can comfortably interact with people different from oneself are increasingly important.
Cheers is also a real brick-and-mortar place (or at least the Bull and Finch Pub in Boston that it’s based on is) where people have to be bodily present for the proper greeting to take place. This real place is a neighborhood bar, meaning that many of its patrons live in relative proximity to one another and are likely to bump into one another outside of the bar. Cheers is in Boston, which influences the topics that are discussed (Red Sox) as well as some of the tensions that exist between patrons (class, nationality, education level, etc.).
The term that best captures the object of that longing we have for a place where everybody knows our name is “belonging.” This book focuses on the kind of belonging that involves real people gathering in real places in the civic realm. This is the kind of belonging that seems to have diminished in the past few decades. And it is this kind that many desire to experience today.
Three distinct but interconnected forces are largely responsible for the demise of this kind of belonging. They are significant, but the first seems to have the dubious distinction of being the driving force in this crisis of belonging. This is a kind of centrifugal force that pulls us inward toward isolated or private environments and away from public engagement. These are the notorious three pieces of glass that were mentioned earlier. The car, the television, and the smartphone have made our lives easier and more entertaining, but together they have vastly reduced the frequency, duration, and quality of our public interactions.
The second force has to do with the public realm itself. Let’s say you decide to forgo your car, TV, and smartphone for one day to experience face-to-face connection with neighbors. You leave your private realm, and, after a walk that is longer and less satisfying than you imagined, you can’t find any place to stop, enjoy some leisure, and interact with neighbors. You might find a fast-food restaurant or a coffee shop, but they don’t seem like places where anybody is greeted by name.
Over the past fifty years, we have seen a marked decline in the physical settings that constitute the public realm. Some neighborhoods have bars that successfully function as a connecting hub for local residents, but the vast majority of American neighborhoods have no such amenity. And bars like Cheers, even when they are present, constitute only one subsection of the civic realm.
Other kinds of civic-rea