Brave new world. . .

As the calendar tells me 2025 is over and a new year is begun, my mind wanders around the disintegration of community, church, and family and how it bodes for the years to come.  I watched as a child the first mall near our small town come to life and was dazzled by its offering of stores, goods, and eateries.  It was a very small enterprise by American standards but decent enough for the small city of 20,000 people serving a wider area of very small towns.  My parents did not greet the new mall with the same enthusiasm I did.  When Wal-Mart and Shopko built down the street, they were not nearly as enamored with the idea of plenty cheap goods as I was.  I chalked it up to the age difference -- they were from another era.  It was that but more.  Now in my 72nd year, I have learned to see what they saw.

The mall offered a different main street than the one where my dad's hardware store sat but they were related.  At this point in time, the little village of 700 or so boasted a car dealership, an implement dealer, a half a dozen gas stations, two grain elevators, two grocery stores, three produce stations, a handful of taverns (beer bars since we had no liquor by the drink), a dry goods store, a Ben Franklin, several barbershops (one with bath facilities), a couple of lawyers, two banks, a bustling cafe, several meat markets, a boat builder, a lumber yard, a paint store, a vet, several insurance offices, and a host of things I have forgotten to name.  On this main street everyone knew each other and they shopped with friends and neighbors in businesses owned by friends and neighbors.  It was a reciprocal arrangement in which we all scratched each other's backs.  But the mall was not like that at all.  Nor was Wallyworld.  There the people in the aisle were mostly strangers and you not exactly feeding the community by your purchases as you were feeding the Walton enterprise.  The main street was community.  Every age was there and the old were not segregated to institutions nor were the young shipped off to daycare.  We all lived on main street no matter what our address.

Nearly everyone I knew went to church.  I would be hard pressed to name who did not.  The funeral home had no room for a real funeral -- only for some visitations.  Everything from life to death took place in the churches.  The combined membership of the two Lutheran congregations (one Swedish and one German) was nearly double the size of the town.  A small Methodist and Evangelical Covenant Church congregation completed the roster.  Every kid I knew went to some Sunday school.  Confirmations were major events.  After a wedding at one of the churches we pulled the fire trucks out of the station and ate, danced, and drank beer in the empty space. The pastors of the churches were held in high esteem -- even by those who disagreed with their public doctrine.  There was no discipline problem because the whole community, with the congregation, doubled as the extension of mom's frown or dad's voice.  With this came a deep respect for authority -- even the authority with whom you disagreed.  God was everywhere and morality was shared even by the sinners who fell before temptation regularly.  We knew what sin was and we knew the value of forgiveness early on in life.

What was true in the small towns across America was also true in the urban neighborhoods -- sometimes called urban ghettos of people with a common ancestry, language, and religion.  People did not life in the city.  They lived in their neighborhood, went to school together, shopped on their version of main street, and played in streets while we played in fields and big back yards.  It was different and yet the same.  Until it was not.  The mass suburban exodus offered them the promise of space but at the cost of the communities they had known and enjoyed.  The exodus from rural America to the factories and suburban life offered the same promise but at an equal cost. We have become so mobile now that the question where are you from has become a joke.  Who knows anymore?   Urban churches have become apartment buildings and their neighborhood markets cannot compete with big box retailers or the abundant online availability of goods and services.  The decimated main street of rural America is matched by the loss of shops and shopkeepers from the urban and suburban landscape.  

I am not saying it is all bad.  We enjoy an abundance of cheap goods that none of us wants to give up.  We have people delivering things right to our doors that no retailer would ever stock.  But think of the loss of community, the emptiness of churches, the lack of order, the loss of a shared morality and a common bond of language, culture, and religion.  It is a brave new world but we are sheltering more and more in our homes, behind our screens, trusting no one but AI, and complaining that we are lonely and depressed.  Are they related?  No one believes we will ever return to what was.  I certainly don't.  But perhaps we all need to slow down the pace of change, work to restore through other avenues those things we have lost but need, and figure out a way forward to build into our modern world places for us to connect.  The church was one of those places -- not because we had a program to foster fellowship but because we came early and stayed late and these things happened.  Boys met girls there whom they would marry and girls met the boys who would become their husbands and they all sat with siblings, parents, grandparents, and extended family in the pews.  I am not sure that the church was the center of our lives because we sought community or community was the fruit of our common faith.  But as we make our way into 2026, I pray that some of what was lost might be found again and the church is key.  We have to give up a me and God kind of religion and find again the faith that binds with baptismal water those who are not kin by blood.  

A blessed New Year to you all!