The big church goes to the circus

Go to church

The Soul of the New Exurb
By JONATHAN MAHLER

In the spring of 1996, Lee McFarland quit his high-paying job at Microsoft, sold his house and drove his Jeep Cherokee from Redmond, Wash., to Surprise, Ariz. He had come to build a church. McFarland, who was 36 at the time, knew little about leading churches and less about building them: he wasn't even halfway through the correspondence classes he was taking to become an evangelical pastor. Nevertheless, he'd been hired by a small group of Christians in an adjoining community to do just that. And so a few days after he arrived, he put on a pair of slacks and a polo shirt, said goodbye to his wife, Sandy, and their two kids, who had come to Surprise several weeks ahead of him to get settled in their new house, and set out to find believers.

For decades, Surprise, which is about 45 minutes northwest of downtown Phoenix, was mostly scrubby cotton, rose and citrus fields, with a small grid of streets where migrant workers lived. In the early 90's, developers discovered the town. By the time McFarland and his family arrived, its population had climbed past 15,000, and more, many more, were on their way. Most of Surprise's new residents were young white families drawn to affordable homes and jobs within commuting distance. Many of them hadn't gone to college but no doubt hoped that their children would.

These were the people McFarland was seeking when he started knocking on the doors of one light brown stucco tract home after another. Applying a lesson he learned a month earlier in a church-development seminar in Orange County, Calif., he introduced himself to the locals as the pastor of a new church that he was calling Radiant. From there he expected to begin long, probing conversations about their lives -- what was missing, what their kids liked to do in their free time and so on. But the mothers and fathers who greeted him were barely civil. ''This was,'' as he put it to me not long ago, ''a radically unchurched area.'' No wonder Surprise's three existing churches were struggling.

After a few days of trekking through identical streets and cul-de-sacs under the hot Arizona sun, McFarland figured he had better try a different approach. He traded in his business-casual attire for a T-shirt and blue jeans, bought a clipboard and posed as the representative of a secular organization. He limited himself to two questions: ''What's your favorite radio station?'' and ''Why do you think people don't go to church?'' The conversations grew longer, and McFarland's mission became clear. People in Surprise listened to rock music. And they didn't go to church because they didn't have any fancy clothes, didn't like being asked for money and didn't see how any of the sermons they had heard in the past related to their lives.

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For several months, Brett and Cristina attended a Christian parenting class at the church, where they discussed things like how to help their kids handle science class in public school. (''If the teacher is up there teaching evolution as fact,'' Brett told me, ''there's nothing wrong with you asking very pointed questions, and it's a great opportunity to share your faith.'') Brett and Cristina attend a potluck dinner every other Saturday night with couples from the church. On Tuesday nights, Brett leads a Bible study class at the church; on Friday mornings he has breakfast with a group of Christian contractors. ''Now I know what it means to have brothers in Christ -- seeing guys, giving big hugs to each other, just that feeling,'' he told me, explaining the transformative effect that the church's small groups have had on him. ''It's not Radiant magic dust, but Radiant encourages you to let the spirit grow inside you and take down the wall you build up around yourself.''


As soon as he arrived in Surprise, McFarland could see that the city didn't have the infrastructure to support an influx of young families. He sensed opportunity. ''From Day 1 we were going to be a church that was going to really impact our community and provide something very tangible that would solve a problem,'' he says. ''Just helping the community opened a lot of doors, made people feel like we weren't just a church.''

The first problem McFarland set about solving was that of the public schools. The newly arriving parents told him they were terrible. So in the summer of 1998, less than a year after he'd started offering Sunday services, McFarland rented a trailer, strung up a banner and began signing up children for an as-yet-unbuilt charter school, Paradise Education Center; C.E.O., Lee McFarland. ''We had nothing to show them,'' he told me. ''Literally there was just land here.''

It was a measure of just how desperate parents were for an alternative to the public schools that the parents of 225 children turned up, vaccination records in hand, and registered them. Today the school, a ring of single-story white stucco buildings directly across the street from Radiant's massive worship center, is thriving. It has more than 1,000 children, and a waiting list close to 200.

Because the school relies on public funds, teachers are required to follow state-approved curriculum guides, but Paradise nevertheless provides free advertising for Radiant. ''To this day parents will come by here and go, 'We just moved to Surprise and my kids go to school here, so tell me about this church,' '' McFarland said. ''We usually say it's a real positive church, real upbeat, kind of a community feel. A great place to get to know people. And they go, 'Great, I'll check it out.' That story has happened hundreds of times.''

Today the problem with Surprise's public schools isn't merely one of quality, it's one of quantity. The city builds two elementary schools every year and a new high school every other year, but parents still complain of overcrowding.

Commercial development has started catching up with the population growth. Surprise's main thoroughfare, Bell Road, is now a traffic-choked avenue lined with strip malls filled with all of the usual suspects (Target, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, etc.). But it's the affordable homes that draw people to the city. The appetite for houses is so strong that most developments have a lottery system; if there is no lottery, people camp out overnight whenever new properties are about to be released. Demand is pushing up prices. At one development I visited, Legacy Parc, homes are climbing between $5,000 and $15,000 every month. But even with these steady increases, the average house in Surprise goes for $175,000.

It's an attractive price for many families who are either trying to make the move into the middle class or remain there in the face of mounting debt and growing expenses. Which explains why the typical Surprise resident, as in many fast-growing exurbs, is a young, white, married couple of modest means.

These are people that the Republican Party has always run well with -- it's conventional wisdom among political analysts that young, middle-class couples raising children tend to be conservative -- and in 2004 the G.O.P. made a strong play for exurbanites. Megachurches were a key part of the strategy. Supporters were asked to supply the Bush-Cheney campaign with church directories so it could make sure these churchgoers were registered and planning to vote. ''For the first time we didn't just engage businesspeople or Second Amendment supporters; we engaged people who said they were motivated first and foremost by their values, and these people were often churchgoers,'' Gary Marx, a liaison to social conservatives for the campaign, told me recently. ''We asked them to reach out to their community, and their community is the megachurch.''

And this is the group for which this Schiavo circus hits home. They aren't fundies, but more like the Simpsons, people who go to church because they think they should. And since church membership is a great way to have friends in a new community, they have no problems socializing with church members. They live in these places because they can't live closer to their jobs and urban areas. You have a lot of ex-servicemen, blue collar workers and the like, people who usually vote Republican anyway, have since their grandparents voted for Eisenhower.

But when they saw that freak show in Florida, this hit them in the head like a 2 by 4. They may be pro-life or whatever, but they are anti-in law. The reason they moved to an exburb was to have their own lives. The Schiavo circus is a nightmare for these people, like being trapped ion a burning building or crashing in an airplane. These young couples can imagine exactly how this would play out in their lives and they don't like it one bit. Time's polling is so bad, Joe "dead staffer" Scarboruough wants to wish it away. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a corrupt coroner to help him out here.

The people who flipped out the most were young husbands imagining dealing with grief-crazed in-laws. Hell, they fight over sending the kids to visit now. They plan those Disney World trips for a reason, being in central Florida in August beats a week with the inlaws. Imagine if tragedy was involved.

No matter how many times I write about it, I just can't believe the GOP thought this would help them. Randall Terry and Pat Mahoney made their name bullying women. The Schindlers come off badly, delusionally. And while some folks thought those pictures would help the GOP by creating compassion, most folks were thinking: If that's me, please fucking kill me. Please.

Some people think this is some kind of cable TV distraction. And it was. I've followed this case for years and was annoyed when Jeb! jumped in . But then DeLay decided to raise the stakes and play with the Constitution. Then the pundits jumped in, calling for Jeb! to become King of Florida as if people supported him. Bill Bennett casually tossed around impeachment like it was a ball gag. Well, Jeb! wasn't worried about impeachment, but jail for murder and kidnapping. These people talk about freedom on the march, but they wanted Jeb! to act like the Sauds and make the laws he wanted.

Then it became the most important story in America, because they were going after the courts in a rather scary way. I know Europeans are shaking their
heads, along with our Commonwealth friends, but they shouldn't take the wrong lesson away from this. Sure, we have some wingnuts who think America should be a theocracy, but most don't. These people took a shot at imposing the rule of man over law for this one case, and then it would all start to unravel. They didn't think people would react so badly, but Americans aren't idiots. They know when politicians are running a scam. Then Dubya jumped in with both feet, with his dramatic return to Washington.

The GOP must have believed that nonsense about a manadate, forgetting that 3m votes is a close election. The country was already divided, this wasn't going to help. So now, people like Grover Norquist are going "holy shit, what are these maniacs doing". Kinda like the exburb church goers. They didn't sign on for non-stop lunacy.

And given the naturual cowardice of the Bushes, who they had pumped up for years as plain talking straight shooters, they were left with Jeb! and Dubya
running for the hills when Randall Terry and the delusional Schindlers became the face of the GOP, endorsed by Tom DeLay. Instead of nice families going to church, the GOP is now being seen as a collection of wingnut protesters complete with criminals in the mix. The kind of people who will torment the dying to make their point.

That cowardice was exactly the wrong move, the anti-George Wallace. Wallace may have stood in the schoolhouse door, but he led his people away from there as well. He didn't flee the scene and leave the Klan in charge. Which is exactly what the GOP did. They let Terry and Mahoney not only challenge the GOP, they didn't refute those challenges, which makes them look even weaker. A pol should have stood up and said "It's easy for Randall Terry to say violate the law, but he doesn't live in Florida and he won't be going to jail in Florida." But the GOP won't even challenge these guys when they pose a direct threat to their reelection. Which they now do. All you get is Jeb! wimpering in the corner and not saying the obvious, he's gone above and beyond any reasonable standard to help the Schindlers, placing his office on the line for them. Nope.

These same people talk about weak Dems, yet when faced with violent loons, all they can do is wimper and hide

posted by Steve @ 10:59:00 AM