A Rockwellesk community

We speak longingly of a time when the business streets were filled with stores selling all kinds of goods that were generally owned by those who were working in it, the mom and pop stores. We remember with hopeful eyes the time when people used to walk to church and the neighbors would know each other and care for all of the kids in the neighborhood, or at least their own block. It is obvious to me that when we speak in these terms we also seem to confine those things to a long lost past that will never happen again! We speak of it as a in memoriam, like a long gone loved one.

I am constantly surprised when I hear these things as though they are long gone because this is the world I live in as a Norristown resident. Our business street no longer has boarded up store fronts, well there is an empty space now but that is because the owners of it decided to move to a newer space created on the same street a block away! in the mornings the "moms" half of these store ownerships come out and sweep the sidewalk directly in front of their store, while they greet each other and shoo away kids on their way to school, who are spreading the leaves they just finished sweeping into a pile. I have come to know may of the business owners in our part of town because they are in their store most of the time. I did not meet them at chamber of commerce gathering where business men/women who live outside the town argue for less taxes and other favorable "breaks" for their business. These people live and work in Norristown, their children go to school here. Evening times on good evenings at around 5:30 or so the cries go out from mothers on their porches calling kids in for dinner. The other day, a gorgeous 69 and sunny day, I overheard a mom call her child in and tell her daughter's friend to go home for dinner because he mom was waiting for her, not in the general sense but by name and pointing to the house where she lives.

It is in the midst of living out life in Norristown that I ask myself how it is that the people who remember a Norman Rockwell world lovingly miss out on that very goodness of community happening in their very own backyard!? sure some would complain that there is much crime in Norristown and it is a dangerous neighborhood, that it is dirty, etc. However, I find it that more often than not these people do not live in town any longer, rarely visit it and would not come anywhere near it after dark.

Of course there is crime in Norristown, it is a densely populated, low income town with a higher than average percentage of young people who are unsupervised. We are sent the "undesirables" from the "nice" neighborhoods where all the good people have moved. Yet in the midst of all that against us we seem to find ourselves with Mom and Pop stores, a diverse neighborhood where the people next door actually have names, and as a parent you know more than your own children's names and address, etc. We have big problems in Norristown just as every other "golden age" has had, but I think that if Norman Rockwell were to visit us today he would still draw, paint what he did, only perhaps the subjects in his amazing picture stories would have been a bit more tanned.

Creating together

We have now had two services since November. The first service is what we've always had, know and are used to having. The second is an experiment that forces multiculturalism from being an idea into a lived reality.

Here's a bit about our Living In Faith Everyday service. We regularly have nearly all cultural groups in our town represented. The service places more emphasis on seeking to increase contact and interaction between those attending than a traditional one does. We do not have the traditional front end of a "contemporary" service. There is no praise band, no flashy video presentations or specific lighting. We do have power point projected onto a wall for worship song lyrics and Scripture. At the same time we do not have the rigidity of structure that a traditional service does. I will not call this rigidity a "liturgy" in the high church sense of understanding, because as Baptist we claim not to have a liturgical worship tradition. We do not have a big sound system. We don't even have big numbers!
I'm very glad the church has decided to engage in this experiment to bring an idea that many churches simply consider into a lived reality that exists and informs the lives of those who attend. Multiculturalism only comes to be when it is experienced personally. We can create awareness within ourselves but cannot truly understand it unless we live it.