Can my church be a third place? Can yours? Should yours??

Corridor Urbanism favors bars for meetings.
Why not a church?

The term third place entered the national vocabulary more than thirty years ago with the first publication of Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place [Paragon House, 1989], and the concept seems as popular as ever. Clearly, Oldenburg struck a nerve with his description of neighborhood gathering places lost in America's rush to the suburban model of development after World War II. The quest to recover authentic third places has been part and parcel of the back-to-the-city era that has marked the first two decades of this century.

Meanwhile, the book went to a 2nd edition in 1999 (DaCapo), and then in 2001 he edited Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the 'Great Good Places' at the Heart of Our Communities (Marlowe), in which proprietors of third places tell their stories. 

Oldenburg would rather describe third places than provide a crisp definition. The concept is complicated: The Great Good Place runs to 296 pages of text. On page 2 of Celebrating the Third Place, he does equate the term with "a setting beyond home and work in which people relax in good company and do so on a regular basis." His most common short formulation, though, is "informal public gathering places." "Conversation is the main activity," he argues (1999: 26):

Nothing more clearly indicates a third places than that the talk there is good; that it is lively, scintillating, colorful, and engaging.... The persistent mood of the third place is a playful one. Those who would keep conversation serious for more than a minute are almost certainly doomed to failure. (1999: 26, 37)

This conversation must cross friend groups to qualify fully:  

The B.Y.O.F. (Bring Your Own Friends) tavern may initially offer a convincing illusion of a third place, particularly when it is crowded.... The illusion is one of unity, of everybody enjoying themselves together. Upon closer examination, however, one finds that there is no unity.... The individual entering alone is almost certainly doomed to remain that way. The patrons, by their choice of seating, the positioning of their bodies, the contained volume of their voices, and their eye movements indicate that invasion of their group by others is neither expected nor welcome. Nobody meanders from one group to the next. No one calls out to friends across the room. (1999: 171)

Sometimes The Great Good Place seems at war with itself, because the heyday of third places in America occurred in extremely gendered times. If you can have a men-only third place, can you slice and dice the public in other exclusive ways? Can you be a little bit inclusive? Now I'm even more uncomfortable than I was when I started writing this essentializing paragraph, but length constraints require we push on and essentialize, so essentialize we will! 

The subtitle of Oldenburg's first book is Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, & How They Get You Through Your Day. Celebrating the Third Place includes plenty of those, plus a garden store, a gym, and a photo shop. Just being a cafe doesn't make you a third place, though; he warns against those who would co-opt the popularity of the concept for their own economic gain without providing authentic community:

Developers build houses and call them "homes." They build socially sterile subdivisions and call them "communities." It's called "warming the product." It's also happening with alleged third places. Officials of a popular coffeehouse chain often claim that their establishments are third places, but they aren't. They may evolve into them but at present, they are high volume, fast turnover operations that present an institutional ambience at an intimate level. Seating is uncomfortable by design and customers in line are treated rudely when uncertain of their orders. (2001: 3)

The third places are, then, predominantly small commercial establishments: "The best places are locally owned, independent, small-scale, steady-state businesses" (2001: 4). However, people gather in all kinds of places that don't fit that description, for all kinds of reasons. Can a sports stadium be a third place? How about a grocery store? A high school? A theater group? A Starbucks? A casino? Possum Lodge? A friend's basement rec room? An online college writing center? 

What about a church? Mine had an orientation/planning meeting last weekend, and the desire to make our church a third place figured prominently in the discussion.

In chapter 2 of The Great Good Place, Oldenburg describes third places as a "leveler" accessible to the entire neighborhood and so expanding everyone's range of association; a "neutral ground" where no one whoever they are has pride of status (with the exception of well-established "regulars"); and a place where conversation is the main activity and main purpose for gathering. They are accessible at most times of day, informal so they accommodate people's home and work obligations, playful, and with a low external profile. At their core...

The first and most important function of third places is that of uniting the neighborhood... Places such as these, which serve virtually everybody, soon create an environment in which everybody knows just about everybody. In most cases, it cannot be said that everyone, or even a majority, will like everybody else. It is, however, important to know everyone, to know how they variously add to and subtract from the general welfare; to know what they can contribute in the face of various problems or crises, and to learn to feel at ease with everyone in the neighborhood irrespective of how one feels about them. A third place is a "mixer." (1999: xvii-xviii)

...in other words, similar to Jane Jacobs's theory of sidewalks, but one level up!

A church, however open it would like its doors to be, is constrained as an informal, public "mixer" by having a creed--though these vary widely in rigidity--and formal membership. Churches have a variety of associations for people, not all of them positive. Their main function is to hold worship services and to provide spiritual benefits to its members. Without products to sell, they rely heavily on fundraising to support paid staff, outreach ("evangelism") to increase membership, and a bewildering array of committees that require members to staff. All run counter to the playful informality of third places, which might be why those tend to be small businesses, which have an owner and employees to keep the beer or coffee flowing and the restrooms clean.

Nevertheless, I've been in a few churches over the years that have some qualities of a third place:

Wesley United Methodist Church and Foundation, Urbana IL, runs a coffeehouse that hosted a broad clientele in the 1980s when I volunteered and quaffed non-alcoholic beverages there. (The church also had a large lounge that attracted students during the week for studying or naps; at least it did during the less security-conscious '80s.)  Back then, at the risk of shocking the young people of today, there weren't coffee houses dotting the landscape, and if you wanted to go someplace near campus that wasn't a bar you had to go to the Etc. The main menu items were "wassail," a very sweet and highly-caffeinated beverage made from Dr. Pepper syrup, and "orts," a sort-of-cheese curds made from Velveeta brand sort-of-cheese. The Etc. is in one corner of a large building, and I'm not sure how many of its customers even know it is attached to a church. In my time it was only open eight hours a week (8-12 Fri/Sat), so limited on the accessibility dimension. 

Getting ready for Jazz Night, March 2018

Westminster Presbyterian Church, Washington DC, has Jazz Night every Friday and Blues Night every Monday--again, only a few hours a week, unlike a regularly-open coffeehouse or bar. Music venues are more for performance than for conversation, but at Jazz Night there are long breaks between sets when people wander all over the sanctuary/performance space to greet each other. Even more conversation can be had in the basement, where they serve delicious home-cooked food. I went there one Friday night to check it out, and after that I returned every time I could. I never attended a service at the church, though. I don't know how many people in the audience do, either, but I suspect it is a lowish percentage. What does the church get out of it? Some spillover increase in membership? Or just the joy of being a community institution?

Veritas Cafe, from their website

Veritas Church, Cedar Rapids IA, is located toward the south end of downtown Cedar Rapids, easily walkable from any of the core neighborhoods. They have been selling Dash Coffee Roasters products in their lobby for a couple years, and are currently open 7:30-3 weekdays. (They close at 12:30 Fridays.)  They have plenty of space, so it's easy to socially distance, and the open floor plan facilitates seeing other people who happen to be there. I attended one service at Veritas in maybe 2017 to see a former student get baptized, and probably won't be back, but that doesn't matter to being welcomed and feeling comfortable at the "cafe."

Each of these churches is built to the street in a walkable neighborhood--design matters!--and they have been able to provide something the neighborhood needs (a safe meeting place during a pandemic, live music, non-alcoholic "wassail") that is sufficiently impelling to overcome any reservations on the parts of attendees about whether they belong there. It's important also that each church sustains awillingness to devote ongoing space, energy, and custodial time to activities which ask nothing of attendees regarding creed or membership, and do not contribute (much) to church attendance, maintenance, or finances. 

Looser affiliations may be where the practice of church is heading in the 21st century, but not all are buying it. Notably, four people at our church's vision discussion--all men, curiously--advocated for more efforts towards increasing membership and financial contributions. There are valid reasons to pursue those goals, too, but they seem at cross-purposes with becoming a third place.

SEE ALSO:

Johnny Dzubak, "What is a Third Place and Why Do You Need One," The Art of Charm, 8 April 2015, and "Third Place, Part Two: Finding the Right Third Place for You," 15 April 2015. Dzubak has a different way of essentializing Oldenburg than I do, with more stress on individual benefits and less on community functions of third places. Nevertheless, it's an interesting take. And I wish Dzubak had been my older brother forty years ago when I really needed these life lessons!

Sara Joy Proppe, "Sit On It," Strong Towns, 21 January 2016. Houses of worship can contribute a lot to neighborhood walkability by providing places to sit in their yards.

MLK Against the Mob

 

Officer Eugene Goodman.
Still from Igor Bobic (Huffington Post) video of Capitol Hill riot
(swiped from Yahoo News)

There is nothing blacker than uncertainty--JULIAN RANDALL

This year's observance of Martin Luther King Day took place less than two weeks after a white supremacist riot at the U.S. Capitol, less than a year after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off weeks of protests, and during a coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 400,000 Americans, disproportionately people of color. The commemorations mixed anger, sadness, and hope.

The mix of feelings came across strongly during "Not Just Another Day Off," a video medley of poetry and oratory produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and available through their website until Thursday. Julian Randall, Camonghne Felix, and Joe Ross read original poetry, while actors read excerpts from speeches by Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, and, of course, Martin Luther King. Felix's poetry in particular ran the gamut of emotions, containing physical pain, anger, hunger, and renewal in one short text. From "Yes, It Is Possible":

But this time, my system nosed down, bringing me down to my knees to purge....

And it was like this for days, I couldn't stomach a morsel, my receptors stunted with the shock of an imminent shift.

...until, at once, it stopped, and I woke to find myself at the kitchen table, perfectly unbothered... as if life itself were some benign victory I'd won.... 

Poet and activist Camonghne Felix

"The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro," Baldwin stated during a 1965 debate with William F. Buckley. It was this statement that was read for this event, and which created a fascinating juxtaposition on King Day, given that King's most famous oratory is his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. King's formulation assumed a well-made society from which blacks were unjustly excluded; it remained only to undo that exclusion, and blacks too could fully benefit from the American experience. Baldwin suggested two ways in which that American experience could only happen with exclusion and suppression of blacks: black slave labor created the wealth (including the construction of the White House, by the way) that whites enjoyed, and that un-wealthy whites still had the psychic benefit of having blacks between them and the bottom of the social hierarchy. Without the oppression of blacks, whites would lose wealth and social position.

These two takes on the American Dream speak directly to whether the current system is fixable, and why race persistently matters. King describes a world where race loses its relevance when segregation is lifted and barriers to opportunity are removed. He was not so naive to believe that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were all it would take, and later argued for direct remedial action. But given civil rights laws, enforcement of civil rights laws, evolving social attitudes, and some degree of reparation, blacks as well as whites can partake of the American bounty. [You could find evidence in professional sports, where racial integration has been followed by spectacular incomes enjoyed by top athletes.]

Baldwin's darker vision suggests that the bounty itself is illusory, that the appearance of wealth only exists because powerful (white) people have taken more than their share. Eliminate oppression, and you eliminate the wealth as well. This is frankly terrifying to contemplate, as we work for inclusive communities with opportunities for all. Can we not have a crowded table with all manner of good things and no one excluded or exploited? But this take on Baldwin helps to explain systemic racism, widening income and wealth gaps, and ten-plus years of white anxiety bordering on paranoia.

Monday morning at 10:30 the DC Library presented Paula Wayne Shelton reading and talking about her book Child of the Civil Rights Movement (Dragonfly, 2013). Shelton is the daughter of Andrew Young, and she talked about knowing Martin Luther King when she was a child, and participating in the 1965 march at Selma. It's an upbeat, celebratory book that ends with the presidential signing of the Voting Rights Act. She was interviewed after the reading by two members of the library's teen council. She told them she wanted to show the "loving, warm and caring person" King was to children who know him only as a statue. There was some reference to current events, but mostly the questions from the children in the audience were of the "What was it like?" and "How did you write it?" varieties. Shelton is currently a 1st grade teacher at Georgetown Day School, and lives near Capitol Hill.

Lovar Davis Kidd, filmed at CSPS Hall

At 7 in the evening, St. Paul's United Methodist Church hosted the annual Cedar Rapids city observance. Since 2020 this has dispensed with a main speaker in favor of a variety show format, this year on the theme of Protest. There were memorable performances of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," and "Amazing Grace," spoken word performance by Rahma and Raafa Elsheikh, and an interpretive dance to King quotes by Lovart Davis Kidd. The Percy and Lileah Harris Who is My Neighbor Awards went to Nate Klein of Mt. Mercy University, and three youth awards: Diamond Roundtree from Washington High School (now at University of Northern Iowa), and Rahma and Raafa Elsheikh from Kennedy High School and the Academy for Scholastic and Personal Success. Ann Harris Carter, daughter of Percy and Lileah Harris, preceded the presentation by reading the Good Samaritan story from the Gospel of Luke, concluding with: "(1) What is this Scripture saying to me? and (2) What am I going to do about it?"

Ann Harris Carter

What would it take to create what King later called a "person-oriented society" as opposed to a "thing-oriented society" (in his 1967 speech "Beyond Vietnam")? As frustrating and maddening as it can be, it seems despair is not an option. We must keep at it.

 

SEE ALSO: Grace King, "Martin Luther King Jr. Service in Cedar Rapids Honors 'Neighbors,'" Cedar Rapids Gazette, 19 January 2021

LAST YEAR'S POST: "Call and Response: MLK 2020," 21 January 2020

VIDEO: Mavis Staples sings "Freedom Highway" live in 2011

Iowa: It's Unreal!

 Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to state Republicans' latest round of electoral victories in November by saying "they validated the direction we are taking the state" (Pearce 2020). She doubled down on that Tuesday night during the Condition of the State address, praising the state's response to COVID and the August derecho, as well as its budget surplus. She did not mention the state being 7th per capita in COVID cases (17th in deaths), nor its reliance on federal grants for economic relief. Dislocations to businesses and students by the prolonged pandemic were attributed to overzealous precautions, to which she is determined to put a stop.

It has become an article of faith for a considerable chunk of Iowans that the pandemic is relatively benign, and requiring precautions such as facemasks are a blatant attack on our individual liberties. "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain," goes our state motto, possibly written by someone who had a sense of responsibility to his fellow humans, but also possibly an early form of "You're not the boss of me!" Which would be an okay motto as well. The chamber seemed somewhat empty, as some members were (wisely) attending remotely. About half the members shown when the camera cut away from Reynolds were wearing face masks. The front page of Tuesday's Cedar Rapids Gazette showed a crowd of anti-mask protestors at the Capitol. The legislative leadership has said they will not require masks for committee meetings or floor proceedings. Representative Art Staed (D-Cedar Rapids) reported unmasked colleagues at each of the three committee hearings he attended Tuesday.

So Reynolds's call for public schools to open in-person rings hollow. Of course, students should be in school. Besides what must be an accumulating pile of research on the issue, I can testify from my experiences in 2020 going between in-person and online instruction that the very best students do well either way, but the farther you get away from that standard the more trouble students have with online instruction. So let's get students back to the classroom! 

Washington High School, Cedar Rapids, was closed for repairs until this month
(Google Screenshot)

But what has Governor Reynolds, or anyone in Iowa government, done to make that possible? Besides demanding it, I mean. She's resisted shutdowns and mask mandates, and overruled districts that have tried to do pandemic measures on their own. Tuesday night she called for a bill "that gives parents the choice to send their child back to school full-time." She also wants to expand open enrollment [to Des Moines and Waterloo, IPTV commentator O. Kay Henderson explained afterwards] and charter schools, as well as "education savings accounts for students who are trapped in a failing school." There will be no spending increase, though, because she wants to cut taxes again. She was full of flattery for teachers who went to extraordinary lengths for their students this year, but is proposing nothing to make their jobs less difficult or more safe. Minority leader Todd Pritchard (D-Charles City) called this part of the speech "a little bit of warfare with out public schools."

We want to do what other countries have been able to do during pandemic, without any personal inconvenience or going to the efforts they did.

From education Rerynolds pivoted to red meat about BLM protests. Reynolds did wear a facemask on her way out of the chamber... and hugged a whole bunch of people.

Iowans are brave and good and tough, and if you come to our state, you had better be, too!

The complete text of the governor's speech is here.

SEE ALSO:

"Condition of the State 2020," 15 January 2020

"Condition of the State 2019," 14 January 2019