The Church as Third Place?
25 July 2006
I just finished Ray Oldenburg's intriguing book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. It's a sociologist's look into the places that foster community. What makes them tick? How are they structured? Oldenburg calls these effective community gathering spots: "third places". They are informal, distinct locales that fosters community. Your home is your first place, and your work is your second place. Americans, by and large, have no third place, no informal gathering space to hang out, converse, and build relationships.Some of the symptoms that reveal the need to establishing 'great good (third) places':
- Our houses are no longer designed with the front porch as the focal point. We pull our car in our garage, enter the house from the garage, and never interact with our neighbors.
- Even our coffee shops are more concerned with profitable efficiency. Hence, chains like Starbucks hiring speed/efficiency gurus to get your coffee order filled in under 3 minutes (or something like that)
- Restaurants...even sit-down restaurants, adhere to the same goals. Get you in, get your food, and get out. It's interesting: on my most recent trip to Italy, we made a reservation for dinner at a local restaurant. The reservation reserved the table for us for the entire evening. . .
- Statistically, American stress levels are extremely high, in proportion to our 'affluence'. We have no place to go, relax, and unwind with good company.
If we were to bring back the third place, consider the impact. In Oldenburg's words: "the stranger feels at home--nay, is at home..." (xxviii)
Being a pastor, Oldenburg's findings have profound insight on how we, as a faith community, design and create the spaces we occupy. Can't there be more to a worship space than pews and/or chairs, and a stage with a screen on the back wall? I hope so...
A week or two back, I shared some of the conclusions in this book with our lead pastor, and of course, he said, "Great...present this stuff at our next lead team meeting." Good thing I opened my big fat mouth. Given that our church is about to embark on a new building campaign (an issue that could easily consume a whole 'nother post), third place principles could be profoundly impacting in how we design our new facility.
Personally, this gets me more involved in the building project than I had initially hoped for, but hey, if they're going to build, they might as well do it well.
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Labels: emerging church
Drew Moser @ 12:23 PM : : permalink
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Sounds like an echo of Joseph Myers "The Search to Belong." Myers also references the loss of the front porch and then gives a history of "space." His argument in the book is that there are four kinds of spaces for belonging, and healthy and missional communities know how to foster all four..
posted by
Len @ 5:59 PM : : permalink
Steve Collins talks about this here:
http://www.btinternet.com/~smallritual/section5/thirdplace.html
My inital reaction is ... why not go find good third places around your church and use them instead of building your own third space?
Are there no space's like this in your community? If not, are you willing to staff this so that it is open enough to be a useful third space for the community at large?
In houston I have seen some large churches spend millions of dollars trying to build third spaces for their uses or build spaces that look and feel like a third space for their youth/young adult worship services. One place I know has this huge coffee shop / retail space that is only open for 4 hours a week around their weekly worship service. Another one is only open from 3pm to 7pm.
Instead our church just uses a local coffee shop that really is a third space. I have offical office hours there, we hold a youth bible study there, and members from the church just hang out and and be good neighbors.
Just my 2 cents.
posted by
Nate Custer @ 1:53 AM : : permalink
nate-thanks for the comment. unfortunately, no, our community of $4500 really has no third places. and, as I presented this material last night to our church leadership, i told them that 'acessibility' is essential. i agree totally, and I wish I had a coffee shop to have office hours in!
posted by
Drew B Moser @ 7:00 AM : : permalink
I'm wondering if we as church leaders could create a culture of "hangout time" within our congregations. It sounds like you have a good opportunity to do that with the beginning of a new building plan. If you can get the architects to draw out some "hangout" space in the new facility, then you (and the other church leaders) can begin to plant the seeds of "hanging out" in the body and see what happens.
I visited Christ's Church of the Valley in Peoria, AZ (http://www.ccvonline.com) and they have a big cafe area outside their bookstore. It provided a great atmosphere to spend time with friends and hangout during down time. I'm not sure of its use during the week, but creating the third space under your own roof goes a long way.
Dean
posted by
Rev_DeanL @ 11:21 AM : : permalink
I was introduced to this concept a few years back. I was part of a church building project that was trying to accomplish this, largely through sports, and I spent two years working for Starbucks who is, or at least was, explicitly trying to create 3rd Place.
It seems that 3rd place is largely about actual physical space which means it would specifically be about the church building, not entirely but mostly so. I wonder, if a church builds something with the 3rd place concept in mind, doesn't that become anti-missional? If church primarily refers to people then maybe we need to focus on being present in our culture's 3rd places rather than recreate some.
However, a church could, though this would really be radical, build something entirely for the sake of creating a 3rd place for its NON-members, either in a neighborhood or commercial area. (Christian Science reading rooms??)
One last thought, and this one might get me in trouble, I think church might be intended to merge with family into 1st Place.
posted by
Bill Bean @ 10:21 AM : : permalink
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