Whatever programs the church may offer, the community needs to be led gradually, across the months or years, to see that the church cares.
—Calvin Miller

Suburbia: the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made. There, amid the water sprinkling systems and lava rock landscapes, rises the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered.

Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?

Two women from our church once made a church visitation call to a suburbanite. They were fearful but brave and wanted to extend the gospel to someone in need of Christ. They were convinced their "prayed up" status would deliver them from the mouth of the lion. They walked up to a door, rang the chime doorbell, and waited beneath a plywood-goose wreath that said WELCOME. ...