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Knoxville, Cupertino and the Church

Last week I spent the better part of four days in Knoxville, Tennessee, at a national gathering of Presbyterians on the campus of the University of Tennessee. We held meetings in university classrooms, we ate in one of the university’s dining halls and we worshiped in the shadow of Neyland Stadium, home of the UT Volunteers football team, a structure impressive for its size (it’s the fourth largest stadium in the United States) if not, perhaps, for its architectural beauty.

As large institutions of higher learning go, the University of Tennessee is lovely enough, but I confess I got a little bit bored with the college and especially with its food, so I asked one of the University’s maintenance workers for suggestions about good places to eat in Knoxville, and armed with this local knowledge, I set out on foot along the banks of the Tennessee river to Market Square and Gay St. in Downtown Knoxville.

Here’s what I found: downtown Knoxville is vibrant. Gay street, the main thoroughfare in the entertainment district (almost certainly named without irony in a pre-stonewall era by rather straight-laced denizens of a Dixie defined by riverboats and hoop-skirts) boasts a lovely collection of restaurants, pubs, music venues and theaters; one block south there is market square, a car-less open space surrounded on four sides by retail and places for food and/or libation. I walked down to Knoxville’s Market Square twice, and both times a troupe of actors was performing Shakespeare to a multigenerational crowd of at least 250 folks sitting on lawn chairs. Competing for attention on the square were crazy evangelists and buskers playing bluegrass and blues; one guy was playing “I left my heart in San Francisco” on a sawblade. As far as I could tell, every shop had customers, every bar was crowded, and every restaurant had a line of people waiting for tables.

And here’s why I think Knoxville’s entertainment district is vibrant: it uses concepts of urban design that have made cities vibrant for thousands of years: streets with business that open to pedestrian traffic and open spaces where people can gather, do business and entertain one another in the heart of a city. At some point Californian city planners decided to organize cities and town around automobiles instead of people. As a result we ended up with strip malls and cities like Sunnyvale and Cupertino, which have excellent schools but about which no one (and you can quote me on this) ever will write great poetry.

I cannot help but think there is some religious analogy to the urban planning that brings us downtown Knoxville (on the one hand) and the Californian suburb (on the other). We live in an era during which there is a rush to do away with ancient religious forms. Many Evangelical Christians are doing away with ancient liturgies that have sustained the Church for centuries; Progressive Christians tend to do something similar with theological propositions, and certainly a measure of ecclesiastical house-cleaning is in order (and sometimes the need is urgent), but it’s also worth asking what ideas and forms and practices should be preserved among us so that our congregations remain vibrant and welcoming and full of life not the church version of a car-centric suburb.

I hope you’ll join me in thinking about these things.

Ben