Saturday, September 19, 1998

A budding movement fights urban sprawl on theological grounds

By Deborah Kovach Caldwell

The Dallas Morning News

FLOWER MOUND, Texas -- The Rev. Richard Spleth is organizing a congregation among the tidy shopping strips and tall four-bedroom houses in this flourishing fringe city. As he watches his tan brick church rise on a wide boulevard, he has begun to consider a battery of ethical questions:

Do we really want to pave over land given to us by God? Is it moral to build new houses and jobs miles from the city? Do we feel spiritually adrift from our families, churches and towns because we're spending too much time in our cars?

All over the country, as developers place buildings on the land like blocks on a Lego table, people across the faith spectrum are starting to ask themselves similar questions. Last week, the Sierra Club deemed urban sprawl the fastest-growing threat to the environment.

"It basically comes down to an ethical question," says Calvin DeWitt, director of the Au Sable Institute, a think tank in Mancelona, Mich., that links environmental issues with religion."We have a system in place that results in the consumption of land, resources and even human beings and culture."

DeWitt, described by one observer as Evangelical Environmentalist, started worrying about urban sprawl some years ago when he was supervisor of a town near Madison, Wisc. He battled with big business over development and won by rallying citizens to create a land-use plan.

"I ended up seeing that the little people were regulated and the big actors could figure out ways around it," he said."We discovered you need another standard."

For DeWitt, that standard comes from the Bible.

"People are beginning to realize there are truths there that are timeless," he said."Probably the key one is stewardship and responsibility for creation."

In the past year or so, a budding movement of religious people has come to the same conclusion. They are expanding their notions of caring for creation beyond preserving air, water and wildlife to attending to what most of them see every day: bulldozed land. They say they are not against development; they just want religious people to help make decisions about how growth happens.

They go about that decision-making in a variety of ways. Some people form congregation-based committees to work with local officials on development plans that religious folks deem less intrusive. Other people educate themselves and turn into activists to battle developers. Still others preach to church members about their responsibilities to get involved in government decisions about land use.

In Minneapolis, for instance, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America brought together a religious coalition to lobby the state on anti-sprawl measures. In Michigan, Catholic parishioners received a grant to gather data about the effects of development around their farms. In Portland, Ore., a rabbi argued that Jews must get involved in anti-sprawl issues. And in Cleveland, Catholic Archbishop Anthony Pilla created a land-use task force to deal with related suburban and central city issues.

One observer who has studied Sunbelt sprawl and its impact on religious groups says these activists are probably wasting their time trying to stop it. But when they talk about their response to feeling spiritually adrift in the suburbs, they may be on to something, said Nancy Eiesland, a religion sociologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"At least they are raising the ethical questions about how this affects the quality of life," she said.

In a few places, congregations cope by making drive-time inspirational tapes for members. Others sell message pads for the car with a daily prayer on each piece of paper. Still others preach on stress.

"Religious organizations realize this style of life that combines longer work hours with longer commutes creates less time for care of self and community and family," she said.

But there isn't much to be done about it, said Eiesland.

"People want contradictory things," she said."They want the small-town feel and they want to move up the economic ladder, and these two things are often impossible for the vast majority of people. They are overstressed but not unhappy. They know they are doing the best they can do."

In Portland, however, people want to do better. In that city, residents are debating what is called the urban boundary, an aggressive anti-sprawl measure being studied by Seattle, Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. The boundary draws an imaginary line around a metropolitan area. On one side is open space; on the other side is the city. The goal is to contain development within the boundary and preserve wildlife outside it in hopes of stopping sprawl and improving quality of life for city-dwellers.

Rabbi Joseph Wolf of Havurah Shalom in Portland is one of its many supporters.

"The Torah definitely teaches us not to wantonly destroy nature," Rabbi Wolf said."Sprawl is tantamount to destroying the gift of creation."

He has preached to congregants, written extensively and lectured on the topic.

Across the country, Catholics in Cleveland are hearing the same message.

"We need a change of heart and attitude about how we look at the city, the land and each other," said Leonard Calabrese, who coordinates an effort by the Archdiocese of Cleveland to address land-use issues.

There, people are living, working and driving on 30 percent more land than a generation ago, even though the population hasn't changed, according to Calabrese. A few years ago, Catholic officials began asking how the church could maintain its credibility as a family if members were spread out and disconnected.

So the archdiocese started partnerships of urban, suburban and rural parishes to make sure Catholics around the diocese knew one another.

Then they studied the causes of sprawl. They contended that government encouraged development of ever-more-distant suburbs by paying to build highways, widen roads and build water and sewer extensions - without recognizing the impact of transferring that money from older communities.

A Catholic land-use task force began meeting with government groups, such as the state's farmland preservation board, to press for what they consider ethical approaches to building growth.

This fall, the church is sponsoring a series of forums on suburban issues. Parishioners are talking about the difficulties of living in the suburbs. About how exhausted they are by the traffic. About the effects on their children, who must be driven everywhere instead of having the freedom to walk.

"How do we talk to our children about commitment, responsibility, perseverance, and at the same time look at the way we live, which speaks of using up land and disposing of it? Those are ethical concerns," Calabrese said.

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In Dallas, there is no organized effort to deal with sprawl -- even though Dallas-Fort Worth's population has doubled since 1970, from 2.2 million to 4.1 million this year.

"My sense is, the typical suburban church is thinking in terms of its own growth opportunities, and most churches, frankly, are thoughtlessly reflecting the culture around them," said Larry James, who resigned last week as director of the Greater Dallas Community of Churches to return to his job as director of Central Dallas Ministries.

That culture values individual property rights and a desire to keep the economy expanding even though that means chewing up more land. And there is no denying that, more than almost any place in this country, Texas has vast land.

For now, James said, there are higher priorities, such as bringing business and housing -- sprawl, actually -- to struggling southern Dallas.

One Dallas church leader thinks about the building going on around him and becomes frustrated. Bishop Mark Herbener of the Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America said Lutherans are busily building new churches in Frisco, McKinney and Allen, towns that are part of the suburban frontier.

"We've got to go there because the people are there," he said."So we're trapped in a certain sense by the sprawl. And the reason we don't do much about it is that we really can't. What do we do? Tell somebody, 'Don't sell your property'?"

He thinks the miles of subdivisions and strip malls stretching halfway to Oklahoma are causing spiritual problems. In his sermons he often talks about the loneliness and isolation that he believes his far-flung flock feels.

"People sit there pretty quiet when I talk about it like they know what I'm talking about," he said.

As a result, he said, some day people here might begin considering the effects of what they've built.

One of those facing these issues is Spleth, pastor of Creekwood Christian Church in Flower Mound.

Spleth, 45, came to Dallas as a teen-ager in 1969. He remembers when the drive from Dallas to Denton featured an almost unbroken vista of cotton farms and ranches. And Flower Mound? It was ranching country, with fewer than 2,000 residents.

By the time he moved there in 1992 to start his church, however, a boom was in full swing. Today, Flower Mound has more than 42,000 people and continues to grow faster than any town in Denton County. Some homeowners, who say the schools and roads are overcrowded, occasionally fight development plans. But in general people are pleased with the growth.

"The church is being born anew in a frontier place," said Spleth."Despite the ethical concerns about suburban sprawl in terms of use of resources, it's where people live, so the church has to be there. We have no choice."

One of his biggest jobs is helping members feel connected to their community, he said. That's not easy, since there is no town center here. In addition, 95 percent of his congregants moved to Flower Mound within the past decade. And 95 percent of them don't work where they live. They commute primarily to Las Colinas and to business centers along Interstate 635.

For the most part, they haven't had time or reason to think about the effects of all the building in their town, although they do complain about the logjam of traffic on the road to the Vista Ridge Mall.

But Spleth has detected some concern about water. As the long summer drags on with no rain, people are beginning to worry about all the water they must use to keep their suburban lawns green.

Perhaps that is a beginning. And perhaps that means in the years ahead, Spleth and the members of Creekwood Christian Church will deal with some internal tension.

"The suburban lifestyle develops, and it's replicated by everyone who lives there," Spleth said."Even people with a heightened sensitivity to the ethical and moral challenges of the stewardship of the earth are caught in the same trap. They need to get to the mall and they need to get to work.

"Looking at ourselves critically," he said,"our use of resources doesn't differ much from people who don't think of these things at all."

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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