God’s call to reach out to the poor may lead us to our neighbors.

Suburbia: depending on your perspective, it’s the home of those who’ve arrived or those who’ve sold out. Alternately sacralized (think Leave it to Beaver) and satirized (think The Truman Show), suburbia still holds mythic sway in the imaginations of many Americans.

Alluring in their promises of prosperity and safety, and regardless of whether they actually deliver on them, the suburbs have become “the latest version of the American frontier—blank slates on which new residents can write their stories,” writes Al Hsu in his book The Suburban Christian (IVP Books, 2006).

Those slates no longer hold only the stories of the middle and upper classes, according to a recent study from the Brookings Institution. The study, based on data from 2005, found that more people in poverty now live in suburbs than in cities. This signals a change from 1999, when the number of people below the poverty line—defined by the government as a yearly income of $20,000 or less for a family of four—was about the same in suburbia as in center cities. Even now the poverty rate in cities is still higher, but the “faster population growth in suburbs has tipped the balance of poor populations toward suburbs,” according to the study’s authors, Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone. Specifically, 1.2 million more people in poverty now make their homes in suburbia than in cities.

The changing economic landscape of metropolitan areas has not been lost on Christian nonprofits that work with the poor. During the past decade, Habitat for Humanity International affiliates in urban areas have increased production of houses in areas outside of the city core, according to Stephen Seidel, urban programs director for Habitat. Similarly, suburban affiliates of Bridge of Hope National, an ecumenical nonprofit that connects homeless women and their children to church-based mentoring groups, have seen an increase in the number of applications from women living in cities wanting to move out to the suburbs.

“Everybody is waking up to that fact [of the increasing numbers of poor people in the suburbs],” says Noel Castellanos, associate executive director of Christian Community Development Association in Chicago. For the first time, the 2007 CCDA conference featured a track of workshops devoted to working with the suburban poor.

The recent shift deserves attention from not only Christian nonprofits but also Christian individuals in the suburbs, many of whom may still think of poverty as residing in other zip codes. “A lot of us move to the suburbs because we want to get away from people in need,” Will Samson, coauthor of the book Justice in the ’Burbs (Baker, 2007), said in an interview.

“Suburbs are designed to keep people in need out, because they don’t fit with the American suburban story. Suburbs are designed for you to drive into your driveway, shut your garage door and shut out the world.”

But say you have no driveway. No garage door. Say you have lived in a high-rise project all your life, a building that is now slated for demolition. You read in the newspaper that your neighborhood is experiencing “urban renewal,” that you should be happy that professionals are bringing their resources and clout back to the city. You are told not to worry, that your home will be replaced by at least some “affordable” housing (which you and most of your neighbors can’t actually afford). Say your job moved to a suburban industrial park a couple years ago and that you have been commuting an hour on the bus each way. Say you’ve heard suburban schools are better anyway and that if you and your kids are willing to live with another family and eat mostly soda crackers and ketchup, you just might be able to afford rent for a house in the suburb right outside the city limits.

“The poor are not isolated from the American Dream,” says Edith Yoder, a member of Frazer (Pa.) Mennonite Church and executive director of Bridge of Hope National. The desire for better schools and safer neighborhoods, combined with the twin forces of economic growth in the suburbs and gentrification in the cities, are fueling the demographic shift detailed by the Brookings study. Indeed, while the recent study’s findings can be attributed, in part, to some longtime suburban residents losing financial footing, much of the shift is due to the relocation to the suburbs by low-income people.

The outward migration of low-income people from cities follows the trajectory of job growth. Industrial and service jobs have been moving outward to suburban rings for at least 30 years, so it makes sense that the people who hold those jobs would follow. Yoder, who lives in Philadelphia and commutes to suburban Chester County, says people often assume her commute doesn’t take long because it goes “against” rush-hour traffic. “That’s not true anymore,” she says, noting the increasing numbers of commuter vans that ferry low-wage workers from the city to their jobs in the hotels and industrial parks of surrounding suburbs.

Adjunct to the suburbanization of job prospects is the gentrification of cities. In the last 10 years, more and more cities have begun working from the theory that “concentrations of poverty are detrimental to community vibrancy and health,” according to Seidel of Habitat for Humanity. Cities are employing what Seidel calls “deliberate strategies to deconcentrate poverty and disperse it more among the metropolitan base”: aka “urban renewal.” The same phenomenon that is pushing low-income people out of center cities is pushing out the nonprofits who work with them. “The real-estate development scene in urban areas has simply become too complex and too costly,” says Seidel. Formerly the director of the Twin Cities Habitat affiliate, Seidel recalls a time when their organization could purchase a vacant lot in Minneapolis or St. Paul for a $100. Those same empty lots now often sell for $50,000.

The mythic appeal of the suburbs should not be underestimated either. “We’re hearing Bridge of Hope applicants saying, ‘I want better schools for my kids. I want a safe neighborhood,’ ” says Yoder. “I’ve heard women conjure up the image of the white picket fence.”

When low-income people make a move to the suburbs, they often move to older, first-ring suburbs right outside the city, many of which now feel more “urban”—in terms of crime, population density and housing stock decay—than “suburban.” What many people making the move do not realize, according to Yoder, is that “the area they’re moving to is actually just a smaller urban area with similar problems to where they live now.”

Shadell Quinones knows what it’s like to be poor in the suburbs. Several years ago, she moved from Brooklyn to a suburban county outside Philadelphia for a residential social work position. After losing the job, Quinones and her daughter became homeless and stayed at a shelter for several months. Quinones says the toughest part of being poor in the suburbs was the lack of transportation. “Having moved from a city, where you could get anywhere at any time of day or night, the lack of public transportation was a major culture shock,” she says. “I was like, ‘What do you mean, the bus stops at noon because they take lunch?’ ”

Although Quinones was a social worker and trained in connecting people with services such as food banks and job-training programs, she had difficulty accessing those services herself during the months she was homeless—mostly because she couldn’t get to them. Quinones says she often ended up doing her grocery shopping at the relatively expensive drugstore across the street from the homeless shelter because she couldn’t get to the nearest supermarket located in the next town.

Even if the suburban poor do have access to transportation, they may find that such social services don’t exist in their communities. “I have a huge concern that suburban communities are not equipped to respond [to increased poverty] with social services,” says Noel Castellanos of CCDA. “It’s a crisis for many suburban communities to have to deal with things they haven’t had to.”

Quinones eventually found assistance through Bridge of Hope. Even as Quinones was receiving support and friendship from her mentoring group, her mostly middle-class mentors were getting a glimpse of the realities of poverty in the ’burbs. “What I heard from my mentors was that by participating in Bridge of Hope, they were enlightened and educated about the poverty that surrounds them,” says Quinones. While urban poverty and homelessness are visible, Quinones says, she’s found that people in suburban churches and communities are often unaware of the poverty around them. “In the suburbs, poverty is not in your face. You’re not going to walk down the road and trip over someone sleeping under cardboard.”

The hidden nature of poverty in the suburbs is not likely to change, says Al Hsu, despite the study’s findings. Officials in suburban municipalities will most likely continue denying that poverty exists in their areas, he says, “because it’s bad for business and bad for investment.”

Yoder concurs. “We see what we choose to see,” she says, adding that the suburban poor are still mostly pocketed away in trailer parks or subdivisions away from wealthier residents of the same suburbs. In presentations about Bridge of Hope at suburban churches across the country, she says, “we still hear the same question we were hearing 20 years ago: ‘We don’t have homeless people here, do we?’ ”

Poverty’s new home raises fascinating and potentially transformative questions for suburban churches. “Some suburban churches that have been reluctant to deal with the poor are saying, ‘Now the poor are coming to us,’ ” says Castellanos. Even suburban churches that have been willing to send service and ministry groups to nearby cities may be ill-equipped to deal with poor people in their neighborhoods. “If you’re dealing with poverty in the city, it’s at a pretty safe distance,” Castellanos says. “There’s not a big chance that a lot of these folks [ministered to in the city] will show up at your suburban church on Sunday morning. Now, however, what will happen if a lot of people from a different class start coming to your middle-class church? Will you be able to welcome them into your midst?”

Will and Lisa Samson, authors of Justice in the ’Burbs, suggest that truly welcoming people in need won’t mean simply setting up a clothing closet or passing out tracts at the trailer park.

Rather, the Samsons posit that an authentic welcome of people in poverty may require nothing less than a total reordering of theological priorities. Having lived in suburbia all their lives, the Samsons say that several years ago they experienced an epiphany about the nature of God.

They describe it as an awakening to the realities of injustice that both changed their lives and bewildered their friends. “We began to ask ourselves, How have we been reading the Bible all our lives and never seen that God’s heart is with the poor?” says Will.

Their book follows the experiences of a fictional suburban couple who, like them, begin to ask questions about the barriers to discipleship they encounter in the suburbs. Each chapter includes a narrative piece about the fictional family, a teaching section on the issues that the narrative raises, then concludes with a theological meditation by Christian leaders such as Brian McLaren and Luci Shaw.

The Samsons have since joined an intentional Christian community in an urban neighborhood. They say that not all suburban Christians will be called to relocate to a city but all Christians should “figure out how to engage with issues of justice wherever they are.” Lisa, a novelist, puts it this way: “When you open your eyes to issues of justice, everything in your life changes.”

The Brookings Institution study suggests that Christians in the suburbs, if they keep their eyes open, will update old notions of who-lives-where. They may even find that the “least of these” live closer than they thought. “Once mentors from churches have their eyes opened to the reality of poverty in the suburbs, they can see it everywhere,” says Yoder of Bridge of Hope.

“They start thinking, Oh, the clerk at the grocery store might be like my friend Ellen.”

“What we are trying to tell people,” adds Castellanos of CCDA, “is that if God is calling you to work with the poor, you can’t assume anymore that that means you will be in the city.”

Valerie Weaver-Zercher is a writer and editor in Mechanicsburg, Pa. She attends First Church of the Brethren and an Anabaptist house fellowship and serves as poetry consultant for The Mennonite.