My childhood home did not have much of a front porch. It was maybe six by eight feet. Not big enough to turn my tricycle on, I do remember that. The home was built in 1972 in a new subdivision in Clay County, Indiana called Pioneer Village and reflected an incipient and unfortunate trend in American home design, the demise of front porch neighborhoods. I don’t think anyone understood the front porch society was disappearing. People had not yet begun constructing capacious private patios or decks behind their houses in order to avoid each other, as is the case today. In fact, I remember my parents carrying their lawn chairs to a neighbor’s home on hot, summer evenings and taking up neighborly residence for a few hours in the grass next to the cramped front porch, chin-wagging and laughing until it was time to get the kids bathed and in bed. Yet, within another twenty years, front porches – at least those spacious enough to support an evening of cigar-smoking among the neighborhood fellows or for a swing where young lovers could court in view of protective and snoopy neighbors – had all but disappeared from American society. In their place, builders constructed wide decks and broad patios behind homes where a homeowner could enjoy leisure without interruption or surveillance from neighbors, whose names he likely did not know and did not want to know.
In its day, the front porch offered a middle social space between public and private life. It was a truly safe space that was not quite the private inner-sanctum of one’s kitchen and living room but more personal and inviting than the public sphere of institutions or workplace. On the front porch one can freely speak his or her mind, unhindered by the legal concerns and workplace politics of public spaces. On the front porch, storytellers spun tales, salesmen made their pitches, politicians pressed flesh, and neighbors kept abreast of each other’s lives. The front porch functioned as a social gatekeeper, empowering homeowners to permit just what they wanted into their homes and to politely keep out what they did not want to cross over their thresholds. The front porch invited and encouraged civil human conversation, a practice much lacking these days.
The age of the inviting front porch is likely gone for good, but society is desperately in need of social spaces that function as the front porch. We need third spaces (those outside of home and work) that facilitate the coming together of people in meaningful ways, where men and women can look each other in the eyes, shake hands, slap backs, share a cup of coffee, unload each other burdens, celebrate joys, engaging in meaningful, soul-level conversation.
As a pastor of small, Methodist churches for twenty years, I have seen the valuable role that churches can play as front porches for communities. If done right, a church can offer itself to the community as a welcoming third space where neighbors can come together to form friendships, engage in common cause, and build true community. From the front-porch church, a person can team up with church acquaintances and friends to address in public spaces important, pressing social, economic and political concerns. Likewise, if they choose (and they often do), visitors and members of a front-porch church can delve ever deeper into the inter-sanctum of the Christian life, joining in powerful worship and transformative prayer. Above all, the front-porch church serves as a spiritual gateway to Christ Jesus. John Wesley said it was the porch of repentance and the door of faith that we must pass to enter into the house of holiness.
Most churches sit empty and idle throughout the week. What ways might members make their churches a front porch for the community throughout the week and not just on Sunday morning?
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