Author: Bryan Chan

<Post written by Bryan & Joanna>

As 2020 begins, we’re looking ahead to the next chapter, after our wandering sabbatical year in Berlin. One of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves is where to call home. We acknowledge how incredibly lucky and privileged we are to have the opportunity to consider & choose where to live. Many people do not have this freedom. This year we lived for a bit in Berlin, stayed for a while in New York and London, and visited many other cities in the US and around Europe.

As we’ve traveled, we have felt how life is similar and different in each city. It’s helped us hone our senses and discuss what we each like and what matters to us, even as we remember that most of what makes life happy and fulfilling is not where we live, but rather how and with whom. Here are some of the main things we’ve been thinking about as we contemplate where to live starting in 2020. Wherever we land, we hope to stay there at least 3-4 years, and then reconsider whether we want to stay or move on.

Diversity & Integration

For us, places where people with diverse backgrounds & interests can live together are better places to live. They’re more equitable and offer more enriching life experiences to all residents.

Diversity is just one piece of the puzzle — we also want a place that’s well-integrated, where people of all kinds share common space, whether at markets, schools, restaurants, playing fields, or community groups. For instance, while San Francisco is relatively diverse as a whole, its neighbourhoods and schools are less well integrated.

During our travels this year, we’ve walked through many urban boundaries. We’ve crossed a street and gone from a restaurant with all White customers to a church with all Black attendees, or from age-diverse non-hipster stores to young hipster-central, or from fancy terraced houses to world-class tourist trap. While we were in the US, we enjoyed comparing our experiences on the ground with maps of diversity data. The University of Virginia Dot Map is especially readable (runner up: National Geographic’s Diversity Map).

Easy Access to Nature & Cuteness

We care a lot about the urban environment we participate in and how it feels.

For both of us, having nature nearby nourishes life — from the trees that we see out the window, to parks and waterways nearby for walks, to wilderness we can easily reach. We want to be in a vibrant, dense city environment, yet a quick hop from an ocean, forest, lake, or mountain. While here in Berlin, the city parks and country lakes have been wonderful, especially in summer, but we’ve missed dipping our toes in the Pacific Ocean and hiking in the Sierras. It’s flat here for a hundred miles in every direction, and the tallest thing nearby is a World War II rubble heap.

For Joanna, beautiful buildings (as opposed to ugly flat boxes) are also important. The more crown moulding there is, the better. Though a natural wood look is nice, too. Bryan’s a little more lax on this criterion — he appreciates homes that blur inside and outside, but he’s okay with anything that is not a brutalist chunk of concrete. Too many years spent in the depths of the MC in Waterloo.

Great Urban Mobility

Moving from one place to another fills a good chunk of our daily lives. This is why we prefer to live in mixed-use areas where we can move quickly, delightfully, and safely through a typical day.

Ideally we also want to be able to commute to work and meet up with friends in under 30 minutes by bike or transit. Also we’d like everything we need day-to-day within a nice 5 minute walk or bike ride. This means we should be able to get to the grocery, doctor, gym, yoga, haircut, bakery, drug store, tasty restaurants, Döner kebab, and nifty cultural things. Our neighborhood in Berlin, Kreuzberg, fits the bill:

A few factors that contribute to great mobility in Kreuzberg are good bike infrastructure, high density buildings that are all 6-7 stories, mixed-use zoning, and walkable street blocks. In his post about life in Berlin, Bryan wrote a lot more about why mobility is so delightful. Even on our quiet side street, there are a couple dozen businesses on the block – everything from a daycare to an orthopedic center. You can see what this feels like in a bike tour near our house:

New York and Berlin definitely come out ahead in mobility (though getting from Brooklyn to Harlem is not exactly fast). London was also very dense, but tended to have less mixed-use zoning. It felt like everyone takes the tube to different areas for sleep, work, and entertainment. Parts of the city felt like ghost towns in the morning, mid-day, or evening. The San Francisco Bay Area is okay by American standards, but has pretty awful urban mobility in comparison.

Delightful Culture

Joanna likes having access to great museums, performing arts, talks, and other fun activities. It’s the best when there are a million things going on at once, and nearby. She also values being in a place with a sense of history, where people feel a connection to their heritage and like to explore how their history can inform today’s culture. She appreciates the sense of purpose and energy that comes from common acknowledgment there is much to be done to make our community (neighborhood, city, region, world…) a better place. Joanna also likes living somewhere relatively non-materialistic (except for beautiful buildings & public space), where there is less focus on buying nifty objects and waiting in lines, and more on picnicking in the park, visiting a museum, or going on a bike ride.

While there are many smaller places with great culture, Joanna really does like having many many things going on. For example, Santa Fe was great culture-wise, but at the same time rather sleepy. Joanna liked living in Bonn for a summer back in 2011, too – but it’s also quiet for our current life stage. For now, Joanna thinks a metropolitan area of around 6 million or (preferably) more people is nice. For Bryan, how vibrant a city is also matters, but there are smaller cities that he thinks are nice too. Like Denver, at just under 3 million.

We’ll reconsider in 3-4 years. There aren’t too many cities that are that big, so it’s a little limiting.

Strong Social Services

Social services are important to us, both for ourselves and because they allow for a more fair and equitable society. Everyone should have access to quality food, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, other parenting support (e.g., parental leave), work-life balance, and retirement. When people do hit a rough patch, they should be reasonably supported rather than unnecessarily or excessively punished/criminalized.

Germany excels on all of these fronts. We have friends here who quit work for a few years to go back to university. University tuition is nearly free. There’s no pervasive competition to move to the neighborhoods with the best schools or send kids to private school, creating more pressure to earn. Our friends here take more than a month of vacation a year, and several work four-day weeks. New parents get a year of paid leave, shared across both partners. Unemployment payments are generous, and recipients can also take a range of actually-quite-reasonable courses to improve their job prospects. There’s no stigma associated with being temporarily unemployed, and the consequences are rarely catastrophic (except in parts of the East, where there is some systemic unemployment associated with the decline of manufacturing post-socialism). The criminal justice system is also more humane, with better prison conditions, much shorter sentences, and somewhat less systemic racism. Of course, racism and white nationalism are certainly still big problems in Germany – for example, minority kids are systemically tracked into worse schools, and there was recently something in the news about an extremist state legislator in the former East shouting “Negro” repeatedly during a legislative session (and then claiming he wasn’t being racist…). But still, incarceration rates are an order of magnitude lower than in the US, and rates of homeless people on the streets are an order of magnitude lower than in SF (though overall housing insecurity rates are similar).

In the US, social supports are weaker. While we’re fortunate to have some savings, to live a German lifestyle in the US, we’d both need to maintain high-paying jobs. That’s the only reliable way to build savings and pay for services the government does not cover well. Plus we’ll both need to continue fighting at work to show that it’s what you do that matters, not how many hours you work.

And of course, no matter what we do, there will be many people around us who cannot afford that lifestyle and are suffering from lack of social services and high levels of systemic injustice. Bryan is fine with this, because inequality of opportunity is far worse globally, and in the US one can do more to improve things everywhere. Joanna agrees that the US is a great place to work on changing the world for the better – it is vibrant, ambitious, and powerful. However, it still makes her uncomfortable to be in a society that she believes accepts too much injustice, and to some degree even praises inequality.

Perhaps because of being raised on stories of the Holocaust and having lived for a couple of years in Germany, Joanna also goes through life asking herself with reasonable frequency: Are there ways in which our society is committing crimes similar to what the Nazis did? How am I personally complicit? What actions could I take to be less complicit? Acknowledging that everybody is to some degree complicit, am I okay with my degree of complicity? These are difficult questions.

Affordability

A place must also be affordable, given the salaries we might have. This is one area where relative differences are more important long term than absolute differences.

For example, even though everything costs a half or a third as much in Berlin vs. San Francisco, the salaries are also about a third. On the flip side, there are more social services offered in Germany. While our American savings go farther here in absolute terms, if we stay long term, what matters more is our relative purchasing power.

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In the end, Berlin, SF, and NYC look like roughly a wash. London stands out as comparably unaffordable, with expenses closer to NYC and SF but salaries closer to Berlin. It seemed that cost of living makes a real impact on many Londoners’ quality of life – very long commutes, being forced to live in areas with poor air quality, and less ability to take advantage of all the amazing cultural offerings of the city. However, it’s always hard to judge from the outside – it seems these concerns, along with gentrification, are present in just about every city we visit.

Family & Friends

We’re totally burying the lede. Friends and family are the most important of all. This year we’ve missed seeing all of you in Canada and the US — you’re so far away!!

Good Career Opportunities

This is the other super-important item. We want a place where we can both find impactful, rewarding work in 2020. Deciding what to do for work is a huge topic unto itself!

Joanna has previously had a hard time finding work in Germany, but this time around she felt she could find something in scooters or electric mobility. Trickier than finding work in the US, and there’s also a lot of sexism in the workplace, but doable.

Bryan spent time looking, but it was harder to find interesting work in Berlin. While the tech scene’s been growing in the last decade, it is small in comparison to the other cities, with few interesting openings for more senior engineers. Plus there’s a critical mass of talent and companies in fewer industries, like Finance, Advertising, and E-commerce, all areas Bryan’s currently less interested in working in.

What’s Next?

While there are many good places to live, no place checks every box. It’s been hard to choose. A few months ago, New York, Berlin, London, and San Francisco were still on our short list — they are all reasonable in almost every area above.

After deliberating, we’ve decided to go back to the US and move to either San Francisco or New York. Let us know if you have thoughts on where we should go!

London was wonderful in many ways, but it felt harder to afford, less mixed-use in many areas, and a bit less social-democratic than the rest of Europe. While Berlin is a wonderful city to live in, there are far fewer interesting jobs for Bryan, and likely also fewer for Joanna. Plus we’ll be closer to all of you in North America! But Joanna will still very much miss Berlin, and so we promised to reconsider living in Europe in a few years.

We’ll be arriving in San Francisco on January 27 and will see where life takes us after that. Until we find work, we’ll be staying in North Berkeley. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to see you!

<Bryan rant on> Let me start by giving an unconventional answer. As I travel, I hear many people talk about how places are very different. Germans are efficient and socialist or Americans are materialistic and capitalist. They give supporting anecdotes and stories.

This kind of answer doesn’t represent how I experience the world. I’ve been very lucky to travel all over. The world is quite connected and shares similar lifestyles in many ways. See how families with an income over $2000 a month live around the world on Dollar Street, for example. Many facets of life are immediately familiar anywhere.

I want to practice giving our shared humanity the weight it deserves, while acknowledging our differences. I think this is more representative.

So with that in mind, I’ll dive into more about life in Berlin so far and how it’s like. <Bryan rant off>

<Joanna comment on> Bryan wrote this post. I don’t entirely share his impressions, and I attend more to the differences than Bryan does. But that’s just our respective natures! <Joanna comment off>

Language

Before I arrived in Berlin, Joanna and other friends said it would be possible to get by with English. This is technically true — several friends who’ve been here for 6+ years don’t speak much German and it works for them. There are many English-speaking native Germans and expats, especially in downtown (Mitte).

Within an hour of landing here though, I felt that German is the primary language for business, bureaucracy, and life. It takes work to use anything else. Many cultural events and exhibits are only in German. Plus, although many Germans learned English in school growing up, very few older Germans seem at ease discussing complex topics in English, unless they lived or worked in an English place. So not knowing German feels limiting.

This motivated me to learn more German! I used SmarterGerman, which teaches a broad set of skills using modern methods (minimal memorizing!). It’s been quite helpful, along with having a fluent life partner 🙂 Now I can often participate in basic conversations. I made it back in one piece on a couple of solo weekend trips, without Joanna.

It’s been an interesting experience and helpful to imagine what living in San Francisco without English might be like. Probably similar and even harder to get by, except for some government services available in multiple languages. Also it’s been fun to see how close or far away our smartphone apps are from a Babelfish. We’ve come a long way since I travelled the Southern Hemisphere in 2012, but there’s a long way to go.

Bureaucracy

Joanna and I have worked our way through a good deal of bureaucracy in Berlin. It’s been tolerable. A few bureaucrats have been fussy, but usually we’ve had friendly people, intent on applying rules in a sensible way, with reasonable wiggle room. We’ve heard it’s harder for people who don’t come from USA / Canada, with our professional background.

Bureaucracy was generally in German only. Thankfully, I had Joanna to help, and all I had to give was snuggles and back rubs. The most important step was the Anmeldung (residence registration) once we had a rental apartment. So many other steps depend on this.

Basically it felt like the bureaucratic experience when I moved to the US for college, except everything in the US depends on getting a Social Security Number. It was also interesting to consider how each system marginalized some people.

Groceries

Buying groceries in Berlin is a lot like SF, down to the impulse candy buys before checkout.

The first time I went shopping alone, without Joanna, it took me an hour and a half to buy ten things. I had to learn enough German to figure the different grades of wheat flour and which one to use. A week later, once I’d learned how to map English brands and item names to German ones, I felt at home. The grocery has most of the same kinds of things, organized in the same sections, and sold in the same ways.

There are some differences too. Stores in SF stock a much bigger Kombucha shelf. Berlin groceries have more tasty cheese and sausage. The fruit and vegetable selection in Berlin is a bit more seasonal and local, but there’s often fruit flown in from South America. And it’s much harder to find bean-to-bar chocolate in Berlin.

Also, there are no big-box organic groceries in Berlin. At our neighbourhood favourite, the LPG Biomarkt, you get to chose between three or four kinds of eggs, depending on what’s available. When we were back in SF in September, the Whole Foods was shockingly large. Disorienting almost! The egg section there takes up as much space as the entire dairy section at LPG:

Getting Around

While San Francisco is one of the better places for walking, biking, and transit in the US, getting around in Berlin feels noticeably faster, safer, and less car-centric.

First, Berlin has a historical advantage: density. Since the late 1800s, over a million people have lived in the central core. All the buildings in the core are six stories or more, with lots of shops and offices mixed in with homes. Only a few neighborhoods in SF like Russian Hill and the Mission approach this level of density. Very few have as much mixed use. This means that in Berlin, there are more people, services, and cultural opportunities in a smaller area. Things are just closer, no matter how you get there.

For virtually all trips in the city of Berlin under half an hour, Joanna and I bike. While San Francisco has an admirable network of bike corridors like the fun Wiggle, Berlin’s is denser, with physically separate bike lanes, bike-only traffic signals. Add in the lack of hills in Berlin, and biking feels a lot easier than in San Francisco.

When we’re not on bike, the public transit is also a step up. San Francisco has reasonable transit — I used Caltrain daily for commuting and BART often to go to East Bay, but compared to Berlin, it’s slow, infrequent, and has spotty coverage. In the central core in Berlin (inside the Ringbahn), you can go from anywhere to anywhere in half an hour or less. Usually only a few minutes slower than by car or bike. Plus subways come every 3 minutes, not 15 like the BART or an hour between Caltrains. It takes much less thinking.

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For longer trips, there is a dense train network. Travel time often approaches or beats flying or driving, with much better comfort. In California, I rode the Coast Starlight from Disneyland to San Jose once and it took 12 hours to go 360 miles. This is not practical. In Germany, the fast train from Berlin to Munich goes a similar distance in under 4 hours. This was a wonderful way to see the Alps or meet up with friends in the south.

One thing both places share is a focus on cars. Cars, parking, roadways, traffic, pollution, and noise are pervasive around Berlin almost as much as in San Francisco. Even though public transit and biking work well for me personally, in a 2015 study, a plurality of Berliners (37%) got around daily by car. An even larger fraction (45%) preferred to use the car as the primary mode of transportation. It’s been nice to hear about a car-free Market St in SF from afar. Car-free zones in Berlin are coming but stalled in trial projects.

Transportation works in both places, but it just works better in Germany. The historical advantages in land use and infrastructure that make this possible will take many decades for California to catch up on.

WILDERNESS

While we’ve been here in Germany, it’s been wonderful to wander the lakes and forests around Berlin, hang out in beautiful urban parks in the city, explore the canals and rivers, and visit a few spectacular national parks. There’s plenty of thoughtfully preserved nature here. Fall colours are beautiful all over, compared to a few choice spots in California. Walking on the beach in Jasmund National Park on the Baltic Sea reminded me very much of hiking the Lost Coast in California — waves rolling onto a cliff-side beach for miles and miles.

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However, I miss the wilderness in California. There is nothing like it here. Even in the national parks, it’s hard to avoid running into centuries of intensive land use: farms, towns, roads, trains, boats, and airplanes. This has benefits, like stopping at a cafe for tasty Apple cake mid-hike. But, it’s hard to have the same level disconnection from human influence.

Germany is working to improve, but only 0.6% of the country is protected wilderness. This is a far cry from 15% of California designated as wilderness, and over 47% as protected public land of some kind. Just as Germany has a historical legacy of better transportation infrastructure, California has a noticeably stronger legacy of wilderness protection.

In Short…

In my day to day life here, I feel like many things are quite similar in general. It took a few weeks to pick up enough German, setup a foundation, and shift habits slightly. The only thing that’s been harder to adjust to is that most of my friends and community are back in the States.

More Berlin impressions to come in a future post on things like entertainment, gender roles, nudity, children, housing, homelessness, pace of life, smoking, tech, dim sum, and more. Maybe also what the alternate-universe German Joanna is like compared to California Joanna?

While we travel this year, we hope to experience communities that have not been a part of our life in San Francisco. We hope you have a chance to travel with us as we try to find ways to share our experience with you from afar.

Back in January, as Joanna and I looked at where to go, we both wanted to spend time in the American South — it’s part of the fabric and history of America, yet it felt foreign in many ways. It’s also warm and has no snow, which we figured would be a good break for the non-Canadian boo, after our time in snowy Colorado. One of the places we wanted to along the way was a megachurch.

Joanna has fond memories of a road trip through Savannah & Charleston and on up to New York City. However, she felt that maybe Savannah & Charleston might not be too representative of other parts of the South, and that cute old buildings and touring an old plantation gives only a small part of the picture of what it’s like in the South today. Joanna also grew up going to a fairly large synagogue (when she went to synagogue, which was really just a couple of times a year), so she was curious how a megachurch would compare.

Bryan went in with only the vaguest idea — brief glimpses of Billy Graham-era televangelism, and a sense of how and why the evangelical vote sways elections.

Finding a Megachurch

In Birmingham, Alabama, we started looking for megachurches to visit and had more than a dozen choices (from the Hartford Institute database). We picked the two marked in yellow: the Church of the Highlands and the Worship Center.

Highlands is the largest megachurch in the state of Alabama, with a weekly attendance over 20,000 people spread across 15 campuses. Each campus has its own local pastor and local volunteers, who create a blended service that merges on-site elements with a telecast main service from the central campus. Highlands was founded by Chris Hodges, who also co-founded the Association of Related Churches (ARC). Through that organization, since 2001 he’s helped launch and connect hundreds of other churches around the US, including several other megachurches.

The Worship Center looked interesting as one of the biggest African American megachurches. Alabama is 26% African American, and African American Alabamians have made huge contributions to America (e.g., Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr!), so we wanted to spend some time learning more about specifically African American experiences in Alabama.

Joining Sunday Services

At the Worship Center

The Worship Center has services in-person at three campuses in Birmingham and streams online here. We encourage you to check it out for yourself, but we’ll tell you about our experience here.

We got up bright and early for the 8AM morning service at the Huffman-Derby satellite site. From the moment we wandered in, we both felt warmly welcomed. Enthusiastic greeters with “You’re awesome!” signs wished us good morning at the door, and when we mentioned it was our first time, our greeter walked us over to the coffee station and pointed us to the entry to the worship room. While there were hardly any other non-African-Americans there, we never felt out of place, unwelcome, or judged.

The service began with a joyful and energizing worship. Since we were at a satellite campus, the main campus came in on video feed, but the room still felt very much alive, if not completely full (it was the early morning service, after all). A band at our campus played with the lead singer on screen, and members of the Worship Center Dream Team sang and danced along on stage and beside us in the aisles. The members of the church sang and danced too, interjecting thanks and praises to Jesus.

In second half of the service, we heard messages from speakers as part of the Dare to Commit series. The pastor talked about daring to make a commitment, like getting married, making a purity pledge, getting baptized, growing a relationship with God, becoming a leader in the church, or joining affiliated “small group” activity clubs.

Small group activity clubs might be things like a running club, or a charity group, or a parents group. There are many many small groups to choose from, and one could have a very full social life just attending group events.

Two visitors from Los Angeles also gave sermons on the theme of taking action. The first was a study of John 5-13, the story of a sick man who had lain by a pool for 38 years, waiting for someone to help him dip in the pool and be healed. When Jesus came by, he exhorted the sick man to walk and go to the pool, and the man was healed. The speaker talked about the story and how it paralleled moments in life where we worry or suffer, yet stop one step short of acting.

The second speaker talked more about experiences from his life as a pastor and real estate agent, along with stories about Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. He talked about missed opportunities and how taking a step forward is so hard — especially in leaps of faith in growing a fuller relationship with God. He noted that at these times, even with God and a whole community behind you, it’s so easy for the Devil to push back and stop you in your tracks. He encouraged us all to channel our inner LA driver. When we see a stop sign followed by a row of green lights ahead, to just roll through it and “get a little illegal.”

For these speakers, we felt like we understood the message, even if we didn’t personally believe in the parts asking for a deeper fulfillment to God. Most of the message had secular relevance to life in general.

There was also a speaker visiting for the church’s weekend relationship conference. Referring to notes on her cell phone, she delivered a frenetic stream of loosely associated biblical references, numerological commentary, and phrases spoken in tongues. While she had an enthusiastic response from the audience, we didn’t quite grasp the experience ourselves. It sounds like in some megachurch communities, it’s very important to become moved to speak in tongues, once you get to a certain level of involvement & leadership.

Services ended with a spoken donation pledge, where everyone read out words on the main screen, making a commitment to spend money with the idea that all of it is God’s money and to tithe at least 10% to the church each year. It seemed that this is the standard ending to all their services.

At the Church of the Highlands

We went next to the Grants Mill site of the Church of the Highlands, the original main campus that broadcasts to satellite campuses. It felt like an even larger, and also welcoming community.

As we neared the Grants Mill campus, we saw hundreds of cars in line with police directing traffic. Inside, we went first into a wide open entrance with hundreds of folks milling around, like a shiny, modern concert hall. Up above, four large posters shared key aspirations of the church such as “Make a Difference” and “Discover Purpose.” We arrived relatively close to the start time, so we got seats near the back. However, with stadium seating in back and large screens up front, every seat has a good view.

Services here started with a musical worship, with exceptionally polished production values — it had a multiracial group of singers on stage backed by an uplifting musical flow and a glowing, bubbly karaoke video backdrop. In the audience, thousands sang and swayed along to refrains like “Victory belongs to Jesus.” To see what we saw, find the online worship and message from February 17th here.

Next up, the pastor invited Les Parrott on stage. Les and his wife Leslie are well-known researchers, teachers and authors on relationships. Over the weekend, Les had lead an annual marriage conference at the church with thousands of couples.

Les spoke about the most important requirement in a relationship:

If you try to find intimacy with another person before achieving a sense of wholeness on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself.

Drs. Les & Leslie Parrott

What does it mean to be whole? He detailed these ways:

1. Profound Significance – Knowing deeply that you matter, because God’s love is fully in you
2. Unswerving Authenticity – Being true to yourself
3. Self-giving Love – Going the extra mile for others, in ways big and small

We both thought these sounded entirely sensible, and things that aligned with our beliefs and secular beliefs at-large, after filtering elements related to God; for example, we believe we matter because we see our own value.

As the service wound down, there was a closing encouragement to connect with the church and give; however, not to the strong degree we saw earlier at the Worship Center. We also received flyers with a survey and an opportunity to receive a welcome card in the mail from the church, which would help the church to start an ongoing relationship with us if we chose.

Our Impressions

After Highlands, we chatted over lunch about what we’d been a part of.

Both megachurches felt welcoming, inclusive, and uplifting. It was easy to join in and immediately feel like part of a vibrant community. The messages focused on generally thoughtful and useful life advice, with connection to Christianity. Everything was delivered by effective speakers, with a gentle, yet pervasive encouragement to let God fully in, and one way to do this was to make progress on clear tracks at the church like joining the Dream Team or participating in leadership opportunities. Each church also had a strong online presence for reconnecting after services and to view services online.

We also felt like we’d only seen a glimpse. We went to two non-denominational Birmingham megachurches, separated by a 10 minute drive. Across the United States, there are thousands of megachurches everywhere, in numerous denominations. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research tracks a growing database. At the churches we went to, we also wondered if the message might give us the same or different impression in a different week. Joanna also noticed that there was no political content, and no controversial content. We wondered if the tracks to progress at the Church would remain as widely engaging, or if they might lead to a more insular bubble within a single church.

In short, we thought both churches were heartfelt yet also well-oiled machines, optimized to reach a wide audience and move them to become increasingly involved in the community – and give their time and money in support of it.

Joanna was impressed by the efficiency of the marketing and messaging. There was no modest shying away from discussing money, or accepting excuses. No matter how poor you are, if all money belongs to God, then you should tithe; and you will benefit more from that experience than you would from using the money for your own family. There was also a complete embrace of new technology and marketing techniques to serve church needs, very much unlike most synagogues (perhaps in part because using technology on Shabbat is a bit of a no-no, perhaps because Judaism is so focused on tradition and ritual, in comparison). The big screens and uplifting music that fill and enliven the room, the welcome signs and the survey that also gets your email & home address, the spiffy church news video segment, the channeling of members into internal clubs and leadership paths, the focus on non-controversial and uplifting content only, the group pledge to donate, the direction to pull out your phone and donate via text message *right now* – everything is geared towards getting members involved and donating, as much and as often as possible. Joanna also wonders what other communities and movements can learn from megachurch approaches. What if climate groups started doing all of these things? Would they be more successful? Would it be a good thing?

At the same time, Joanna also felt that the services were a bit fluffy, or like eating candy. The sermons were generally thoughtful. But would it continue to be engaging if we attended week after week? All uplifting and nothing controversial doesn’t sound too enticing, long term. Maybe more nuanced activities happen in the small group clubs, however. And Joanna doesn’t go to temple on a regular basis either, so maybe it’s just that she’s not cut out for weekly worship!