Reconnecting the Community

Colleagues,

One thing that several of us learned during the water bond initiative was that our community may not be as closely knit as we may have presumed.

Visits in neighborhoods that appear worn revealed a lot of quiet desperation and serious disconnect among neighbors.

What do you suppose could happen if we got several realtors together to identify natural "neighborhoods" and leaders who live in them, and then got together as pastors to identify even more leaders in those neighborhoods for the purpose of creating experiences that bring neighbors into positive contact with each other?

The years of Welcome Wagon and other organizations meeting this need are gone. The stay-at-home moms who ran those programs and successfully wove them into the fabric of local life are busy with jobs and taking kids to soccer practices or other after-school events. Newly retired folk seem either more interested in enjoying a second round of adolescence or already overloaded with volunteer and sandwich generation responsibilities.

I think we may also be ready to admit that it is time to give up the myth that we live in a "Christian" community that measures time by a liturgical calendar or waits with baited breath for every word that comes from local pulpits. Yet, we are not excused from the mandate to make disciples of Jesus, nor are we absolved from living the two Greatest Commandments just because the fastest growing minority among Cameron's citizens couldn't tell you the difference between a doctrine and a dogma, a parable and a parabola.

Is it time that congregations worked together to reverse the unravelling of "neighborhood" and to give some hope to people who live paycheck to paycheck, abuse to abuse, addiction to addiction?

It seems to me that this effort cannot be contained in a program offered by one congregation anymore than the current efforts to address chronic hunger.

I'm very interested in conversation here (or elsewhere) about this. How about you? Is God whispering similar thoughts into your prayers and reflections on Scripture?