There's a move afoot, plainly, regarding church being localised in the neighbourhood. The idea that people could form communities by travelling across town to some mega-church (or even a reasonably sized smaller church) is beginning to be seen as counterproductive to the idea of community within the Gospel. See our last post for more on what's happening.
Here in the National Mission Office, one of our jobs is to help people begin the journey of looking at their own community: what's already there, what's needed, who lives there, who doesn't, what's available for local people and much more. Though we might start the process, much of this work can only be done by those who actually live in the community, and an excellent piece of such work was done in this way by the Flagstaff Parish (in Dunedin) a couple of years ago. We use their template for helping other parishes to think about their community.
In North America there's a kind of movement beginning called Moving Back into the Neighbourhood, and Alan Roxburgh's site not only talks about this but offers a one-day workshop for people getting to grips with their community and what it contains.
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