How to transform every community in the West

1. Start with a worshipping community of Christians
2. It has to use some energy maintaining itself but
3. It has spare energy to use outside itself so
4. Do some theology. Christians are heralds of a new world where God and people are together. We can’t make that new world, but we can be a sign of it, an instrument of it. A portent of it, if you like.
5. Do some Bible study. Around Ash Wednesday (not so far from when I’m writing this) the great passage in Isaiah 58 defines what ‘fasting’ looks like:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness^[a] will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
⁹ Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

(Isaiah 58:6-9

6. Understand the times. We are not, in the West, surrounded by masses of starving people. But think of all the lonely people.

7. Think of one of the fruits of the covid pandemic. In the UK, local authorities started trusting churches to do community things decently and well. It has always been happening to an extent (it isn’t new) but covid was a kind of crash course for the nation.

8. Think of the need in our day for social prescribing. How many doctor’s surgeries are plagued by the lonely? How many ills (mental ill-health but much else also) can respond to the balm of community? In how many ways can community complement all that the state attempts to provide (housing, cash, healthcare)? Why can’t GP surgeries prescribe community in the same breath as they’d like to prescribe exercise and diet? Why are their options limited to applying chemicals or knives to human bodies?

9 Churches have premises, a certain facility with tea-pots, and a tolerance for the misfitting people whom every congregation anyway hosts.

10. Community heals. Humans are a herding species. Churches have the plant, the location, the resources, the opportunity and — best of all — the moment. We can built the connections. Every community in the West. Think of it.