John
McKnight and Peter Brock (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler Publishers)
170 pages
What
does it take to build a strong community? What
gets in the way of that happening?
It
occurs to me that these are two key questions that we, as churches
and as communities in general, need to take seriously as we try to
imagine what sort of a society we want to live in. Because, to be
brutally honest, I am feeling more and more that the idea of
community is falling more and more by the wayside with each passing
decade. Maybe it is because of the drive to be “productive”.
Maybe it is because we have decided to over-schedule ourselves. Maybe
it is because we don't trust the people around us anymore (although
arguably that is also a result of not having strong
community-mindedness – bit of a chicken/egg spiral there) and
so often believe that we are to live in a level of fear all the time.
Maybe it is because we are so
much more of a mobile (or even transient) society – building strong
community often takes time and rootedness.
Maybe it is because, as McKnight and Brock claim, we have
moved from being 'citizens' to being 'consumers'.
At
any rate, it is harder and harder to find people who live in a truly
encompassing and supportive community. 20 years ago when I was
working in a crisis nursery I quickly learned some of the costs of
that lack of community. When I was growing up there were a number of
people (largely from the church congregation in our case) who could
care for my sister and I in case of emergency (or in the case of a
planned trip) or people who could share each others' struggles and
offer wisdom and support. The people I was talking to on a crisis
line had no-one. The lack of community put them into an even deeper
crisis. And even then, in the 1970's and 80's I think we could see
that community was different than it had been for my grandparents'
generation.
In
this volume McKnight and Brock begin by outlining the difference
between living as 'citizens' where we take ownership for issues,
where we live in a more community-building mindset and living as
'consumers' where we go out to buy goods and services to resolve our
issues (or possibly to hide from them), where we rely on
professionals rather than the community. They suggest that in
following the path into consumers we have put much of the strength
and wisdom of the community behind us, that maybe we have even lost
much that used to come naturally to us as people. They then lay out
an alternative way of life, and start to give the readers a map that
would take us back to living in the “abundant [and competent]
community” where we re-learn that we have the gifts and tools and
skills within our communities and associations to live healthy
productive lives.
Over
and over as I was reading this book two thoughts occurred to me. One
was that this is the sort of book that municipal politicians need to
read. If we want our communities to be stronger than our leaders need
to see a different way of building them. The other is that these are
the sorts of things that communities of faith should be doing almost
automatically. The church can be a force for modelling a different
for of interaction. Much of it we still do just because that is how
we are. I fear that we are, even in the church, starting to lose the
full sense of what community can be and accomplish.
One
of the challenges of following this approach in this century, I
think, is going to lie in how we define community. Is it the
neighborhood in which we live? Yes, and much of what McNight and
Brock talk about works well in that milieu. Is it the groups of which
we are a part? Yes (they talk of these as our associations). BUT
community today is also something different and broader when we
consider the on-line world. In many ways the whole on-line
phenomenon is a product of the consumer mindset. But can it also be
placed into the paradigm of the abundant, caring community? And how?
It would be interesting to ask the authors that question....
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