Team

This week was exciting as a few people who had shown an interest in joining the Lubbesthorpe Community Development Team, met together for the first time.    We all bought food and ate Sunday lunch together.  The weather was glorious so we spent the afternoon in the garden getting to know one another and telling our own stories of how we had got to where we were.

The Development Team is a bunch of people who will be able to help out practically with events and activities in the early days, who will be regularly praying for the development and will be learning from each other and our experiences.    There is a great diverse skill set amongst us with people who have previously been involved in cultivating new communities as well as being part of local community engagement stuff.    There will be times when we arrange community gathering events, put up gazebos (we have no indoor space yet), maybe run a bbq and potentially organise a ‘get to know you neighbour’ events.   I need people to help get those off the ground until we have built relationships with the people sufficiently to see them come up with the ideas and take more of the driving seat.

My role as Pioneer Community Worker is first and foremost to help build healthy community.   What that will look like will depend upon the residents, the activities they like engaging in and how they rub along together.   It will be about getting to know everyone, people of all faiths and none, people from different lifestyles and backgrounds whose commonality is the place they live.   It will definitely be about having fun together!   Although we have a Development Team I hope that we will quickly be able to engage the people who move in to help them create activities themselves, I’ll hope I’ll be a facilitator and be able to cheer people on rather than a ‘leader’ who drives everything.

In time we hope we may see some sort of missional community grow there but our priority is to listen, love and serve the community.   What happens next is in God’s hands and the people who move in.