The development of social capital in our neighbourhoods may seem to be a daunting undertaking. I will in future posts look at why churches together should be addressing this issue and how they might go about it. Today, I want to identify one last problem in our neighbourhoods and how many churches are already addressing it.
The basic need in any neighbourhood is for social spaces. Places where people can meet informally. Meeting rooms are often in short supply too but here I mean unstructured spaces. These are of two types.
One is often called the Forum. Here local people will meet perhaps only a few times a year to debate matters of common concern. My local Forum has been meeting 4 times a year for eleven years or so and rarely has attendance fallen below 60 people. Usually these meetings have an agenda and some sort of structured process, more or less participative. The meetings also involve a meal which is an opportunity for people to mix who might have few opportunities to do so otherwise.
The word Forum goes back to the Roman Empire. The Forum was a public gathering place. The Forum was where news would be posted, it was a marketplace, the location of the courts and the baths. It was the natural place to gather to share news and plan activities. My local Forum does this only four times a year, surely a Forum would be more accurately be a place that is open every day?
Indeed it would. And this is what so many neighbourhoods lack, a natural gathering place where people can meet and share news. It is a place with perhaps tea and coffee (but not dependent on peoples' purchases to keep going), where information can be shared perhaps through notice boards or stalls, maybe some meeting rooms attached and also the availability of toilets. Not so different from the Roman Forum. Perhaps this is the vision behind community centres except that many do not offer this type of unstructured space.
When we look at many neighbourhoods today there are no such meeting places. New housing estates often have no facilities whatsoever, where such a space might be opened up. Ideally they need to situated at a local centre or on a main thoroughfare into the centre.
Many churches occupy this type of place and some already offer a meeting point, at least for part of the week. There are of course many issues. The temptation to biase information sharing in certain directions may be a problem for some. In a muilti-cultural area it might be difficult to encourage all to share in a space where there will be suspicions of an agenda for proselytising. And yet, would it be right for churches to open such centres with no spiritual dimension? I shall return to this question in a later post.
It is easy to identify problems. The point is that organising depends on social capital and a meeting point or Forum is an essential first step. Churches Together in a neighbourhood should be able to meet this need by identifying the most appropriate available premises and then resourcing it with time and finance. They might do this in partnership with others and the premises might not be church premises. The point they must agree about is why they are doing it.
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