Samuel Pullenger
Community is at the heart of the human endeavour.
Samuel Pullenger
Communities that empower care and compassion for the other enable individuals to flourish, though those qualities are often corrupted by power, wealth and prestige.
I am not a person in isolation, I do not create my own identity out of thin air and then project it to the world. We are people born into a specific place and time, formed by our histories, culture and experience – we are persons-in-relationship. We, therefore, gravitate towards others who are similar to ourselves, in doing so, reinforcing our identities.
However, as we gravitate towards people like ourselves, we also actively move away from those who are not like us in thought, culture, history or experience. This move away from the other and towards the similar makes us feel safe, but it also locks us into our bubbles of thought. The more we are around like-minded people the less we can hear and understand those who are different. This is a tragedy.
The Church is meant to be a place where community is enabled to flourish, where people from all walks of life can come together in unity to follow Jesus. Recently we celebrated Pentecost which many people call the birth of the church. In the story of Pentecost the Spirit of God enables a group of people who all spoke a single language to be heard and understood by people who spoke a wide range of languages. One of the points expressed in this story is that the church is called to communicate so that those who are different from ourselves can hear, understand and engage in their own way.
Our rapidly growing town of Te Awamutu is changing. We have new voices, new perspectives and new histories that need to be acknowledged alongside the long standing ones if we are to continue to work towards being a community. One of the struggles the council has is to listen carefully to all these voices and seek to work towards a future in which all their citizens are enabled to flourish.
As we have seen in a recent Te Awamutu News column, communication must, then, also be at the forefront of what the council does. Without communication the community are left in the dark about purpose, plans and changes.
However, communication always comes with a “spin”.
Almost all communication comes with a story that is being told or a perspective that is being put forward. It would be naive of us to expect that a council who are seeking to gain our trust would not spin their communications in a certain direction. But the spin must not be the point of communication.
The point needs to be to inform its citizens on the direction they are taking and the ways they are working towards the flourishing of the whole community. With an area as large as Waipā and with the multiple platforms that council needs to communicate through I think we should expect to see a reasonable sum of money allocated towards that team so long as the community is at the heart of the endeavour.
