One of the inspiring art installations at this year’s Adelaide Fringe was featured at Tandanya and titled, Yabarra-Dreaming in Light. Visitors were invited to walk through, discover meaning in the dreaming stories and capture a sense of place. The 2020 Adelaide Fringe will be remembered well into the future as generations to come will recall the crowded events on the brink of the restrictions that came with the arrival of the Corona virus
One small notice at the entrance of a shelter titled Tikkaperendi Nakkondi: Sitting, seeking to know caught my attention.
You are invited to sit in the wodli and see what is around you; what you see you will begin to know.
Look and listen to the ways of understanding.
Learning comes from patience,
teachings comes from knowing,
and seeing comes from respectfully waiting to understand.
You are looking through the dreaming landscape
which breathes through the first and living culture.
Hold on to what you know you have seen.
Now working with the discipline of social distancing I often return and reflect on the meaning of this invitation and the phrase, those with eyes to see and ears to hear has become a continuing refrain for me.
Confined to home and nearby streets I have been prompted to make the connections between Sitting, seeking to know and seeing comes from respectfully waiting to understand.
Is this happening now in our neighbourhoods? Residents finding creative ways to connect with strangers, new forms to belong, being at home and caring for others nearby and next door. Local missional churches becoming aware of the high number of people living alone and the risks associated with social isolation.
As we plan and think about the future we need to encourage one another to see the gifts, assets, qualities and opportunities that exist for small rural and suburban neighbourhood congregations. Surely now it is not the time to sell up, merge and only focus on developing centralised regional congregations. Loving the neighbourhood is about being present, active, open and working with partners to make the most of what we have, to bring people together in community.
In the August newsletter of Neighbourhood Matters their lead article comments on our current focus, the places where we live.
We have rediscovered and re-embodied urbanist Jane Jacobs’ classic phrase ‘eyes on the street’. This is about local people engaging in their local spaces to keep those places safe and to retain and transmit the embedded knowledge of that place, strengthening social cohesion and building a resilient community that can withstand any disaster.
https://neighbourhoodmatters.com.au/
This web site also recommends recent publications with an emphasis on loving the neighbourhood as the primary focus of congregations.
In their 2018 publication, Kingdom Communities: Shining the Light of Christ through Faith, Hope and Love Australian authors, Andrew Menzies and Dean Phelan draw on their experience and study of churches in Australia. Sometimes confronting they invite readers to reimagine denominational priorities and discover ways for congregations to engage creatively with others by finding where God is already at work where they find themselves. We are convinced that local congregations have so much to offer. The combined synergy if all the gifts and skills of congregants can result in wonderful kingdom possibilities in many areas of the community if people are empowered, trained and released through Kingdom Communities. Pg. 277.