I have been on the journey of coming up with ways to help people change the world since 2009. I know what it is like to be frustrated and not be able to make your dremas come true. My first dream was literally a dream. I had just set up a community interest company and went to bed saying God what do you want me to do with this business. I woke up the following morning seeing a diagram in my mind of Lily’s Place. I typed it up and it looked like this.
I sat and looked and it and somehow just about every idea I had seen either in action or had recognised would help the people at the mental health drop in I helped run was included. The project ideas listed on that diagram would help jsut about anyone who needed to start again after some kind of personal disaster. I looked at it and wonder how on earth would something like that ever be developed. My only answer has been to find ways to help people start doing projects like that themselves.
Developing that kind of community
I have carried that dream since 2008. One day I sate down and wrote this story in an attempt to explain the vision I had for developing community projects. It was a brain dump of ideas that made sense to me.
A general overview
Imagine a Christian community that worked together to meet the needs of the people around them. Some knew how to earn more money than they needed to survive and gave the remainder to the community’s projects. In fact, loads more money so that they could fund many different projects. Some in the community had enough money that they could follow the example of John Wesley and give away 90% of their income without sacrificing their ability to live comfortably.
Everyone had a role within the community. Some were project managers running projects. Some worked in the projects serving individual people. Some were bookkeepers. Some were IT experts. Some did the admin. They did this so that they could run a range of projects that worked together to help people in need.
Someone could come into the café run by the community. They then met people who were support workers who hung around the café waiting to talk to people in need. The support workers acted as signposts to other projects run by the community. This might be the job club or the furniture restoration project that also helped to restore people.
Over time, the support workers had identified more and more needs and had found ways of meeting those needs. Sometimes they directed people to projects run by others that they had listed on a database of trusted sources of help. Or maybe they recognised the need to set up a new project, so pointed out the need to other members of the community so that someone could do something about it.
Everything worked together. Even the housebound had a role as they were the prayer warriors and without their support, everyone would find fulfilling their role so much harder. Everyone had a role to fulfil, as there were as many ways to serve others as there were people.
Where did this community gather?
Like any other group of brothers and sisters, they were not identical but loved each other and worked together towards the same aim of doing what made their Father happy. In this case, it was providing a support system to the people around them.
Although their focus was on serving others, there was also time and space for them to focus on who God is and what He has done for them. There were many different ways they did this. Some focused on visual experiences, but those who preferred to do this with their other senses or used other ways were not forgotten. They loved and accepted each other so much that there was con-siderable give and take about how they connected with God.
Some Christian communities do a lot to serve the people around them, but there are few, if any, that have managed to reach this kind of level. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg as behind the scenes is a training centre. This is where the people who have come in struggling are helped to become the people who help the next generation of people in need who approach the community for help.
Recycling people
As people work on creating a new life for themselves, they are helped to learn to read if necessary. Any other gaps in their education are filled as well. They are supported as they learn to manage money better and find new ways of earning money. Their home goes from just orange box furniture to one full of comfortable items that are not necessarily new but that build their self-esteem. They have all they need and their home is a place where they want to live.
Life is easier because they have learnt the practical skills that once made it harder for them to have a comfortable life, such as doing the laundry, cooking for themselves or gardening. They even have the opportunity to experience a complete restoration so that the underlying issues that have caused them problems are resolved.
Making it work
There was no shortage of resources because people knew how to use the re-sources that they had. People had given them things to use, and they used what they had wisely, that could be money or experience. They knew that if they gave what they had, it would be stretched to meet the needs around them.
They used biblical principles but did not put people in straight jackets and force them to do this because the Bible says so. Experience had shown them the best ways of helping people, which was not always what people expected. They gave and God multiplied. God then gave again, and it was multiplied again.
They had started small doing what they could, but then once God knew He could trust them, He brought more and more people to them for help.
That is some community, but it is the best that I can do to explain what I would like to see from something like Lily’s Place in action.
Times have changed but needs have not
Since I wrote that story the world has changed. My world definitely has. When I wrote that I lived in a village that in the 1960s faced a death sentence. If that sounds strange I think it was 1958 when Durham County Council decided that every settlement in the county was put in one of four categories.
- Settlements in category A got money spent on them. The care home the library you name if the council provided a service they got it.
- Settlements in category B got some money spent on them but not as much as category A
- Settlements in category C were left more or less as they were
- Settlements in category D were encouraged to die. No money spent on them and the houses were included in slum clearance programs. In other places they cleared the slums and built blocks of flats nearby. With these villages they knocked the houses down and rehoused people in another settlement, preferably a category A settlement.
This was an experiment that was not repeated elsewhere in the UK. Partly I think because it did not work. There was only one village that did actually die and do you know what they did a few years later. They were looking for a site that was out of the way but still had services like water, sewage and power that they could use as a permanent caravan site for travellers or gypsies. They did not use exactly the same location as the village that had been demolished but they sued the same name and it was only a few yards away,
Today I live in a very different area. All the things that the government measures suggest that this is a much more propersous village. There are still needs in the community. Maybe different needs. There are still issues with mental health but not with the same root causes and not to the extent as there are in some of the villages in County Durham.
Today although I am not done with God I am done with traditional church. I have seen too much and experienced too much to want to want to stay within a denominational church. I put up with things that made me uncomfortable for years. I found churches were often full of people who were doing what they wanted rather than what the bible said they should be doing. People who read the bible and then made excuses for why there were not doing the same things. I wanted to know God in as full and deep a way as I could and I found that I was being held back by traditional church.
I still believe in a God fearing community that gathers to share their experiences of being a Christ-follower. I still think that one of the purposes of such a community is to develop and strengthen its members and then to support them as they go out into the community and do exploits that change the world around them so that it becomes more like God would like it to be.
Yes times have changed and my circumstances have changed but my basic belief of joining the family of God and working in partnership with Him to change the world into what He wants it to be has not changed. The dream has not materialised yet but it has matured.