Operational Spheres in Community Development

The Basic Issue

Nobody does it all in Rural Community Development. It's a team sport.

What is critical here is that the various players in the community:

• articulate the sphere of operation within which they are operating,
• articulate the tasks that fall to their responsibility, and
• look to ways in which they can contribute in inter-agency co-operation when appropriate.

For Christians this aspect of the work is rippled with prayer. Prayer is the context for coming to understand their sphere of operation, and the tasks they are to pick up. It is the context within which they express their concerns for the community and hold up its needs to God.

Some amazing initiatives in community-focus prayer have arisen over the past few years, very similar to the initiatives undertaken in the Middle Ages by members of the Monastic communities. Many Churches around the continent of all denominations have formed "prayer rooms", often arranging hour-long shifts of 24/7 prayer vigils for their communities.

Far from "heaping up many empty words" these prayer teams, have leaders whose job it is to visit all the leaders in the community to find out what issues they are currently facing, what the details are so that the issues, participants, and events of that sector of the community can be prayed foe intelligently and constantly. When people come into do their shift, they have a room with "centers" with binders of current information, issues, pictures, names and so on. They can either stay with one center or move around the room. They can fill out a "prayer-gram" expressing concern or appreciation to someone in the community, which staff then see is delivered promptly.

The effect in such towns is often dramatic. It makes a great deal of difference to a grade three teacher to know that people know her name, are aquatinted with her curriculum, her goals, the children she teaches, and what she struggles with at any given time.

Rural towns have long been known for their high level of community caring. This is just one little way it is currently being shown. It is a way that the necessary "spheres" of operation can meld into one larger awareness of community in today's complex and changing world.

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