Community & Co-Housing

Today I ate lunch in the lunch room at work, for the first time in months. Lately I've been one of the desk-eaters... the ones who just keep working and put food into their mouths when they have a spare second between phone calls, charting, home visits, and the various crises that occur on a regular basis. But today was different. I decided to sit down, eat lunch without my computer, and read the newspaper.

The front page immediately caught my eye as it had a headline about a new Co-Housing development in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area of Vancouver.

You can read the full article here, but the Cole's Notes version is that a development proposal for Co-Housing has been put forward which hopes to build a 31 residential condominium building that would contain individual/separate condos with their own amenities but large common areas for cooking, eating together, laundry, offices, etc. They talk to a few people interested in this type of lifestyle, who express a desire to know their neighbours, to share life together.

What I read in between the lines: People are longing for community. People are realizing they need each other. People want to be known and know others. And it's people in VANCOUVER wanting this. A place that is one of the "most liveable cities" in the world, yet many people feel isolated and alone and pursue an individualistic lifestyle. I'm not trying to generalize. This obviously doesn't apply to everyone and all of Vancouver. But it's been my prayer that isolation, loneliness, despair would lift and that people would realize their need for God and community. I am encouraged by this article because it's showing that people are longing for community in some way, even if they can't fully articulate it and may not even be fully conscious of this need or desire.

I feel strongly in my Spirit that one of the keys for the Gospel to spread in Vancouver, for people to encounter God and his love is in the context of community. I have felt this for a while, and have the joy of seeing it happen in our own small group that meets every few weeks, as well as in our own home where we are embracing community living. God is on really on the move within small groups/community groups. He is using communities, however they may look, in a powerful way. In ways, I can't even comprehend or fully imagine.

It reminds me of Acts 2:46-48 where they met daily together to break bread, to eat together, and to Praise God while enjoying one another's company and favour. And daily people were being saved! This is how they did church for hundreds of years.

"The fullness of Christ will not come without Christians standing with each other in love."

- Francis Frangipane, The Three Battlegrounds

Let's live this. 

That's my heart right now.

..... And hey, what if half of the owners of this new Co-Housing development were Christians?