A local ward can be a strong and inviting community. Wards tend to be about the right size to know most everybody, to minister to each other, to make a difference in individual lives. To know and be known - an essential human need. We come together to worship and to support. A call to that sort of community can be deep and meaningful. 

Living on the Inside of the Edge by Christian Kimball. Common Consent Press. 2023. p. 41

everybody was a worker

In an essay on African socialism that he wrote in 1962, Nyerere gave an idyllic account of pre-colonial society. ‘Everybody was a worker… Not only was the capitalist, or the landed exploiter unknown… [but] capitalist exploitation was impossible. Loitering was an unthinkable disgrace.’ The advent of colonialism had changed all this. ‘In the old days the African had never aspired to the possession of personal wealth for the purpose of dominating any of his fellows. He had never had labourers or “factory hands” to do his work for him. But then came the foreign capitalists. They were wealthy. They were powerful. And the African naturally started wanting to be wealthy too.’ There was nothing inherently wrong with that, said Nyerere, but it lead to exploitation. There was now a need for Africans to ‘re-educate’ themselves, to regain their former attitude of mind, their sense of community. 

The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair by Martin Meredith. PublicAffairs. 2005.

"Why don’t the Amish use cars?" asked a tourist brochure from western Pennsylvania. "The Amish believe that cars pull people apart, and that a car distorts its owner’s sense of self-importance in a world where humility is a necessary virtue. Besides, they haven’t adopted a belief that faster is automatically better. The Amish don’t believe that the internal combustion engine is inherently evil. Their primary aversion to cars is their belief that cars pull families apart".


Jane Holtz Kay, an author, journalist and architecture critic for The Nation, has written widely on the built and natural environment. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back. New York: Crown, 1997. p. 31, 32

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

M. Scott Peck, "A Different Drum"