An excerpt from another blog

I am a member of the Assets-Based Community Development Network of South Pacific and Australasia. That's a mouthful that says I keep in touch with the latest ideas in community development and connect with people from around the region that have worked in the field.

One such guy in Melbourne has a great blog that I subscribe to. I thought I'd share one of his entries with you:

Good neighbourhood building relies on good relationship building. As simple - even simplistic - as that might sound, its amazing how many community building initiatives rely on “programs to fix what is broken” rather than growing knowledge amongst residents of what capacity already exists in their neighbourhood, mining the wisdom of neighbours about what is possible and growing our “trust of each other” as neighbours.

The Christian notion of Holy Trinity (though corrupted over time to be seen as a personified god-hierarchy) originally captured the dream of this type of relational neighbourhood. The earliest exponents of the concept labelled it “perichoresis” which is nothing to do with hierarchy at all. In fact the word means “circle dance.” Involved in the dance were the source of all possibilities (“father”, in the language of the day), the transmitter of what is possible (“spirit” in traditional language) and the one who knows the part he has to play in using that possibility (“son” in the old language). In this circle dance, the three dancers wind tightly together into an amazing unity of relationship and interconnection. Knowledge of and trust in what is possible comes about in the dance.