Clearly the Author and Designer

Just got back from a Community Gardens information session and, though an amateur gardener, I can't wait to start a community garden here. As I sit and listen to the initiatives taking place across Hamilton, specifically in regards to community gardens, I am excited about the potential this city has for rejuvenation and health. The gardens all operate with different activities: growing food locally, creating more beautification across the city, bringing school curriculum together with gardening, intertwining gardening with public art, building relationships between markets and communities, creating opportunities for immigrants to grow their own food etc, but ultimately the outcome is the same - they build community. God is orchestrating so many neat initiatives. At the same time as this conversation about developing community gardens there are other conversations taking place. The Hamilton Roundtable for poverty reduction is looking at ways to address the issues of poverty, the city is increasingly motivated to invest in more community development, and there is a desire to see more activities that create 'community' like community gardens. I just leave these kinds of meetings smiling dumbly and shaking my head at how God is clearly the author and designer. How he is bringing certain themes, hopes, conversations, and realities together to influence and compliment each other, and lifting Hamilton out of a gloomy, hazey, fog of complacency and hopelessness, into a vital, flourishing city of beauty, peace, and restoration.

Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction

A couple of people from New Hope are a part of an initiative by the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction (HRPR) to mobilize 'neighbourhood launch pads.' Neigbhourhood launch pads are community focused conversations that lead to strategic actions to address the impact of poverty on children.

We have been talking with both local residents as well as a number of city-wide persons who are open to being part of a conversation on April 29, 2008 to look at the particular strengths and needs in the Crown Point neighbourhood in the east end of Hamilton. We also met with a local teacher who hopes to encourage her class to describe their hopes and dreams for their community in a writing assignment - thereby adding the voices of children at the table!

Pray that God will help us to hear and see the strengths of this community and their concerns as described by those living here - that we may walk with them in addressing poverty.

We have a 3rd Space in the community!

"Third spaces" are informal gathering places where people in a particular community or neighbourhood meet to develop friendships, discuss issues, and interact/network with others. They have always been an important way in which the community has developed and retained cohesion and a sense of identity."Third places" are crucial to a community for a number of reasons:

• They are distinctive informal gathering places.
• They make people feel at home.
• They foster relationships and a diversity of human contact.
• They help create a sense of place and community.
• They invoke a sense of civic pride.
• They provide numerous opportunities for serendipity.
• They promote friendship.
• They allow people to relax and unwind after a long day at work.
• They are socially binding.
• They encourage sociability instead of isolation.
• They make life more colourful.

There are essential ingredients to a well-functioning "third place". They must be free or inexpensive to enter and purchase food and drink within. They should be a place where a number of people regularly go on a daily basis. It should be a place where the person feels welcome and comfortable, and where it is easy to enter into conversation. And a person who goes there should be able to expect to find both old and new friends each time she or he goes.....and that's where New Hope enters the scene. We have the opportunity to be and provide that 3rd space in this community. God is calling us to be a community (an incarnational presence) filled with grace, love and forgiveness, accesible and safe for the people of east Hamilton that He so desparately loves. With a physical place to call home, we know God is calling us to be that presence, that open, useable, welcoming presence each and every day of the week.

(the beginning description of 3rd spaces is found on the Freeway Cafe's website - check it out for further description)

Being a presence in the Community

Why community involvment? New Hope Church is excited by God's call to continue the mission of Jesus Christ in East Hamilton.

And, just as Jesus was affirmed by the Spirit to be the liberator of the captives, the healer of the blind, and the bearer of good news to the poor (Luke 4:18), New Hope also longs to be an agent of transformation, immersed in the neighbourhoods in the east end of Hamilton.

How about you? Are you interested in participating in this risky new venture? We invite you to get involved!