It’s two weeks now since I finished my job as Community Worker at the local United Reformed Church and I’ve had some time to think through what I think about the last three and a half years of practicing community in an explicitly spiritual context – that’s how, when I started, I set my own intention for learning, it was the main thing that seemed different to me about the work that I’d done before. There is, I think by (at least my own) definition, something spiritual about social art of any kind, just because it’s always made of people and the thing that connects people, in my view without any idea of religion or faith or science or anything else) is the thing that I would describe as spirit. I finished on my fifty-eight-and-a-halfth birthday, a couple of days after the solstice, a good time to review and think about what’s left of this year.

There are some things that I’ve learned about myself and how I work.

During this time, I grew in my realisation that the thing that had always been different about me in school and the workplace, my relationship with time and other structure, my need for variety, my difficulty maintaining attention and capacity in certain situations was still a thing, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it or improve myself. And that led me to get a diagnosis of ADHD and some understanding of how I need to work differently and ask for allowances to be made even though I’m horribly embarrassed to do so. For example, I was contracted to work 18 hours a week. I tried many different configurations of hours across the week but all of them left me either exhausted or confused or over-compensating to meet my perception of other people’s expectations. And empirically, even given the pandemic and this time of getting used to working with my ADHD, I wasn’t able to do much other work outside of the 18 hours I was committed to – and this was the deal I’d done with myself when taking a relatively low-paid, local job with a regular commitment: that I would be able to balance it with higher-paid freelance work, but that just didn’t happen. That’s not only been financially difficult (although the regularity of knowing I’d be paid a salary every month has been lovely) it’s meant that I’ve really felt like I’ve fallen behind with my community and my practice. The one area that I’ve been able to make some progress in has been my music – I guess because a) it’s a thing that I’ve been able to incorporate easily into the church community work; b) it’s a much easier thing to pick up and do half an hour of (and it’s a good balm for ADHD overwhelm) and c) because I know that it’s really my core practice and always has been.

And then there are things that I’ve learned about community building. These might arise from pathologies of mine, or of this church, but I think they’re more general than that.

I’ve become (even) more aware of the importance of varying tempo. I came a cropper during the pandemic when I was tempted to do everything every week. A weekly rhythm is good for some things (dementia café, community lunch) but monthly is better for others (a cooked lunch for older people, book club, a bigger intergenerational music group) and six monthly or annually works too, but only if you can take a break from the things that happen weekly for the biggies. Christmas and Easter are, predictably, busy for everyone in church. I think, if I were starting again, I’d go more gently with fewer things rather than trying to crack every nut at once.

A related issue is scale – there’s a temptation (that word again!) to just try to get everything as big as possible, serving as many people as possible and while it’s true that in this situation, one of the problems in doing this was the difficulty of growing our capacity to serve bigger groups, I think, on reflection, I’d like to have introduced some nuance into what scale is appropriate to which kind of activity. I had some really valuable (mutually so) interactions with people when there were fewer people around than we’d expected. And there are things that I wish I’d allowed to grow more by experimenting with letting them be less personal and intimate.

I repeatedly experienced the clash between supporting community and generating revenue – this isn’t new and it’s not just about this church or churches generally. It was a good space though in which to consider how to use space, how to share space, what limits you need to put on people using the space and how the organisation’s relationship with people who use the building is affected by money being involved. We had a few opportunities to look at whether we wanted to keep doing something for the money that might be getting in the way of helping people.

I think there’s a much bigger thing about what church is for now, where the line lies between church as a group of people and church as a building, how to know when to let an institution die or transform and when to put all your energy into keeping it alive and growing. And if a church (building or community) needs to die, how to give it a good end. There’s also something about the use of places of worship in the wider community – these buildings that are no-go areas for lots of people, for various reasons, but which could be doing much more to provide what people really need.

Overall, the idea of this job was to help reduce loneliness and social isolation in the town. I feel like I did some of that, but there’s so much more to do and I think it needs something more focused on personal and interpersonal development as well as changes in the social institutions we have. That’s where I find myself now, thinking about that.

Anyone reading my blog for the first time, please know that this isn’t meant to be a polished essay, it’s a learning in progress and I may have left something out or over-emphasised something. It helps me to be saying something and I’m interested in what other people think.