Saturday, August 01, 2009

What do you think of your neighbourhood?

Over the last month or so, we have been doing some survey work around our neighbourhood to see what people think about living here, about God, and about how we could help them.

I thought that I would plug some of the responses into Wordle to give a graphical representation of what people said. This is what came out:

Good stuff about Etruria:

Wordle: Good Things in Etruria

Bad stuff about Etruria:

Wordle: Problems in Etruria

I wonder if it's significant that people and community are prominent in both sets of words? Does this mean that some people in the community are good and some bad, or that the same set of people is seen in different ways by different people?

What Puts People off going to Church?

Wordle: Why don't people go to church?

This one really interests me. There are families in this area working long hours a long way away. They are time poor. I am convinced that every minute we can find for exploring the big issues of life and death and investing in our relationships with each other and God is a minute of pure gold. We can't create time, but we can choose how we spend it. I am so sorry that the people of God (including me) have been such faithless witnesses to the life changing power of God, that we have let down our friends and neighbours by not living this out, by not walking the talk.