HOUSE CHURCH ARTICLES
CO-HOUSING AS A POSSIBLE WAY TO REACH OUT TO YOUR NEIGHBOURS
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CO-HOUSING AS A POSSIBLE WAY TO REACH OUT TO YOUR NEIGHBOURS
- by Grace Wiebe; excerpts by Brent Unrau - The Urban Green
There is a rather new type of community living developing
in various places across the globe, including in the Fraser Valley.
There are several local situations like this in the region,
such as WingSong in Langley (Walnut Grove - Info on tours they have available
on certain times/days:
http://www.windsong.bc.ca/tours.htm),
Cranberry Commons in Burnaby, Quayside Village in N. Vancouver, etc.
One of these co-housing situations is in the process of
developing a group of interested people for the N. Delta region. The Urban
Green has a web site here: www.theurbangreen.ca.
Brent Unrau is a local believer/artist, etc. who is currently
facilitating this development, with a heart to reach out to their neighbours
that God brings to The Urban Green co-housing situation they are moving towards
developing. Some of the other members of the developing team are also believers,
but some of them aren't. They are all looking to have a multicultural, multi-generational
community and the believers are wanting to reach out to their lost neighbours
through authentic Christian lifestyles.
These co-housing communities are set up so that there is
a much greater interaction of lives throughout the communities, as that is
one of the main reasons that draws people - the desire to belong to a community
where their lives are interacting with their neighbours in a much richer way
than our normal housing situations afford.
Many of these also take into consideration environmental
and sustainable living concepts which help to protect the environment. More
about co-housing here: www.cohousing.ca
I thought some of you might be interested in this type of scenario, and some
of you may even wish to consider becoming a part of this community?
Here are some excerpts from a fairly recent email I received
from Brent about this:
"...I am very excited about our involvement with " The Urban Green"
Cohousing project here in North Delta. In many ways it feel like a grass roots,
organic way to reach out to a lot of our
neighbors about the need for living a more simple, relationally connected
lifestyle. A few of us in our group gather monthly to pray for the project
and that God may use it to draw people to himself. In many ways we feel like
the cohousing lifestyle addresses a need for us also on a personal level regarding
living a healthier lifestyle.
We are surprised to that so few Christians seem interested
in addressing the larger issue of sustainability, environmental concerns,
and the need for new architectural models to
help foster healthier ways of living in community. The following quotes catches
some of what catches me about the potential of cohousing.
"The idea of modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an antisocial view of existence. I don't believe that we can afford to keep pretending that life is a never-ending episode of Little House on the Prairie. We are going to have to develop a different notion of the good life and create a physical form that accommodates it." James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere.I have a hunch that cohousing get close to a different notion of the good life and embodies a physical form the accommodates it, yahoo." If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of our time. We worship this idealized container for family life, and yet it turns out that the family cannot be sustained without the larger container of community life". James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere
The Urban Green is not a specific Christian cohousing project
but I think it is a great place for Christian to live and to enjoy living
out their faith in a more natural incarnational way…"
--
There is an upcoming tour of some local co-housing projects coming up which
you could consider, and here is a recent online interview with Brent about
co-housing, as well:
93.1 RED FM: Interview with Brent Unrau (MP3 - 2.21Mb) - http://www.theurbangreen.ca/html/inthenews01.htm
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