Part 6: Community Systems

Our community can be understood from a systems approach. It consists of a number of complex, interrelated systems that sustain the necessary elements which make it possible for people to live in this place; jobs, housing, utilities, transportation, communications, security and order, education, health care, recreation, family and social services, justice and religious institutions. “The sheltered religious world in which most pastors live and work,” says Dr. Stanley J. Hallet, an evangelical theologian in Chicago, “is often vastly different from the rough and troubled secular world of their parishioners. This difference of pulpit and pew worlds can result in irrelevant preaching, insensitive pastoral care, and unrealistic expectations of parishioners.”