Community is a tricky idea these days.  Surveys tell us we no longer know our neighbours and TV tells us that, when we do, they are very often ‘from Hell’. Online communities are elusive and shifting. The Guardian reported recently that ‘Facebook is now dead and buried to teenagers’.

But politicians like the word ‘community’.  Since 2006 we’ve had a Department for Communities and Local Government, with its own cabinet minister.  In the same department are a Minister of State with a brief for faith and communities, and Parliamentary Undersecretaries responsible, among other things, for Community Rights and even Community Pubs.

But the more we talk about community, the more various and disparate are the forms it takes: local communities, religious and ethnic communities, school and workplace communities, sports clubs, book clubs, online gamers and people in the pub. Sometimes, ‘community’ seems to be a label we slap on any reasonably like-minded group of people.

Growing up, the community I knew best was my local church. At the time, it was where I spent every Sunday, where I went to cubs and scouts in the week, and to youth club, jumble sales and coffee mornings.  What I didn’t see at the time was that it was also where I learned how to relate to people who were not my age, where I was taught respect and the value of small kindnesses as I saw my parents, their friends and our neighbours help out in one another’s lives not just on Sundays but through the year, year after year.

The lesson I didn’t realise I was being taught was simple and fundamental: love your neighbour as yourself.  Simple, but hard when the people next door leave their bins all over the pavement or no one in the PTA will volunteer to help at the summer fair or your colleagues aren’t pulling their weight.  It’s worth a go, though, loving your neighbour – because done well it is a real and solid thing, hard to ignore and will bind up even the trickiest and most problematic of the many communities we live in now.

The picture at the top is of North Harrow Methodist Church, where much of my growing up took place.