Brandon Profile

There are a variety of ways to look at the City of Brandon. The general background information is quite well presented in the city's site and its economic development site. In addition, there are a variety of other sites with information on Brandon: This sort of information forms a framework for understanding the life-context of Brandon, and works for most general purposes. However, the process of Pastoral Ministry requires a further perspective, if the Church's members are to be enabled to minister to their fellow citizens with effectiveness in this specific context.

Every town or city has a "Spirit", or way of dealing with each other, which can also be looked at as an "access code" to full participation. That is, each center has some social realties with which it has to deal, and over time, the people who live in that center decide just how they are going to deal with those realities. Ministry to people living in a town or city requires an understanding of these spiritual and social components. The Gospel is spoken into the lives of people living in a specific context at a specific time.

Ordinarily, these community components are not so much spoken about as spoken to. That is, these components make up the social and spiritual backdrop for any number of day-to-day events. People have to

just like all the other people in the world. However, the ministry of word and sacrament does not simply consist of bringing the word of life to bear on those various components of daily life, or even of addressing the various situations and crises which tend to emerge in people's lives from time to time.

Ministry consists of bringing the Word of life and the Sacrament of "blood wrung out and body broken" for the people facing both normal life events as well as extraordinary situations, all within a context and in a time, part of which consists of this social-spiritual backdrop of the focus community. It is what Paul was referring to when he said "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." Ephesians 6:12 NEB.

During the past twenty years of living in this community, I have had the opportunity to:

Over this period, I have come to understand a few of the components of the social-spiritual backdrop. It is a partial picture, but it should suffice to anchor this presentation of the five areas of ministry, which can be augmented with community television.

The elements of the Brandon profile which I wish to portray, are the central ones I have found people in this town having to cope with in their daily lives. These insights are not original, but rather come either directly from people struggling with them or else from the reports of colleagues who have had to assist people in this town who were dealing with such phenomena.

Owing to the confidential nature of the work I do, as well as that of my colleagues, names and situations have been stripped of identifiers in order to share the essence of the phenomenon but not to bring undue hardship to those who have shared the material with me. I hope that others will watch for the same phenomena in this community and perhaps sharpen the focus of these aspects, so that we as a community can start to address them and make this an even better place to live, work and raise our children.

These items are offered in no particular order or priority:

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