Earlier this year, I attended a presentation by Peter Hurst and subsequently got to spend time with him as we looked at the Asoke communities here.

He presented the concept of Deep Community.

Deep community can be described as a community or group that has tasks to do together and works efficiently at those but becomes "deep" when it provides the room and support for people in the group to do personal development work.

This "automatically" happens in Asoke communities because the thing that brings most of them together is an desire to work on personal, spiritual development. They join the community for that and then the tasks of living in and supporting the community are secondary.

Most groups or communities come together from the other side; they come together in order to accomplish some goal or purpose and the personal work is secondary or non-existent.

I think the best example that I can think of of a deep community that most of us are familiar with is a good, functioning, supportive family.

And that is what Asoke feels like to most people coming in to it -- family --- a big extended family.

As we look to helping the people in northern Uganda resettle, it seems to me at least, that they need support, physical and emotional/spiritual. And I believe in many ways the latter is more important than the former because it helps condition us to deal with hard times.

Next month, I will be taking a group of students who are interested incoming to Uganda with me in March, April and May to live in one of the Asoke communities and we will be working on many things. But the most important will be intentionally working on building a community among ourselves that will get us through the time in Uganda and help us model that kind of supportive community.

This is enough for now of the plans of the Thai group!

Comments?