Residential Community

Urban Seed has a range of opportunities for those interested in exploring incarnational neighbourhood mission. In the city there is the option to come and live in an intentional residential community and explore community living and grassroots work in the CBD.

For more insight into the residential experience, check out regularly updated blogs by current residents Andreana and Christop.

Former residents Ali and Nathan have also charted some of their thoughts below.

Nathan was part of the Urban Seed residential community for a year in 2006. Check out his reflections, after returning  to Central House to catch up for a few days recently…

I don't know about you, but the city for all it's glamour, glitz and parties, for all its culture and couture, can seem a starkly empty and hollow place to me; tall, high-rise buildings towering above people rushing from one place to another, in the struggle to stay afloat and keep up in a rat race that relentlessly gets faster and faster. But right in the midst of the all the meaningless striving, there's a place that's different; a place hidden deep in the recesses of a dingy laneway. Perhaps apt, as I've always contended that Melbourne's true treasures are found down laneways (or at the end of two). For the last two days of my self-imposed sabbatical of sorts, I've been at Urban Seed helping out with some IT stuff. I'm still a little puzzled at how a place can still feel so much like home, even after four months removed and so much movement in my own life since. I found myself walking down the laneway, pressing buzzers and walking stairs so familiarly; but surely it was more than the stones and improperly-attached-to-the-wall elevator doors that beckoned once again. I don't think it's normal to leave somewhere for that long, and to be included again so seamlessly and effortlessly; conversations picking up right in the middle, without the hint of the four months of blank space between. Not a slick, well-oiled machine producing off-handed polite remarks, but rather the gathering of unlikely and seemingly divergent people... how could I even describe the personality pot that is that space?! I can't. Perhaps it's because so much of me is still there, is there in the '06 resies that still call Central House home, the huge part of my heart that will belong always to christop-nomes-ray (and bio-diesel ali), always. A newspaper once used the term for the open-lunches of "soul food" (would that be what edith sprigg eats?); I left today, until who knows again, walked out of the heart-place of the laneway into the comparatively desolate city, but restored incredibly in soul and resolve.

Here are a couple of Ali Turnbull’s journal entries as a 2006 resident …

Friday 7th April 2007

What a day. Stewy came over, smashed, and took the last $100 of the $230 he'd got me to hold for accomodation for him. My cousin was over when he stumbled into level 7. He said "He was doing it all tonight", referring to the visit he would later make to the gay bar on Flinders Street. My cousin felt quite awkward, understandably. She said after he left, that she doesn't know how I do it. For me it's more the question of I don't know why I do it. I hope God installs a new hope in me for Stewy over the weekend. At this stage I don't know what to think of him and what he wants to do with himself. Tonight, like so may others recently, Stewy is "off the show darling!".

Sunday 30th April 2007

Kat doesn't feel safe around Troy anymore. Fair enough. Pete and Kat were downstairs chatting to him while he was quite intoxicated and he threw a cigarrette bin at the door while they were closing it on him. We decided not to let him sleep over at Central House any more. Troy was being denial Troy. You know, pretending everything was okay and that things would be fine. He said he was going to Sydney tomorrow for a fresh start and to sort out some stuff with friends and family. "Troy's on the run again Ali, Troy's on the run."

So I got him a couple of blankets, beanies etc. because he was with his uncle and they were spending the night on the street before going to Sydney. The blankets were knitted by Brighton Baptist Ladies. The label on the blanket and beanie bag said "Knitted by the Brighton Baptist Ladies for the Homeless". And I thought... I can't give these to Troy, he's not homeless. Then in a mind reeling instant, I realised that Troy truely was homeless. I felt the love that those ladies had put into the material flow throught me and it made me feel a sense of wonder. Wonder that I was the person in the middle, in touch with this "homeless" guy, that they must have envisaged during the long knitting process. Wonder because Troy probably wasn't what they envisaged. And wonder at the fact that this very night, Troy would lie somewhere in the shitty gritty city and that the blanket would do what it was knitted together in the womb to do.

If you are interested in exploring this with us we would like to extend to you an invitation to come and join us for lunch in Credo Café or take part in one of our "Mission Exposure" weeks.

For more information please email our Residential Co-ordinator Paul Toms or phone 9650 4023.