More than one way to be a community
Community is an oft-heard word at Fresno Pacific University, and used in many ways.
Sometimes it means how we make decisions. Sometimes it means who we want to hang out with. Sometimes it means how we treat one another.
Let me go where so many have gone before and define community, for at least the rest of this page: A group of people who do more for one another than they have to.
That definition isn't as institutional or specific as some, but that doesn't make it less useful.
This meaning stretches the university community from Tulare to Thailand, the long way. It embraces students, faculty, staff, alumni, former students, donors, friends, neighbors and companies we do business with.
The intent covers as many activities as it does geography:
- Students, faculty and staff who remember a student who dies.
- An administrator who stops and chats with a groundskeeper out of genuine interest.
- A group of students who write happy birthday to a friend in multicolored chalk letters four feet high on the sidewalk.
- Faculty and students who fill a first-year department chair's office with balloons for his 50th birthday.
- A faculty member who creates an original composition to honor a staff member in another office, and a student ensemble that premiers the piece.
- Anyone, any time, who stops to pick up litter.
It's all doing more for one another than we have to, and maybe almost as much as God would like us to.