The Church has a critical role to play in holding communities together amid constant global changes, Prime Minister Bruce Golding has said.

"(Communities) have to be established and maintained deliberately, because if they don't, they will disappear and we will become a group of human creatures who relate to each other in a fictional way with no genuine concern for each other," the prime minister said.

Golding was addressing the 345th anniversary dinner of the St Dorothy's Anglican Church of Old Harbour, St Catherine. The anniversary was celebrated last Saturday with a dinner presented under the patronage of the prime minister and his wife at the Terra Nova Hotel in St Andrew.

Golding said that while the Church was being viewed as a trendsetter, schools in each community also had an important role to play. He said schools in the past were seen not just as centres of learning but sources of the architecture that hold a community together.

Negative impact

The prime minister lamented that the school is now struggling to find its place in the community. It has become a place where parents send their children to relieve themselves of the noise from children with the hope that they will learn something in-between, he said.

Golding argued that the changes which have taken place throughout the world had also impacted negatively on places like Old Harbour, once considered a peaceful, sleepy fishing village.

"We are in touch with the world, our music, our expressions, our language have taken off - we are mobile. In the course of that, we have lost much of our community.

"It has disappeared and we are part of a broader society and the values that used to identify us as a people from Old Harbour, have been undermined and weakened as we are part of this broader arena of human existence."

He added "When it comes to values, there is not just an ambiguity, but confusion about what's right and what's wrong," Golding said.

Deliberate strategy

He said part of the challenge now is to pursue a deliberate strategy to try and rebuild this community. One of the first things, he said, would be to try to harmonise all the groups as there were so many different initiatives, each trying to carve out a little piece of Old Harbour for themselves.

"We have to bring them together under some broad umbrella ... to bring all the movers and shakers together and to agree on some basic principles that will guide not just the development of the community, but how we collaborate and to see to what extent we can make Old Harbour a model for other communities across Jamaica," Golding challenged the congregation.

St Dorothy's Anglican Church in Church Pen, Old Harbour, is one of the oldest existing structures dating back to 1663. It is a National Heritage site.