IF anything characterizes the American I community today-the community in which health personnel worksit is the fact that in many significant ways it is a new community. The present-day American community, regardless of size or type but more especially if large and industrial, tends to be new in its physical appearance: new in its suburban sprawl stretching into the hinterland; new in its homes, its business and industrial buildings; new in its transportation system winding around and through it, and in its roaring and mounting volume of traffic; new, too, in its uninterrupted digging and hauling and relocating, as it makes room for invading armies of newcomers. The present-day community is new in its civic pattern: new in the strange, inexperienced, and uneasy partnerships of and private agencies; new in the powerful coalitions of federal and local bureaucracies; new in its motley crews of coordinators and supercoordinators, research analysts, and relations experts, professionals and indigenous workers toiling in the vineyards of the public good; new in the autonomous but overlapping, burgeoning and dying, competitive and effortless agencies of the interest, all crowded in small, dense life spaces over which they claim taxing sovereignty and questionable administration. The present-day community is new in its many institutional arrangements: the emerging ecumenism of its churches clashing with the separation of its ethnic neighborhoods and groups; its schools struggling with centralism in Albany, overseer guidelines from Washington, and decentralist demands from clamorous PTA's (the latter probably the most astonishing novelty in the whole community picture!) ; suburbia wallowing in leisure-time guilt while black militants exploit suburbia's newly aroused shame with billion-dollar non-negotiable demands, while white liberals shout hosannahs punctuated by cries of mea culpa; those secular sanctuaries of scholarly wisdom, the universities, warily patrolling their corridors where learn, baby, learn competes with incendiary refrains. It is in such a community that the work of ministering to the health is being done. Let us take a closer look at this new community.