STUDY COURSES
St Leonard’s is a Living and Questioning Community.
This means we don’t simply accept things, but expose them to challenge and investigation. In turn, this means we take seriously the ideas of study and reflection. All too often Christianity is seen as a sort of package-deal paid for by a blank intellectual cheque, with people expected to sign up for everything and agree with everything – which thinking people simply cannot do! Unless our faith is able to respond to anything and everything that a sceptical age can throw at it, it really doesn’t deserve to survive. We respect and encourage people’s questions, not in the patronising sense that we think we know the answers to all of them but in the sense that they keep us alive and open to new possibilities.

Because we see study and reflection as a key part of the Christian journey, they need to be ongoing. Many churches run Bible study groups, and there are several of these in St Leonard’s, with details of times and venues available from the parish office. In addition there are more open courses of varying lengths, operating throughout most of the year.

During 2008-2009 we worked our way through the 21-week Living the Questions course, and this was followed in the summer by a three-week course looking at some of the ideas of the inspirational Bishop John Spong.

We spent the autumn and winter of 2009-2010 studying First Light, a 12-session study of the historical Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

Beginning on 27 April will be a course entitled Taking Mystery Seriously. All too often religious insiders pay lip-service to the idea of the Mystery of God, when in fact what they really mean is that they can think of a few loose ends that need tidying up. Such an attitude is an insult to the intelligence of all those people of integrity and goodwill who find the very notion of God difficult or even impossible.

This brief course will try to achieve more honesty than is usually attempted. It will take with particular seriousness the problems concerning what can (and cannot) be said about God, and will look at how the practice of religion may most appropriately be thought of as tightrope walking.

Members of the course will be encouraged to read the appropriate chapters of the Sea of Faith book, copies of which will be available on loan. Each two-hour session will look at one of the six 1984 ‘Sea of Faith’ programmes, which were written and presented by the philosopher of religion Don Cupitt. He invites us to think of God in a radically different way, something which many people have found threatening and upsetting. But perhaps we need to resist the attempt to force the idea of God into the straitjacket of orthodoxy, if we are to be genuinely open in our religious explorations.

The course will not appeal to anyone who is replete with religious certainties, but will offer those with a healthy collection of doubts and questions an opportunity to explore them in the company of like-minded companions.