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! Our faith really doesn’t deserve to survive unless it is able to respond to anything and everything that a sceptical age can throw at it. 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.
In 2008-9 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 2009-10 studying First Light, a 12-session study of the historical Jesus and the Kingdom of God.
The spring and early summer were spent following a course entitled Taking Mystery Seriously, which looked at Don Cupitt’s seminal 1984 Sea of Faith series and accompanying book.
During the autumn and winter of 2010-11 we studied St Paul, who turned out to be both more attractive and more radical than is often thought to be the case! Many of the ideas associated with him were almost certainly not actually his at all, and we did our best to disentangle what might be considered to be the ‘authentic Paul’. Our guides once again were the American scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, by means of video clips and also their book The First Paul.
The spring of 2011 was spent studying Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, and looking in detail at her ‘Charter for Compassion’. This was followed by an examination of one of the most neglected jewels of the bible: the Book of Ecclesiastes.
The autumn and winter of 2011-12 will follow the course ‘God Matters’, which is an attempt to identify ways in which the idea of God can find some resonance with the modern worldπ that do not do violence to either contemporary knowledge or people’s intelligence! We will look at efforts that have been made over the last 100 years to ‘keep the rumour of God alive’ in our society, and examine the extent to which they have succeeded or failed. This will lead us into an examination of some radical new possible ways of understanding God, and what these might mean for the Church
As with all the courses in St Leonard’s, it 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.
The course will demand much of its participants, but the only way in which we can become a Learning Church is to put in the necessary efforts, as opposed to simply paying lip service to the idea.Course sessions will be on Tuesday evenings and Thursday afternoons, with details of dates and venues available from the parish office. |
