At Glen, house group is split into two sessions immediately before and after
lunch, totalling 2 and a half hours. The fellowship study group meets in a
single hour and a half long session, on a Monday evening. The religious
experiences and everyday concerns of 16 year olds can be very different
from older people. Questions such as “Is it difficult being a Christian at
school?” are not, at face-value, ones you pose to grown adults who left
education several years ago. Are adults, unlike teenagers, much happier to
exist “out of this world”?
And yet, the more I tried to re-work the materials, the more I realised how
much does not change as you grow older.
Our life as Christians will always give us time to pause and reflect, and as
we leave the crib and begin to journey through the liturgy towards the cross,
the themes of being in the world, and out of the world take on sharper
meanings. Jesus is both fully human and part of our earthly world, and also
fully God, who made the entirety of heaven and the earth which we inhabit.
The questions I asked 17-year-old delegates in August 2016 have proven
just as relevant to our older attendees to fellowship study group. While it
may indeed be difficult to be a Christian at school, where it is decidedly
uncool, it’s can prove just as difficult to be Christian in the workplace, where
it can be seen as “irrational” or, heaven-forbid, old-fashioned.
And so, realising that the questions need not change, I realised that the
format need to change either. The study materials we are working our way
through are designed to let us pause, reflect, and pray in a variety of ways,
on what it means to be in the world, and also out of the world. Being out of
our comfort zone is very much a part of being a Christian, and so I’ve
included things I would use at Glen – creative prayer through art, silent
meditation on a candle-flame, short Bible passages of single verses to break
apart and explore.
These are not familiar ways of working to some in our fellowship study
group, but they are yielding rich fruit, and I pray they will continue to do so.
If you would like to use the study materials, please ask me for a copy.
Although much of it is designed for group use, they can be easily adapted for
your own individual study, and feel free to share your thoughts or questions
with me on Sundays.
If you can, you are very welcome to join us.
We currently are meeting at St Aiden’s at 7 pm on Monday evenings.
Emily Alldritt
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