Yesterday’s brainstorming workshop at New Farm, Brisbane may be of interest to other groups planning their year.
A well-attended and fully engaged group met to develop our plans for 2024 and base this on well considered values and purposes. The result in brief summary was as follows:
Criteria/Values that will guide our thinking about our seminars:
- Using culturally relevant language.
- Involve scholars, influencers and commentators.
- Draw on contemporary theology, recognising diverse interpretations.
- Acknowledge religious and philosophical diversity.
- Be informed by Gospel rather than Credal values.
- Focus on relevance.
- Reflect any situational ethics.
- All seminars open to the public.
The Purposes of our discussions:
- To challenge our thinking
- To connect with the modern world
- To develop progressive thinking
- To widen our perspectives
What we don’t want to happen:
- Build a bubble around ourselves.
- Become ‘Pharisees’ by not engaging with other viewpoints.
- Create an ‘us and them’ mode that makes the Church the enemy.
Ideas to be developed into 2024 seminars:
- Examining the resources available to progressives
- A place for young people in the progressive community
- Nurturing Progressive Christianity with children
- Designing an alternative funeral
- The interface of science, religious belief, the meaning of life
- Invited speakers such as Julia Baird, Val Webb, Lorraine Parkinson, etc.
- Role of Consciousness in Spirituality
- Living in Harmony (the study series)
- Multifaith and Interfaith engagement
- More on Spong
- Contemporary music and songs
- Compassion as the foundation of Christianity, not credal statements.
- Jesus – nature, love and metanoia
- Contemporary prophets in our world
- Why people retreat into bunkers in politics and religion (Meryem Brown)
- What prevents some parts of the institutional church from being open to progressive thinking.
- A hermeneutic of resistance
- Education for human flourishing in a time when tertiary humanities studies are diminishing.
oOo