Linda and Shirley’s Story
We are members of a partnership of very small rural congregations. During the pandemic, we started an online parish study group which met weekly throughout the year, drawing participants from four congregations in the partnership: about a dozen people.
Soon we began to wonder how we could be intentional about our learning: how could we assess what we need to learn, not just what we want to learn? Learning is not just entertainment. It’s meant to change us and help us grow.
We found our model in the Marks of Mission, which re-frame our baptismal vows as a call to action for the Church. What if we planned each year a program of learning that was designed to help us fulfill our baptismal vocation? We would allow ourselves to be challenged by things that made us uncomfortable. We would try to inform ourselves about the responsibilities we have towards one another and all of creation. We would explore spiritual disciplines that nourish and sustain us.
We made a plan. And we carried it out.
We learned about evangelism. We learned about Indigenous Peoples. We learned about the environmental and ethical impact of everyday things we take for granted. We learned about death and dying. We learned about prayer, Scripture, worship, and a rule of life. We learned about our baptismal vows, and how we can engage in daily practices that enable us to fulfill them. We talked, we listened, we prayed, we laughed — and we learned.
And at the end of the year, we looked back. We took note of what we learned, and what we did as a result of what we learned. How did our learning change us so that we see things differently, and do things differently? How did our learning help us to be the church?
And an amazing thing happened. We began to realize that our being a church depended not on having a church building, but on living our baptismal vocation. We began to realize that even with all our financial challenges, we have a future that is full of hope and life.
That’s what learning did for us.
Janet's Story
At St. Mark’s in Brantford, I was challenged to do a catechumenal experiment with adults who were already active members of the church, and you might ask: So what? What differentiates what you did as catechumenal? Why not just call it another small group bible study?
Catechesis brings one into the body of Christ as he draws us together
Meeting together in person is a calling from the Holy Spirit into participation in Christ. Perhaps because of the gross limitations that Covid put upon us, our group was so very grateful to be allowed to meet together again. But more than that as we studied the gospel of Mark, we became profoundly aware not just that Jesus called the disciples into a small group but that we have been drawn by the Holy Spirit to attend in person. Often this drawing in is marked by baptism, but our mature reflection was on Jesus’ expression of his own baptism as one that involves the pouring out of his life, and so is our baptismal life in the church meant to be a pouring out of the gifts for the building up of the body. The impact was a sense of calling, a responsibility to the body of Christ.
Catechesis brings one into the story of Christ as he writes us into it
The hazard of a bible study is that it leaves the story in the past like a curious relic, but the narrative that we entered was one that illumines our present as that which is charged with God’s presence. This was accomplished by listening to scripture through the Lectio Divina method, so that God’s voice can be discerned, it was accomplished through imaginative entry into the narrative so that in the sanctity of our imaginations we can claim our place, and it was accomplished through a process of mind mapping the imagery that Jesus gives us so that no image or story is left in isolation. This was not the gleaning of information at an intellectual level, it was rather a recognition that through his holy Word we are in formation.
Catechesis brings us into the incarnation of Christ as he lifts us into himself
As we studied the end of Mark, as Jesus prepares for his death, as he celebrates the last supper with his disciples, we participated in an embodied fashion. We crushed bitter herbs with mortar and pestle, we shared wine, we warmed flat bread over a candle, we did this three times in a dim church, and we reflected on how he told us to share the eucharist, how he did not complete the Passover, how that consummation is left until we meet him in heaven. This embodied behaviour, this playing with the elements of creation as our creator has given them to us, was not child’s play, it was an honouring of the gift of our createdness, and it helped us to recognize that he creates not just us and our place but our spiritual food. The impact for the group was a heightened sense of God’s presence in the Eucharist through the power of his promise.
Perhaps it was just a bible study, but if a Christian is drawn to respond to the gifts of God, if they are drawn into communion, into the body he has created that strange thing we call church, into the narrative that he writes that strange thing we recognize as truth, and into the reception of his gifts that strange thing we taste and see at the Eucharist, then he has done it, the formation that he affects in us is his new creation and for that: I give glory to God.