Thursday, November 15, 2007

Grow one week old

logo finalforweb.jpg kicked off on Sunday evening. Excellent start, real buzz around the place, new faces, and faces we had not seen for a while.

It’s only week one, so it’s too early to evaluate. What we are trying to do is to offer a whole variety of angles on a topic. So for 3 weeks it is Grow through gardening and on the first week we played a scene from the movie Over the Hedge where the animals meet “the hedge”. We then offered a history of gardens in ancient times. We guessed who owned a number of Opawa gardens. We interviewed a flower grower. We explored why the Bible starts with a garden.

We then invite people to process together. The set up is in table groups. As someone said, you have created collectives, not rows. To get people talking we are trying 3 basic questions – as you listened who is God? who are humans? how then should we live? We hope these will provide an ongoing framework.

We encourage people to write up their exploration and they are then placed on the web. We hope this encourages people that their learning is being taken seriously and they can see what they, and other’s wrote, over the week. The first responses, are, IMHO, quite encouraging.

There are other bits built into Grow (gathering ritual, new approach to offering, response, take home projects), but I’ve explained enough for now. We are simply following our intuition – that people learn in different ways and asking the question – how can church can be a better learning/forming environment.

Posted by steve at 03:41 PM

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