We are watching the "One Size Fits All? Exploring new and evolving forms of church in Canada" documentary at the Ottawa Mennonite Church ( see website here . You can watch the entire documentary there or on Youtube. )
We broke into 2 Sundays, with about 20 minutes of video + 30 of discussion in smaller groups of 4-5 people. Here are the questions that I brought to the church for the 1st Sunday:
1.
What does it mean for a church to respond to its
postal code?
2.
"To go to church, to be church": what's
the difference?
3.
"The church has lazily been answering
questions no one is asking" - Do you agree or disagree?
4.
What questions are people asking? Are the questions
inside the church the same as outside?
5.
"We need to be where people are" - What
does this mean to you? Do you agree or disagree?
6.
What are the architectures of the spaces like in
the video? How do they relate to their discourse?
7.
Can you name different kinds of associations? ( Ex:
sports leagues, unions, companies, NGOs, political parties … ) Does it make sense for church to
be involved with these associations?
8.
How do you describe a church?
9.
What's the ideal church like to you?
10. What's the ideal church like to your friends?
For the 2nd Sunday, we'll watch the 2nd half of the video and have a discussion with the whole group. Here are my guiding questions:
- Question #8 - asking the same thing to the whole group
- Gustavo's comment to foster debate:
- One main critique of church as we know it is in the documentary, in my opinion, in the words of Scott Williams ( Club 365, Mission, B.C. ): we can only communicate with the Christian culture. In other words, the church as we know it became a closed group more interested in its own survival and less on people.
- "It is not about church, but about kingdom"
- When was it that the Sunday meeting became more important than community formation?
- Question #9 - asking the same thing to the whole group
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