These weekly posts explore how we are both introducing and living into the Way of Love in our Adult Christian Formation offering. My hope is to provide accessible experiments to live more into this way of following Jesus.
Opening
Learning from the Christian scriptures can be seen as improvising faithfully from what we know (our history) and moving forward to what we see as our preferred future.
The participants played an improv game called “In the beginning…The End.”
The end goal of the game is for everyone to be involved and for the story to somehow make sense. This game can be played with all ages – from children to older adults.
Two volunteers begin as the bookends of the story. The first person says, “In the beginning,” and the last person says, “The End.” They stand with some room in between them.
One by one, people stand and join the story at any place in the story. Every time a new person joins the story, the story is told as is with the new participant saying the line they bring to the story. For example, after one person joined the story the story might sound like, “In the beginning…and the cow jumped over the moon…The End.” Each participant repeats their line each time the story is told. Participants join in the story making before and after to add to and/or change the storyline with the end goal of everyone being in the story and the story making sense.
Why improv? Because improv allows us to start to think about life with God, this way of Jesus, as living improvisationally. NTWright writes in a number of places (but this is a decent article with which to start) about how the invitation of life with God is to improvise faithfully. We know the story. We are in the middle of the final act. Introducing the topic with some improv games, and there are many from which to choose, helps people imagine what improvising means and helps inspire imagination on how to faithfully improvise as a response to the scriptures.
Reflection
Goal: Learning and growth happens through reflection. The goal of this reflection time is to create capacity for experimentation, learn from failure, and reflect to deepen learning.
Check in with last week’s experiment: to say hello to God each day
How did your experiments go?
What did you try?
What didn’t work?
What was the impact?
How do we read the Bible?
The concept of the 5-Act Play, Creation-Conflict-Covenant-Christ-Church from Brian McLaren adapted from the work of NTWright, offers a helpful hermeneutic through which we can see the story of scripture, this narrative which invites us to participate with God in making God’s dreams come true. While it is not the only way of seeing the scriptures, it can be a helpful one for looking at the big picture.
We then watched two Bible Project videos and noticed the categories of the 5-Act Play throughout. A discussion followed.
Dwelling in the Word
We practicing Dwelling in the Word again this week as a way to approach and read scripture.
Experiment and Closing Liturgy
This week’s experiment is to read scripture daily. On can use apps online or the daily lectionary. Participants received printed sheets of two-week Bible reading plans based on topics and a low-tech option.
The closing liturgy is based on the We Seek Love page associated with the Way of Love.
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