Being With - a life changing way to help people explore the Christian faith

Jesus Christ, when he was on earth, was content to simply be with us. He wasn’t working with us or being for us. He wasn’t in any other role than being with us. And maybe that should reframe our way of being on Earth. It’s a very embodied, relational and experiential theology. We were already trying to root our youth work in relationships, and it felt like this book was putting into words what we were all longing for.

And then, I ended up winning a convent in a competition! A ten-acre site with five historic buildings. And we wanted to reimagine this for the 21st century amongst young people. We had a community that came in and we lived together, and we ended up creating a rule and a rhythm of life built around the eight dimensions of ‘being with’ that are identified in The Nazareth Manifesto: presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment, glory.

How did the Being With course come about?

During this same time Revd Sam Wells was having a conversation with his clergy colleague, Revd Sally Hitchener along the lines of – what would it feel like to give people an experience of this ‘being with’ theology? How could we create something that would do that?

There’s lots of good courses out there which are focussed on getting a good understanding and knowledge of Christ, but what would it be like to enable a gut feeling and response, an embodied understanding.  They wanted to create a course that really did that.

And then I was invited to join the staff and begin to share the Being With course beyond the walls of St Martin’s.

How does the course work?

The course is founded upon three principles.

1. The belief that God’s grace is to ‘be with us.’
2. The conviction that the Holy Spirit has been at work since day one, in truth, beauty and goodness, and we want to be present to that in other people.
3. The method is the message. When God said, I want to be with you, there was an incarnation. The method of ‘being with’ was the message. And we want to model that in a Being With course.

The course runs over ten weeks. Each 90-minute session has a different theme but follows the same structure, divided into four parts:

Part one is the welcome. It’s the same question each time:
‘What has been the heart of your week?’
It’s not asking, ‘what was the highlight?’ or  ‘what was the worst thing?’ Although it may be both of those things. It’s asking, ‘What is the thing that you are carrying into the room with you?’ The question is encouraging people to really think about being with themselves in that time, but also allowing other people to be with them as they are with themselves.

Part two is the wonderings. There are 4 different wonderings.  So, for example, the first one, on the very first session is:
‘I wonder what it feels like to be set free?’

Wonderings are not questions. Questions tend to have a wrong or right answer. Wonderings can take you in any direction. What you are feeling is as important as what you might be thinking.

During the welcome and the wonderings, the two hosts only respond to any contribution with the words ‘thank you’. No one else responds in the group. So there’s a lot of listening and also a lot of silence. But what that does is it creates a very safe environment for people to feel that they can share the things that are most meaningful to them and be heard. And our experience has been that people really do share profoundly in those two sections.

Part three is: the story. This is the most explicitly religious part of the session, covering classic foundations of Christian thinking: Jesus, the Bible, prayer, suffering, the cross, the resurrection. The host will weave those previously shared wonderings through the story so suddenly people’s small stories are woven into the bigger story and fed back to them. It becomes quite a beautiful exchange between the hosts and participants as their stories become the illustrations for the theology.

Part four is a time for reflection – more normal conversations.

What sizes are the groups?

We suggest between eight and 12 people.

We talk about the course being more like going to the gym than going to a lecture. It requires a level of commitment. But because it’s all about ‘being with’ we have found that participants very naturally and very quickly become committed, not necessarily to the hosts or to the theology but to one another.

Who is the course aimed at?

It has been working well engaging those on the outside or on the periphery of church. Equally we know of churches who have run the course with their PCC and wider members and for whom it has then become a whole new way of operating as a church: a new way of relating.

The host sounds like a key role. Particularly weaving in the wonderings to the talk.  Is the course packaged to equip people to host?

The website is the main resource.

You can sign up as a church leader for a free account which gives you all that you need to understand the course – including twelve explanatory videos.

From there you can access host training (£100, £150 for two hosts) which we strongly suggest people go through. Host training is three, live, 90-minute online sessions, run just like the Being With course.

It’s a very different way of running a group – how we hold people safely in silence, how we weave the wonderings into the story – and so experiencing it as a participant and going through the training is a really important way of feeling and understanding how the course works.

There’s always more to learn, so we also have advanced training and masterclasses so that people can dig deeper.

How has exposure to this theology changed you?

It’s permeated every aspect of how I see and experience the world!

I could highlight a couple of key ways:

Mystery is something that I have grown to engage with in a new way. I no longer see people – myself or others- as problems to be solved but rather as mysteries to be delighted in. If we can help people sit comfortably with the certainty that there is mystery, perhaps something they don’t fully understand or completely know, I think we’ve done a good job.

The second is my understanding of abundance. As the church we sometimes operate out of a place of deficit and fear but if God from day one has been at work in our lives in beauty, truth and goodness then when the course comes to an end, we trust that there is no deficit. There’s no altar call or pressure to sign on a dotted line, we trust that the abundance will continue.

There was a Being With pilot group that ran two years ago in central London. The oldest participant was 83, the youngest was 21, and they finished the course. And they just decided they wanted to continue, and I thought they were meeting once a month. It turns out, it’s still meeting every week. Not everyone comes all the time, obviously. But there’s still a commitment to ‘being with’. Six of the 12 decided that they were going to come to church more regularly, and they do that. But they still continue to meet as a 12 and hold each other to some sort of account. And so, they ask each other, what is the heart of your week? They talk about wonderings together and they explore theology together completely independently, completely on their own track. All they changed was that they decided that they were going to meet in a pub nearer the 83-year-old, because they thought it was dangerous for him to cycle into central London every time!

And so, there’s a beautiful story of ‘being with’ carrying on beyond the church, because I think that ‘being with’ opens an unclosable door. People say, “I want that… that perhaps tastes like everlasting life… that tastes a bit like this God of abundance you tell me about. That’s what I want.” And they go and do it themselves. You know, it turns out God is working outside the church walls. Honestly, I’ve seen it.

being-with.org