Advent Course - Exploring 'Life Together'

Discussion by Milton Avery, 1944 (Mount Holyoake College Art Museum)

Our Advent Course at St Giles-in-the-Fields this year was based on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book ‘Life Together’. We held three sessions in church around our Sunday services and a separate half-day retreat on a Saturday at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine in Limehouse, which was also attended by parishioners from St George’s Bloomsbury. 

We selected ‘Life Together’ as the basis for our study group for a number of reasons. With the restrictions of the Covid pandemic behind us and a growing congregation at St Giles, it felt like a good time to consider what it means to be a Christian community. Bonhoeffer’s book offers practical advice on how to live together as Christians not only in times when we gather for worship but also when life means engaging in the world outside of the church (which for most of us is most of the time!) The book is profound but also short, which we felt made it a manageable study text over a few sessions during the busy season of Advent. 

Rather than explore the book chapter by chapter in sequence, we designed the course around four themes. Apart from the retreat day, we limited each session to a maximum of one hour and offered either a light lunch of soup and bread or tea and cakes depending on the time of day.

A copy of the poster and flier is below, followed by a brief summary of the structure of each session and a synopsis of the discussion that ensued.