Led by Francis Stewart

The pandemic has forced us to change how we do church.

How have we experienced this changes? What are the new ways of doing church that we need to hold on to? Are there challenges which we need to embrace?

Is this an opportunity to return to the roots of our faith and to embrace a new way of being Church?

• Questions for discussion

• What has been your experience of church over the last year? What has been difficult? What have you learnt?

• Can we learn from the idea of fasting? If we were to engage this time of restriction as a fast from communal worship- from weekly holy communion for some of us-in solidarity with those unable to participate, would this centre us on the universality of being "one body"? Or perhaps bring to our attention those who's life circumstances prevent them from receiving communion even at the best of times?

• What about setting our spiritual hunger beside world hunger, focusing energies on the community food bank? Would this serve to centre us on being food for the world, or on the promise of abundance scandalously curtailed by the world's structures?

• What about practices of fellowship in the home, like the early Christians, along with common ownership of property and distributing to each according to need, like the mutual-aid groups during the pandemic?

• Are there other ways of "being church" that you have heard of people doing during the pandemic, or that simply spring to mind? What do you think has stopped us from seeing matters of justice, reconciliation with each other, the earth, as internal to the task of "being church'?