House Groups

It has long been part of the tradition and practice of All Hallows to meet at various times in the church year for house groups. These are usually study courses, but some have been more oriented towards prayer. While these groups tend to be fairly structured, they are nevertheless informal and open to a degree of flexibility to allow participants the space to explore and share in a supportive environment.

The leadership of the courses comes from within the congregation, and groups meet in one another’s homes, with two and sometimes three parallel groups running on different nights to allow the maximum flexibility of attendance.

We tend to be experiential in our approach to study, and learning from one another is an important principle. The content of our study groups has been quite varied: we prepare our young (and not so young) people for confirmation; we have looked in some depth at Celtic spirituality, which has had quite a knock-on effect for both public and private worship as members of the congregation began to incorporate Celtic prayer styles into the devotional life of the church.

A recent major area of study followed hot on the heels of the publication of various social and political studies on urban poverty, as the congregation struggled to live out an appropriate Christian response to such issues as debt and homelessness.

All Hallows is a congregation characterised by its mission to be an Inclusive Congregation. Many of our members have negative experiences of the institutional church for a variety of reasons. We are not a single-issue congregation, but there has been no escaping the lamentable record of the churches on issues of human sexuality. One of our most recent study programmes has been to explore the meaning of inclusivity in this context: straight and gay Christians working together in search of a common understanding which will move us forward and be both a rebuke and an example to other congregations. (Click here for more information.) This programme of study grew partly out of our own convictions, but also out of a previous Investors In People workshop. If you know anything about the IIP process you will be aware that The Church has not the remotest chance of meeting the standard because of its institutional attitudes and practices towards women and gays.

Our most recent study programme has been the institution of what we hope will be an annual Exploring course. This has become unofficially known as the Not The Alpha Course. It’s also not strictly a house group, as it meets mostly in the café, but never mind, eh …

This page was last updated on Saturday, 07 May 2005

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