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The Lord’s Prayer - the York course for 2008. Course Material is available from the York Courses Website: www.yorkcourses.co.uk £2.75 for course booklet £8.95 for audio cd
York Courses began some ten years ago and have proved very popular. This experience and success is evident in the well presented course material: a booklet for each participant; a CD (or audiotape) and a transcript of the CD. The booklet provides a helpful introduction to each session and the questions. The CD and audiotape contain a fourteen-minute discussion starter for each of the five sessions.
The Lord’s Prayer is intended as a course for Lent 2008 or for any other time. Although designed for groups and individuals, it will work best for group discussion and this review considers the course in that context. The course subtitle is ‘praying it, meaning it, living it’ and the questions and discussion starters do justice to that objective. The difficult issues are not avoided and the questions are searching and often challenging.
The first session raises questions such as when and how we pray, the language of prayer and our images of God and about comparisons between the practice of Christians and that of other faiths. Session Two is about the risky business of trying to discern God’s will and then to do it, both as individuals and as a society. The session raises some broad moral issues and reminds us of the choices that Jesus faced. The third session, ‘Our Daily Bread’, addresses the balance between the spiritual and material and explores the implications. ‘As we forgive’ raises some very hard questions about our attitudes and actions, using moving examples of how others have responded to wrongdoing and injustice. The final session is about death, heaven and Easter. There are questions about hell and suicide bombers too.
This is an excellent course. When asked to review it, I tried out the first session in an ecumenical group and we all decided to complete the course. That led me to order more booklets on the web. The service was first class and there are some special offers that encourage that purchasing method. To use the closing words of Dr David Hope’s introduction; ‘I wish you well then, as you gather around this material and hope that you’ll enjoy rich fellowship and deepening friendship as you discuss, disagree perhaps, and then pray together in the unity of the Holy Spirit’.
David Butler |
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