A friend recently came and joined us for worship at St Clare’s, and was intrigued by the ‘shared sermon’, created together by all the community. She had some questions for us, so Naomi and I sat down and had a conversation about how we make meaning together at St Clare’s. This is (roughly) a transcript of that conversation.
I saw at the service that you had a discussion. Is that usual and is it always the same?
Naomi: There’s always some kind of spoken opportunity. We sit in a circle for our worship, and do a fairly standard common worship communion service, but at the Word section (but sometimes in other sections or sometimes both) the sermon is something that that happens together with the community and it’s held by the leadership rather than delivered by the leadership.
Charlotte: I think ‘being held’ by us is a really beautiful way of putting it.
Naomi: Very occasionally we’ve had Word responses which have been entirely a kind of prayerful action rather than any kind of discussion but that’s really rare. On the whole there’s some kind of spoken invitation within the service and most commonly, at the moment, that’s a homily followed by discussion, sometimes completely open, sometimes directed with specific questions which we might print out and put in the centre of the room.
Charlotte: And we have various ways of doing that, so yesterday I used the ‘heart, mind and soul’ questions. We have a few different ways that they’re familiar with, or sometimes they might be specific questions to the reading.
Naomi: Or sometimes we’ll do Lectio Divina, so we’ll just meditate upon the reading, then people are invited first of all to say which word in the reading stood out to them. Everyone is invited so speak, so we go round the circle in turn and everyone says their word, but they can just turn and look to their neighbour if they don’t want to speak. That works very well and then we’ll usually have a discussion, beginning by asking if anybody wants to say why they chose their word.
Charlotte: Another thing we do is to invite people to write down their responses to something and then share them as they bring them forward to the front as a symbolic action. They are invited to read them out, or just place it there, but always with a proviso that they don’t have to. And you find then that the people that don’t often speak, having had the chance to write something down first, are more likely to speak.
Naomi: I was just thinking of a time when we thought about who Jesus is, all the different ways we see him. Everybody wrote their responses down and came and put them in the middle, and then we stood and looked at them all and talked about the themes. That was quite a different way of getting into discussion because it was about what do you notice about what everybody said, rather than it being somebody’s thought just directly, so it’s a little bit more community orientated.
Charlotte: And sometimes it’s not discussion about the Bible reading, but mini testimonies or stories, so recently, when there’d been a particularly grim week in the news, we asked what good news stories they had, or stories of signs of hope of the Kingdom. And that gets really different response which is lovely.
I’m assuming some people have arrived from other churches or with some experience of church, and others are completely new to church. Do the former speak share more than the latter or is it pretty mixed?
Charlotte: My immediate reaction to that is no, I mean maybe a bit, but I think it depends way more on personality type and what the particular question is.
Naomi: The thing is that non church people don’t know that it’s not normal.
Charlotte: Yeah, they’re not conditioned to sit quietly and just listen.
Naomi: So if there’s somebody who likes to answer questions, or they’ve got something to say, they’ll say it, because they see that’s what’s happening.
Charlotte: We’ve certainly had times when people have arrived and it’s their first week and we’ve no idea whether they’ve got any church background, but I remember an occasion with a woman who had absolutely no church background (I’d met her in the shop and she came to church on Sunday) and she joined in completely. She also did the Bible reading!
Naomi: It does also slightly depend on the question. I say question, but that makes it sound like what we do every week is ask questions whereas the better way of putting it would be to say it depends on how the discussion emerges, to some extent.
Charlotte: And it varies because sometimes we’ll have a discussion, but other times we will ask for specific things.
Naomi: Whereas if it’s a thorny bit of the Bible and we’re asking for theological answers, I’m wondering if maybe it’s more people who have either been with us longer, or had a previous church background, but I think the people with the previous church background can be nervous to speak because that’s not what they’ve ever been asked to do before. The sermon slot is a place where you listen rather than where you speak. But I think it’s so led by the people who are already there. If the first week somebody arrives people are responding quite naturally, and they’re somebody who’s comfortable to speak in a group, then they speak because it’s what’s being presented to them as normal.
Do you think you attract people with questions and who haven’t yet found a place where they’re able to ask them, or whether the environment nurtures a more inquisitive nature?
Naomi & Charlotte: I think both… *laughter*
Naomi: I mean, without doing an in-depth survey you never completely know why people come, but definitely I think the words in the window, the words on the website invite people with questions.
Note: There is a sign in our window inviting people to join us, which says ‘we welcome the spiritually seeking, those who have wandered away from God, those who never knew God and to those who have lost their faith in the church’.
Charlotte: And it’s not always about attracting people who have questions, but also it’s also attracting people who have walked away from church because of some particular teaching, and felt that there was no room to express that or to have a different opinion or to talk about it.
Naomi: Yes, they’ve come from another church because they’ve got questions about the teaching and that church doesn’t have space for that, or maybe that’s why they left church and are now coming back. We don’t very often have people who come straight from another church unless they’ve really been exiled. They’ve usually left and there’s a gap.
Charlotte: Yeah.
Naomi: And then there are the people who are new to faith, and I think they come with big questions, but usually fairly unformed. I mean maybe one or two formed, but I think it’s a bigger questioning kind of nature. I mean what would make you go to church otherwise, let alone a church in a shop.
Charlotte: I think actually people do have questions, but I think that the environment allows and nurtures a more inquisitive nature.
Naomi: Nurture is a good word, because you don’t create something in nurturing, but you help it to thrive. I think there’s space for people to explore their questions. I think that’s what we do. So I don’t think that an unquestioning person becomes questioning, I think that’s unlikely, and I don’t think it’s that people come with a list of 100 questions and one by one we’re working through them on a Sunday and nobody is suggesting that, but I think there’s more of a kind of questioning nature…
Charlotte: and people are wanting to grow and to learn and know more about their faith and what it means…
Naomi: Yeah, and the environment is very much ‘let’s explore questions together’ and I think that some of that is because you and I express ‘oh, I wonder about this’ or ‘oh, that’s interesting, I haven’t thought about that before’, so there isn’t a closedness. Even if we get to quite a resolved place in the discussion, there’s an overall openness that there’s still more to discover and if a different group of people had the same questions, there’d have been more things to say.
Charlotte: There’s always an openness, and you have to be really undefended. We never preach with an attitude of ‘this is the answer’, we preach with an openness and open handedness that allows for uncertainty and question and difference of opinion…
Naomi: …and discovery
Charlotte: Yes, discovery is a good word and expects that the people in the room will have something to contribute, and that we don’t have all the answers.
Naomi: It not like let’s say, teaching a maths lesson, and you ask a question of the class and you know the answer and you’re trying to get them to get to the answer. It’s not like that.
Charlotte: No, it’s not like those old Bible studies where they had the answers in the back and you always felt like actually what you were trying to do was get the people to the right answer. We’re absolutely not doing that. It’s a genuine exploration of what does this mean.
Naomi: Yeah, a journeying together to use a really hackneyed phrase.
Charlotte: So we’re neither telling them what they have to think or believe, but nor are we doing that in a kind of slightly sleight of hand way, like we’re going to pretend you got there on your own, but still to a predetermined answer. And they know that so it makes them feel safe that they can say anything…
Naomi: Yeah, so I think it’s not just that we regularly have discussion, I think it’s what the quality of discussion is like, that really matters in nurturing in people’s inquisitiveness.
How has that space for discussion evolved? When you started, were people as open as they were yesterday or has it developed over time?
Naomi: So I think that, for me, the beginning of the development of this really crucial way we do the Word section of a Sunday service, and therefore the way we do teaching probably throughout our church community, evolved from a really specific moment in time and that’s when we went to Bushwick Abbey on sabbatical. We sat in a service of predominantly young Christians in Brooklyn and the priest led a discussion using Lectio Divina as a way into reflection and the sermon happened from amongst the young people in the room and it blew my mind. It was so rich and she trusted them that they had got deep things to say, and she didn’t sit there with the answers ready to dole them out when they made little faltering attempts towards it. She really trusted them, that what they would say would be the Holy Spirit speaking. It was incredible and I knew I wanted to experience something like that when we started St Clare’s six months later.
Charlotte: So Bushwick Abbey was the core moment, but I think it was rooted by the surrounding experience of two other churches we went to that were a similar sort of size, both of which invited people to speak. At St Lydia’s dinner church the Priest did a fairly conventional homily but then invited people to share stories that related to it, and also at Not so Churchy, again there was an opportunity for people sharing.
Naomi: Yeah, for sharing. I really agree but I would say that those were things I’d encountered before. The thing that was unique about Bushwick Abbey was the theological depth of what the people in the room said, it was like getting five different sermons and that’s something I say all the time about St Clare’s. I leave feeling like I’ve had five sermons. And when I was the person writing the sermon for Sunday I’d get one, and if you asked me to preach on that on that passage again in three years’ time, I’d probably give you roughly the same basic point because that’s so often that’s the way I see that passage, whereas at St Clare’s I get to see it through their eyes. Sometimes that means through the eyes of someone who’s never been taught what they’re supposed to think, so it’s incredibly fresh, or at the moment we have someone who’s done a huge amount of theological reading so he’s got a lot of stuff at his fingertips from great theologians. But most often it’s from people who haven’t been taught what they’re supposed to think so you get an incredibly fresh reading.
Charlotte: But you do also get the people who, especially when they’re new to us, just give what they think is the right answer. They give the answers that they think they ought to be giving, what they’ve always been told the passage means, and you get to watch how they get surprised by other people’s voices and gradually are able to see for themselves what they want to think, or what the Spirit is saying to them through the passage.
Naomi: So thinking back to the answering the question about how it emerged; we knew that it could work because we saw it happening and of course we’ve had experiences, it’s not like we’ve never led sharing before…
Charlotte: But always in small groups which are always self-selecting to some extent and often not brilliant, but to actually do it in church in the gathered community, in the gathered space of all the people that was the radical thing.
Naomi: And so I think it required two things at the beginning. One was courage, because you’ve got a new little community and we’ve been taught as clergy that it’s our job to teach them and what if you create the space for questioning and discussion and they say hello to heresy. Heresy, or stuff that is just simply wrong, or a folk religion kind of response or just kind of platitudes, and if I’m really honest I think I probably would have worried about that. I’m sure we never talked about it in those terms, because I’m not sure we’d have been that rude, I but I think there probably would be some worry about that. So it requires courage to actually just put it out there and let people speak because you have to give up control.
Charlotte: Absolutely, you have to trust the Spirit.
Naomi: Yes, and the other word I was going to say was trust. And that does take a theology and an ecclesiology that believes that the Spirit works through the congregation, that that we are making church together, that this is a common endeavour.
Charlotte: And that requires confidence. The confidence or maybe experience, in knowing your Bible well enough that you can hold a conversation with potentially interesting, if not actually heretical, comments, or if people have questions, or have just sort of drifted off the point…
Naomi: Yeah, or if it becomes sharp or sort of angular and painful for people, having the confidence that you can bring the conversation back to a place of safety. And that confidence and experience is not just knowing the Bible well enough, it’s about knowing your theology well enough, and having emotional intelligence and so on. And that takes practise, and we weren’t as good at it at the beginning as we are now. We didn’t trust as much, we weren’t as experienced, we’ve got seven years’ experience at it now.
Charlotte: The other fear I guess, is not that people say challenging things, but they say absolutely nothing and you’ve just got deathly silence.
Naomi: The thing we always say about the silence and the speaking is to make it really clear that when people say nothing they’re contributing as much as when people say something. Because it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re a small congregation not everybody can speak, you’d be there forever, so actually you’re not looking for everybody to speak, but you’re looking for enough people to speak to make the thing balanced and work. So not speaking is contributing because it’s letting other people have the space to speak, but also not speaking is letting people who would be uncomfortable to speak feel they are included and they’re normal and I think that’s so vital because otherwise there’s a risk that that somebody would be sitting there thinking am I going to be expected to speak. I was always keen that we say that, and we have occasionally announced that not speaking is empowering of others.
Charlotte: And remembering to do that, especially when new people arrive, reiterating that not speaking is just as valid and important even.
Naomi: It’s still a community endeavour and still permission giving. But also, saying something even if you’ve not got very much to say is ok. Sometimes I see community members saying something because maybe nobody has spoken and they want to help the conversation begin, and so they’ll just say something really short and it the helps the person who had something on the tip of their tongue, actually speak. But I think us having a comfort level with silence is so important, and we’ve had to learn to really hold our nerve on it.
Charlotte: As the person often leading, I have got much better at just sitting there in silence and I’m genuinely not worried about it, whereas early on I think I was. I was also going to say that I think that in terms of evolution, one of the things that really helped at the beginning was there being two of us. So if it was me leading, I’d ask a question or we might do Lectio Divina and I’d know that if nobody else spoke you would. And that would give people a moment to think, whereas now I never really worry about that. It does vary according to which group of people we’ve got because we had a little phase a couple of years back where they were quite reluctant to speak so we adjusted what we did according to that group of people, whereas the current group…
Naomi: …are very chatty!
Charlotte: Yeah, the bigger problem is like yesterday when it suddenly was one o’clock and we were still chatting!
Naomi: Let’s not say problem!
Charlotte: Another way it’s evolved is that even if it’s a quite straightforward homily for us, people still now ask questions and interrupt.
Naomi: Yes, the homily is often quite chatty!
Charlotte: There isn’t a sense that the person preaching is speaking and everybody has to just sit and listen. If somebody has a question or don’t understand something, or something makes them laugh, they’ll comment. Not in an inappropriate way but there’s something really lovely in that, and it feels two-way. I think that also reflects the nature of the preaching, that we’re sat in a circle with them, we don’t stand up at the front, we are one in the circle and the tone is such that it invites comment and laughter.
Naomi: And again there’s a modelling between us, so sometimes I’ll think of something to say when you’re preaching, and if it was anyone or anywhere else it would just stay an internal thought, but at St Clare’s I might say it out loud because I’m consciously modelling that contributing is ok, and sometimes it will be because I’ve got an extra thing to say and I’ll know that you’re comfortable for me to kind of add a theological point to the homily that you’re that you’re making.
Charlotte: and one of the things I love now is that I’m not anxious about covering everything in a homily. I used to worry about what if I haven’t done this or what is I’ve missed something. But now I know that if I do a basic homily, the discussion will cover the areas that I’ve missed or not thought of, and it will be so much richer by the end of it than my initial offering.
Naomi: And it means that we never get away without tackling the hard part of the reading!
*Laughter*
Charlotte: So to conclude, let’s summarise the words that we used in describing how we make meaning together at St Clare’s…
COURAGE * TRUST * CONFIDENCE * EXPERIENCE * UNDEFENDED * OPEN
Rev Charlotte Gale and Rev Naomi Nixon, March 2025
If you enjoyed this article and would like to know more about St Clare’s, how we got started and what we do, then you can read the full story in the book ‘Simple, Generous, Open‘.
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