Jim Fielding reports on the Day Conference of the Gloucester Group, 'New Thinking about the Great Questions' After meeting for over ten years, the Gloucester Sea of Faith group had finally hit the buffers. What could be done?
Why not hold a one-day Conference, suggested Helen Fisher, the local groups co-ordinator. This proposal met with controlled enthusiasm, for how could the tiny rump of our group (two of them elderly) cope with such a task?
Help was at hand however, with Helen Fisher and Penny Mawdsley and other Network resources. The Conference date and venue were agreed, and Don Cupitt and Stephen Mitchell would be our speakers. Thanks to high quality publicity material supplied by Amanda and Peter, our telephone was soon buzzing with enquiries, dispelling my personal nightmare of bringing Don from faraway Cambridge to speak to six people and a dog. In the event around sixty people attended; a most encouraging response.
Patti Whaley chaired our Conference, which was opened by Stephen Mitchell, with an introduction to the Sea of Faith. SoF explores and promotes religious faith as a human creation, he explained, but what is faith? Like some other key religious concepts, soul and spirit, it has been debased by advertisers of toiletries and other consumer products. ("Put your faith in white lavender and revitalise your spirit with our exfoliating body scrub!").
Overwhelmed by science and technology, faith has been pushed to the privacy of the bathroom and has apparently lost its central place in our culture. But faith has changed with changing world-views over the years. The Sea of Faith perceives it as a human creation, glorious and strong.
Concluding with an overview of SOF ideas, Stephen urged his listeners to join our ranks, for as a SOF member you won't be told you're a heretic for asking questions!
Don Cupitt's address, on 'New Thinking about the Great Questions', transported us back to the origins of world religion during the Axial period (roughly 800 to 200 BCE), which saw great changes in the human condition.
Against a background of almost continuous warfare appeared great thinkers such as Zarathustra, Israelite prophets, Greek philosophers, the Buddha and others. Later religions such as Christianity and Islam also had their roots in this fertile soil. He outlined the rise of Christianity with its body/ spirit dualism, wherein our spiritual self finds its true home elsewhere, following bodily death. But these concepts began to change with the Renaissance and, more importantly, the Enlightenment. In our own times, John Robinson and others cast doubt upon many traditional beliefs.
To-day, some liberal thinkers feel that we are in a new Axial period bringing fundamental changes in religious thought. In Doris view, we should love this world and this life and experience them to the full, putting aside all notions of hidden spiritual "Truths".
The afternoon, of questions and answers with Don and of group work, ending with a plenary session, when group leaders reported back on their discussions and conclusions.
SPCK and SOF bookstalls did a brisk trade, showing the interest aroused, and the overall response to the day was most encouraging. The Conference, I feel sure, achieved its aim of spreading the SOF message in this area, so I urge other local groups to follow suit, as ample support is available from the Network. Whether this Conference will lead to a resurgence of Gloucester group has yet to be revealed, but we remain hopeful.