Resources for Life Groups
Video Material for Life Group Studies
We have a subscription to The Work of the People that enables you to watch a variety of Films to deepen your faith experience. Access the stream link through the relevant buttons below.
Includes 6 FILMS. People are beginning to seek a new path for our faith. For many years now, our faith has been traveling on a road that you know well. It looks like going to worship on a Sunday morning to hear a sermon from “professional theologian” who will educate us or inspire us or at least entertain us for an hour (but no more). It looks like a congregation that struggles to be a true “community” in the midst of competing demands on our time and attention. It looks like a woman in her late thirties in the last congregation I served (a small family-based church in rural Texas), who even though she had gone to this same church her whole life—baptized, confirmed, married—and her family had deep roots in this particular congregation and community, lamented to me that “these people think they know me, but they don’t know the real me.”
"Embodying the Divine: Love as the Heart of Creation" is a compelling five-part film series featuring theologian Ilia Delio, exploring the profound implications of understanding God as the unstoppable force of love within creation. Each film delves into the nature of divine love as it manifests in the cosmos, community, and personal transformation. Through these discussions, viewers are invited to reconsider their relationship with the divine, themselves, and the world, discovering how love is not only the essence of God but also the very fabric of existence. The series offers a transformative journey into the heart of a universe that is continually evolving toward greater union, freedom, and fullness.
The series includes five films, one liturgy film, and a discussion/discernment guide with reflective questions and prompts, practices, and video transcripts.
Our culture tends to ignore death. At the very least, we make wild attempts to distract ourselves from it for as long as possible. As Dr. Hauerwas likes to say: “No one gets out of life alive.” So how are we, as Christians, to approach death and dying? Undoubtedly, death is a difficult topic. In a culture of jittery discontent that is constantly striving for happiness, we find ourselves with few tools to help us abide in sadness, even for a time. Living With Death with Stanley Hauerwas is an attempt to provide but one humble tool for followers of Christ to think through and move toward a healthy, God honouring view of aging and death.
Please email priest@anglicans . live if you wish to watch these films and a link will be shared with you.
Drawing All Things to Christ a 12 session series around the life of Jesus
Jesus’ birth welcomed something greater into human form. Through the recorded accounts of his life, Jesus’ teachings pointed to a connected way of living in relationship to God, one another, our meals, our positions and possessions, and to the Earth. To people who find themselves detached from such things, who had exhausted themselves and their means, who had forgotten they were created out of the same vibratory frequency (voice) that birthed all things out of no-thing (the Eternal), Jesus came with a message:
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
Through this film series, we will just walk awhile together in our skins and see what comes through. We’ll hold space to feel our inborn salvation made available through the mystery of the Anointed One who came among us.
The curriculum, written by Kelly Ann Hall, includes 12 sessions with an accompanying discussion guide.
Please email priest@anglicans . live if you wish to watch these films and a link will be shared with you.
A New Family with Rachel Evans
Through her writing and speaking, Rachel Held Evans work opened a space for people to become involved with the evolution of their faith by example. She strived to be grace-full while admitting her imperfection. Her advocation was for the heart of God which is for the people of God. All people, a diverse bunch of clumsy-yet-beautiful people of different races, cultures, beliefs, faiths, genders, and sexual orientations just doing our best to be human. She was a person who reached for the outsider and brought their voice and perspective into the fold. She inspired change and sometimes provoked resistance. But as she says in this series, her hope was to start more conversations than end them.
Our hope is that bringing these films forward in a time such as now, is that we not only get to see and remember the friend so many miss, but to honor her work in the world and continue to let her “conversation starters” to stir, awaken, and provoke those who find them.
Rachel was recently quoted as saying: “The folks you are shutting out of the church today will be leading it tomorrow. The future is in the margins.” If we are resurrection people, are we willing to let the ways of doing Church that do not serve God, ourselves, or our neighbors, die? If God throws open the doors of the church, who are we to monitor them, or worse, close them? When the doors are locked and requirements for inclusion are narrow are we willing to become sanctuaries ourselves? The series includes 5 conversation films with Rachael a discernment and discussion guide, and transcripts of the conversation.
Please email priest@anglicans . live if you wish to watch these films and a link will be shared with you.
Does your faith feel static? Move into a deeper well with the six-session series with Richard Rohr. Salvation is now. Get in on God’s eternity...now.
The curriculum, written by Danielle Fanfair, includes 6 sessions with an accompanying discussion/prayer practice guide.
SESSION TITLES AND FILMS
SESSION ONE// Running from Resurrection
SESSION TWO // Distorted Bible Filters
SESSION THREE // En Christo
SESSION FOUR // Fast Food Christianity
SESSION FIVE // Jesus Hermeneutic
SESSION SIX // Anti-Septic Christianity
A four Gospel journey With Alexander John Shaia
How do we face change? How do we move through suffering? How do we receive joy? How do we mature in service? Spend some time with Alexander J Shaia as he uses the great map of the four Gospels, just as the Christians used, to guide us on the Christ journey - one of love, growth and transformation.
The series includes 6 conversation films with Alexander, a discernment and discussion guide, and transcripts of the conversation.
The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem,
This book is co-authored by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan.
As The Last Week moves from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, a clear picture forms of the events leading up to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The authors illuminate not simply the unjust domination systems of imperial Rome, but the passion Jesus fought for – the justice of God's kingdom.
Embracing an adult faith
Marcus Borg with Tim Scorer
Marcus Borg on What it Means to be Christian
Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others
by Barbara Brown Taylor
The renowned and beloved New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching the world’s religions to undergraduates in rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations.
Embracing the Prophets in Contemporary Culture
Confronting Today's "Pharoahs" Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann, arguably America’s leading Old Testament scholar and theologian, takes us on a wild ride through the poetic prophecy of the Hebrew Scripture, identifying cultural contexts, putting a framework to Israel’s history, and, most significantly—and times challengingly!—drawing connections between Israel’s sociological, economic and spiritual status and that of America today.
Each of the six sessions begins with a 10-15 minute video presentation by Walter Brueggemann, followed by filmed interaction with a diverse small group.