Let’s Talk: Life and Death

In Ecclesiastes 3 we read:

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die.” (‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3‬:‭1‬-‭2‬) 

The bookends of life are wildly significant nodal events, but they are not events we experience in a way that enables us to reflect on them. Reflection is becoming all the rage in education at the moment with Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle being utilised to encourage students to reflect, observe, interpret and understand the world in which they life and what they’re going to do in it and about it. It’s a great way of growing thinkers but try as you may, no one is able to reflect on birth or death from an inwardly experiential point of view.

We can however reflect on and talk about Life and Death from God’s point of view. As we open the Bible there is much to read about birth, life, death and the human experience. And in July we are going to unpack as much of it as we can in our Let’s Talk: Life and Death series. 

Over three Sundays and a midweek seminar we are going to explore what God says about who we are as people, where we come from, where we are going and how we get there. The series has shaped up like this:

• NEW LIFE (Sunday July 14)

  What am I and when did I begin?

• BEST LIFE (Sunday July 21)

  How do I live my best life?

• GOOD DEATH (Sunday July 28)

  How do I die with dignity and peace?  

Our midweek event will be on Wednesday 17th July from 7pm-9.30pm and will include a talk from Dr Andrew Errington exploring “How to Think Ethically” and then a series of workshops:

• Dr Susan Beattie will be leading a session titled: 

  A Time to Be Born (Understanding Contraception) 

• Professor Melanie Lovell will be leading a session titled: 

  A Time to Die (Understanding Voluntary Assisted Dying)

• Sally Sims will be leading a session titled: 

  A Time to Mourn (Understanding human grief)

All these issues sit in a complex and vitally important space that we are going to walk into this July. We’d actually like an indication of which of the seminars you would like to attend so we can work out room allocations and material so if you can fill in our quick survey, we would really appreciate it.  

We want to be a church that takes on the big issues unashamedly but also carefully and pastorally so you can be sure we are thinking carefully about how to talk through Life & Death. The purpose of these Let’s Talk events is to bring us together to talk about all the Bible has to say on important topics that shape our lives - not just from a theological perspective but from a compassionate human perspective as well. 

Now if you want some spoilers - or you just want to begin to think about this whole topic - can I encourage you to read Genesis 1-3, Psalm 139, and 1 Corinthians 15. I think you will find in there a whole lot of really interesting theology there about life and death and your place in it, how you should think about it and even an answer to the question, what is life and what sort of life should I be living!

So get excited and start praying that God might be at work in us as we talk about Life and Death in July.