These learning communities will engage in world class content together. You’re welcome to register for more than one group. However, we simply ask that you prioritize your commitment to the duration of the course. This year we are offering:
The Sanctuary Course
The Sanctuary Course is for anyone who wants to learn about faith and mental health.
At each session, we’ll gather together, read through the content out loud or listen to it on audiobook, watch a film, and engage in conversation, reflection, and prayer.
Over the course of the eight weeks, we’ll cover topics such as:
- Understanding mental health and illness
- Challenging stigma
- The recovery journey
- Companionship
- Self-care
- The role of community in mental health recovery
Each topic in the Sanctuary Course is explored from a psychological, social, and theological perspective.
Unwanted Course
Are you seeking freedom from unwanted sexual behaviour? Although many of us feel ashamed and unwanted after years of sexual brokenness, these places can be the very location God can most powerfully work in our lives.
This course is being offered in partnership with St. John’s Vancouver, and will be co-led by Rev. James Wagner (St. John’s Vancouver) and Rev. Lloyd Lee (St. Peter’s Fireside). There are limited spots available.
A primary resource will be the book Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing by Jay Stringer. The book is based on research from over 3,800 men and women seeking freedom from unwanted sexual behaviour, be that the use of pornography, an affair, or buying sex.
“Unwanted is, without rival, the best book on broken sexuality I have ever read. It is heartbreaking and hope restoring and with immense kindness it proceeds to where most work stalls and refuses to enter.” – Dan B. Allender Ph.D.
This small group will begin on Thursday May 12th and continue for 7 sessions. Please email Lloyd to sign up.
Feeling God’s Presence
It’s so easy to feel that God is distant. How can we cultivate a way of life where God feels present?
Drawing from Ronald Rolheiser’s book The Shattered Lantern, with supplemental readings from The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill, together we will discern and rediscover God’s felt presence in our lives.
In Rolheiser’s words, “The way back to a lively faith is not a question of finding the right answers, but living in a certain way.”
Join Richard Sandlin on Thursday evenings beginning May 19th.
St Pete’s Reads: Imagining Our Neighbors As Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy by Mary W. McCampbell
In this book, Mary McCampbell looks at how narrative art–whether literature, film, television, or popular music–expands our imaginations and, in so doing, emboldens our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves.
The prophetic artists in these pages–Graham Greene, Toni Morrison, and Flannery O’Connor among them–show through the form and content of their narrative craft that in order to love, we must be able to effectively imagine the lives of others. But even though we have these rich opportunities to grow emotionally and spiritually, we have been culturally trained as consumers to treat our practice of reading, watching, and listening as mere acts of consumption.
Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves presents a journey through initial self-reflection to a richer, more compassionate look outward, as narrative empowers us to exercise our imaginations for the sake of expanding our capacity for empathy.
This group will meet weekly at 7pm on Wednesdays, beginning June 8th, in downtown Vancouver.
