Spirituality

Critical.Mass on Sundays starts with Café hospitality at 10.00am and includes a healthy breakfast joined with community news and links to liturgy and altar.

Worldviews are like the lenses we use to look at the world. Our ‘market madness’ means we are encouraged to pick-and-mix lenses to taste.

One result is that we look at a fragmented world and we speak a split language that makes opposites of public and private, sacred and secular, material and spiritual. The serious consequence of this is that such words are degraded and the essential concepts drained of real meaning.

…we cannot separate Art from Work, or Work from Creation…

Saint Stephens gathers around the energising conviction that spirituality is about the way we put the world together; it is not an ‘add-on’ for those who want that little bit extra out of life. Looking at the human condition, there is a tendency to focus on the economic situation and never get around to understanding spirituality as the heart-rhythm of creativity. Instead, there is much that tries to persuade us, for example, to believe that the thing which defines us is our sexuality, or status, rather than our spiritual character. We lose sight of our ‘being’ as created relationally and instead speak and act as if life is about self-realisation, further propagating a damaging individualism on the local and global landscape.

At Saint Stephens, we are endeavouring to explore this rich panorama in the areas of Creation, Work and Art, set within the rich context of Transformational Spirituality, that is, the outworking of our essential nature in different areas of life, bringing renewal and hope to the world. However, we cannot separate Art from Work, or Work from Creation. Part of this exploration is to develop forms of reflection and meditation; processes and ways of working together, which light up our calling and vocations. In all this, the desire is to create an hospitable space where we can work with others, affirming one another’s gifts in a richly creative, communal setting.