An important part of our commitment to wrestling with hard questions, we have a regular (every few months) session called "Bring It On." The purpose of this is to give a bit of serious attention to the sort of hard question which easily gets swept under the carpet, but can have profound effects on us, and our faith.
The way it works is that someone will go away and do some research on the question - what people in the Christian tradition have said about it. This then turns into a fairly full on talk - a lecture really, where, unusually for Cafechurch, the focus is on listening. We have communion the following week, and then four brave volunteers do a short presentation of reaction to the topic. There is then an opportunity for the group to discuss it.
The questions are big, so we don't assume that we are going to be able to answer them in the time available - indeed most of them are questions that have been debated endlessly for the last 2000 years, and we aren't going to be able to resolve them here. The aim is to open up the conversation, so people can take it offline and really think about it.
In 2008, the first year we have done this, we looked at:
