Group Profile
Contact Details
About Us
We are an open group of Christians, mainly from evangelical backgrounds, exploring more progressive ways of understanding and implementing our faith. Geographically we live in an area stretching from Hartlepool to Redcar to Guisborough to Bishop Auckland, and we meet in Billingham.
Our regular activity is a fortnightly study group called Logos, which generally attracts between 8 and 16 people, and follows a book or theme for a few months. Our subjects have included
Making sense of atonement (or not)
Christendom and the Anabaptist tradition
Human destiny ("Hellbound?" film and follow-up discussions) .
"A New Kind of Christianity" (Brian McLaren)
"The Heart of Christianity" (Marcus Borg)
"What the Bible Really Teaches" (Keith Ward)
"Vanishing Grace" (Philip Yancey)
"Falling Upward" (Richard Rohr)
"Black Sheep and Prodigals" (Dave Tomlinson)
"Letters and Papers from Prison" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
"What is the Bible?" (Rob Bell)
Occasionally we put on a more public event at Billingham Forum - most recently a book launch of "Black Sheep and Prodigals" with Dave Tomlinson, and "Bonhoeffer's Theology" with Rev Dr Jennifer Moberly.
Venue & Meeting Times
Logos is a theological discussion group. It meets fortnightly on a Tuesday evening from 7.30 to 9.30, usually on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month at the home of Paul and Dorothy Wilson, 17 Richmond Crescent, Billingham TS23 2JP.Because of additional demand, there is sometimes another study group on Mondays.
Full details of when the groups meet can be found by clicking the Programme tab above or on the Galilee Network website at https://galileenetwork.wordpress.com. We are also listed on Meetup at https://www.meetup.com/Galilee-Network/.
Group History
Galilee Network was formed in 2004 when ten long-term friends in Teesside decided to meet regularly. We were all Christians by conviction, and had a background in the charismatic movement of the 1970’s, but our paths since then had been quite diverse. One common feature was that we all had misgivings about some of the narrower aspects of our evangelical roots, particularly ideas such as an inerrant bible, exclusivism, scepticism towards science, and violence attributed to God (such as the conquest of Cannan, eternal torment and penal substitution).We recognised that we were not the only people with these misgivings, so we decided to launch a monthly public event to support people on a spiritual journey ‘outide the box’. This continued for four years, during which we welcomed well-known speakers such as Dave Tomlinson, John Bell, Brian McLaren, Stuart Murray Williams and David Wilkinson, as well as giving a platform for more local talent.
We then reduced the frequency of visiting speakers, but added North East Workshop, a wide-ranging two-year rolling programme in Applied Christian Studies, mainly taught by Paul Wilson, who had also taught in all the national Workshop centres.