The Davidson United Church is trying something new in order to build the spiritual well being of the community and the individuals within it.

Mary Smillie, a leader with the multi-faith Rural Spirit Study project initiated by the Davidson United Church, said they are going to be installing “around $10,000” worth of audio-visual equipment in the church, so they can use the resources of the Internet to start content-driven conversations among community members. She said this would be phase two of the three-phase $30,000 research project that is funded by the United Church of Canada and is being conducted by the church and the Centre for Rural Community Leadership and Ministry (CiRCLe M) in Saskatoon.

“We saw, ourselves as a congregation, the need to understand better what it is that makes people’s spirit tick,” said Smillie about the purpose of the Rural Spirit Study. As “a church we’re supposed to exist for that, but as everybody can see in Canada and North America church populations are generally dwindling. That doesn’t mean people don’t still have a spirit that they want to nurture and we as a church need to change how we approach people from a spiritual point of view. We can’t do that unless we understand what it is that makes people’s spirit tick.”

Smillie said the word spirit is representative of things such as wonder, awe, and a person’s purpose, meaning, and connectivity in the world. She said religion is “not essential” in the steps they are taking to nurture the spirit of the community and individuals in the community.

“The end goal would be to take what generations before us built in terms of this church and this structure and this space…and continue to have it evolve and expand in what it does to be more relevant to more people in this community,” she said, noting they are not trying to get more people to attend United Church services with this project.

Cam Harder, executive director of CiRCLe M, said phase one of the study identified a number of factors through focus group research that resulted in a sense of spiritual well being in a person. He said one of these factors is the importance of having a place where people can have a content rich conversation about things that are important to them and that is something the church can provide using some of the funds from the scholarship.

“People felt that having these conversations was a really rich experience, so we thought what if we set up a space where we can for example Skype somebody in on a large screen TV from anywhere in the world really who could share something really interesting with us and we could have a back-and-forth with them,” said Harder, noting they could also show the self-development video TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks or YouTube videos and then have conversations about them. “We could (also) have the young people come in and they could share their favourite content piece from the Web…and it would allow for some intergenerational sharing of resources. It would allow for some content rich conversations.”

To read more please see the December 2 print edition of The Davidson Leader.