Being With, in one idea

Most courses about faith are built to hand people information. Being With is built on a different conviction: that the deepest human need isn’t to be fixed, solved, or improved. It’s to be known.

The name comes from the theology underneath it. The heart of the Christian story isn’t that God swooped in to fix us. It’s that God chose to be with us, in Jesus. So the course doesn’t explain that idea. It gives people an experience of it.

Being With came out of a conversation between Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, and his colleague Sally Hitchener. There are plenty of good courses that build knowledge about Christ, they thought. What would it take to build a gut-level, embodied understanding instead?

It’s for people who are curious about faith, or wondering whether Christianity has anything real to offer. People on the edge of church — uncertain, disconnected, hurt, or just looking for something deeper. And people who’ve never explored faith at all but are open to doing it alongside others.

The main course works through topics like meaning, Jesus, church, suffering, prayer, and the cross. No judgment. No wrong answers. No set path you’re supposed to end up on.

What actually happens in a session

Every session has the same four parts. That sameness is deliberate — people relax faster when they know exactly what’s coming.

Welcome → Wonderings → Story → Reflections

Welcome. Everyone answers one question: What is the heart of your week? Everyone speaks here. It’s the only place that’s asked of you. After that, you can stay quiet all evening if you want.

Wonderings. Prompts, not quiz questions. There are no right answers. Someone might be invited to tell about a time they felt they weren’t needed anymore, or to wonder aloud what it’s like to hope and fear at the same time.

When someone shares, nobody responds. No agreeing, no building on it, no fixing it. A host thanks them and the group moves on. That restraint is doing real work: it’s what makes it safe to say something you’ve never said out loud.

Story. A host reads a short piece of writing aloud. You’re told up front you don’t need to follow every sentence — just notice what catches.

Reflections. Now the group talks to each other. It’s the only section where that happens, and by then the room is different than it was an hour before.

Two hosts run every session. Host one holds the shape of the evening. Host two listens, takes part, and reads the story. It works in a parish hall. It works on Zoom.

Being With AI

Being With now comes in several versions. Alongside the main course, there are versions for people facing the end of life, and for people carrying grief. The newest is Being With AI — six sessions written by Sam Wells on the question everybody has an opinion about and almost nobody has really talked through.

The six sessions:

• AI and society

• The three stories people tell about AI

• What’s at stake in each of those stories

• AI and our humanity

• AI and God

• The challenge AI puts to the church

Here’s what makes it a Being With course rather than a seminar: it doesn’t ask people what they think about chatbots. It asks them about being dispensable. About handing work over to a machine they could have done themselves. About hope and fear arriving at the same time. The AI conversation comes in through the side door — through people’s actual lives.

Wells’ argument across the six sessions is that we’re being handed a machine that can do almost anything except love us. It can spot disease early, model the climate, clear your inbox. It has no idea what joy is. And the real danger isn’t only that it takes our jobs. It’s that we hand over our memory, our imagination, and our friendships one convenience at a time, and only notice they’re gone afterward — like someone who lives on takeout until they can no longer cook.

Does this technology strengthen and deepen relationship, or hollow it out?

That’s the plain test Wells offers. Then he turns it on the church. If relationship is what we’re for, are we living like it?

Which is why the shape of the course matters as much as its content. A group that spends six weeks practicing real attention — listening without fixing, being present without performing — isn’t just discussing a response to AI. It’s doing one.

One thing to name when you invite people: some won’t like this format at first. Anyone arriving to debate AI policy, or hoping an expert will brief them on the technology, will find the no-cross-talk rule frustrating and session one slow. That’s a real cost, and it’s the price of the thing that makes the course work.

You must be trained to run it

This is not optional, and it isn’t a formality. No one can offer a Being With course — the main course, the AI course, or any other version — without completing the training first.

The reason is simple: hosting isn’t teaching, and that’s the hard part. The instinct to respond — to affirm what someone said, draw out the lesson, fill an awkward silence — is a good instinct in most rooms. In this room it breaks the very thing you’re building. Sitting in a pause. Thanking someone and truly moving on. Holding the format when a group drifts toward debate. These are skills. They’re learnable. They don’t come naturally to most of us who lead.

Untrained hosts don’t just run a weaker course. They run a different one.

Training and course materials: www.being-with.com
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