Our assemblies in January-June 2016

11:00 am, June 19 2016

Conway Hall

Speaker: Lots

Poet: Lots

It’s our 3rd Birthday

  • 3rd January 2016, 11:00am

It’s time to party!

The Sunday Assembly was started by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, two comedians who were on the way to a gig in Bath when they discovered they both wanted to do something that was like church but totally secular and inclusive of all—no matter what they believed.

The first ever Sunday Assembly meeting took place on January 6th 2013 at The Nave in Islington. Almost 200 people turned up at the first meeting, 300 at the second and soon people all over the world asked to start one.

Three years later there are 68 Sunday Assembly chapters in 8 different countries where people sing songs, hear inspiring talks, and create community together.

Come and celebrate with us and hear stories of how Sunday Assembly has created something beautiful, complete with epic songs and cake!

Happiness

  • 19th January 2016, 11:00am
  • Speaker: Sir Anthony Seldon

This week we’re talking about happiness, and we have a pretty amazing speaker – Sir Anthony Seldon, co-founder of Action for Happiness and author of 25 books on contemporary history, politics and education, including biographies of Tony Blair, “Trust” and “An end to Factory Schools”.

He will be talking about finding your inner song or unique purpose in life.

Read more about him and how he threw out GCSE’s and brought in a happiness curriculum at Wellington College here.

We’ll also sing brilliant songs, celebrate life and drink tea together. Come join us and find out how to live better, help often and wonder more.

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

Utopia

“What would your perfect country look like?”

Individuals start countries all the times, for many reasons. Some of these folks are grumpy and impatient. Some folks are dreamers and want to establish a community where there is peace, harmony, and lots of sex/drugs/classical music. Some country-creators are individualists or wannabe royals. Often it’s a combination of all of the above.

Paul has been intrigued by the idea of creating your own country since he was invited to join a modern version of the Knights Templar, which was planning to buy, and govern, an island in the Caribbean.

He’ll review some of the more imaginative “micro-nations,” offer the legal perspective (yes, there’s an international convention that applies) and tell you how his Knights Templar adventure worked out.

As well as this amazing talk, we meet to sing great songs, hear inspiring talks and drink tea together. Come join us and find out how to live better, help often and wonder more.

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t. 

Let’s Got Bored

Come and join us at Sunday Assembly London to hear all about boredom.

The fantastic Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is a writer and journalist who is fascinated by getting bored! She will be asking “Why do we get bored? And have we always been doing it?”. Have a read of her article for the Smithsonian mag to get you excited!

As well as our super smart speaker, we have the generally fabulous Jennifer Lack who will be talking about how she’s trying her best and we’ll be pulling some shapes and singing some tunes to boot. Don’t forget that we drink a vat of tea/cofee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

Vision

  • 6th March, 11:00am

On March 6th we want you to join us for an Assembly with a twist. We want to speak to you about Sunday Assembly in 2016 AND we want to hear from you about what YOU want.

That’s right on Sunday March 6th we are going to spend a day casting a vision of Sunday Assembly London, and part of that vision is you.

Sunday Assembly London is nothing, nada, zip, rien without our incredible community. That’s you – you beautiful hunk of meat, bones and brain. We have done so much since we started but at the same time we are just getting going. We are on the foothills, on March 6th we’re going to try to have a look at the top of the mountain!

The question is: is this vision assembly for you? To help you out we’ve come up with a handy test.

Are you regular? This is for you
Are you semi-regular? This is for you.
Are you occasional? This is for you.
Are you new? This is for you.
Did you join the Facebook group by accident? This is for you.
Did you get the point? This is for you.

We want as many folk there as possible as we lay out the incredible journey that we want to go on with you, what you can expect from us and how we can build a loving community where everyone lives life as fully as possible.

This is the first assembly of this type that we’ve ever done – we’d be honoured to have you there.

Play

Come and join us for a Play themed Sunday Assembly!

Our speaker is the fantastic play fanatic, Dr. David Bramwell. He’s not only a Sony-award winning presenter for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 but also an award winning performer, picking up ‘Best Comedy’ and Outstanding Theatre’ at Brighton Fringe Festival. He will explore the role of the trickster in myth and real-life, arguing that chaos, deceit and amorality are qualities to be celebrated!

David is the author of the No9 Bus to Utopia and host of Brighton’s Catalyst Club, where everyday folk share their passions with a live audience.

Don’t forget it’s also our Bake Sale this Sunday. We’re raising money for the awesome homeless charity The Choir with No Name – so please get your apron on and start baking!

Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/coffee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

The Joy of Not Knowing

This week we are joined by the very amazing Dr Harry Cliff. He is a particle physicist at Cambridge University and the Large Hadron Collider as well as the in-house physicist at the Science Museum.

Dr Cliff will be speaking to us about ‘The Joy of Not Knowing’. The more we learn about the world we live in, the more we realise just how spectacularly ignorant we are.

Science is full of big unanswered questions; what is the invisible 95% of the universe made from? Can consciousness be explained by neuroscience? Is there life on Mars? Particle physicist Harry Cliff will explain why he finds not knowing the answer exciting, and discuss some of the deep mysteries of fundamental physics.

Wow!

Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/coffee and a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t. 

Your Mind: From Frenemy to BFF

We are being joined by our speaker Michael Matania, who works on behalf of the Mental Health charity Mind, where he spends his days spreading awareness on tools and techniques that help people to stay happy, healthy and well whilst coping with the challenges of life. Michael also co-founded The Present Moment Project, a social enterprise that seeks to make mindfulness training widely accessible to the most marginalised and hard to reach groups.

He will be discussing our addiction to thought, talking from his own experience of mental health problems. Michael will explore how moment-by-moment experience is clouded by worries about the imagined future, regrets about the past and a frustration with our present circumstances and will look at how it is possible to flip this situation on its head.

Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs and drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteers Lauren Harris and Paul Hollingdrake!

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil: Living Life to the Full as a Deafblind Person

Ben Fletcher was born profoundly deaf and also has RP (retinitis pigmentosa), which means that he is gradually losing his sight. And yet Ben is one of the happiest people in London! He will talk about how meditation, positivity and finding his own community have helped him to accept and rejoice in his differences, find inner peace and joy and lead a life he loves. This talk is part of Deaf Awareness Week.

Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs (which Lauren has chosen) and drink a vat of tea/coffee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

Poetry will be provided by Sunday Assembly favourite Raymond Antrobus – poet, performer and hearing aid user. BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteers Lauren Harris and Kathleen Gillan.

There’ll be a bake sale after the Assembly – so please donate a cake if you can.* We’ll be raising money for Sunday Assembly to attend this year’s Pride march in June.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

* If you would like to donate a cake, please bear in mind: no raw eggs, but fine if cooked. No fresh cream, but butter cream or the stuff can buy in tubs is ok. Also let us know if it contains nuts. They’ll be sold for £1 per item, so please portion into slices beforehand if possible. 

Curiosity

Our theme for the week is Curiosity and we are being joined by the very brilliant Steve Mould part of the comedy team, The Spoken Nerd.

From mind-bending tricks on BBC 1’s Britain’s Brightest and element-hunting on ITV’s I Never Knew That About Britain, to dismantling a child’s robot to make it talk backwards “like the devil”, Steve’s scientific interests are unfettered by the limitations of specialism. On any given day, Steve might be leading a dubstep subatomic particle safari, putting nail varnish on a pineapple (for maths) or dressing up as a Lego man (also for maths).

Through his curiosity he accidentally discovered a phenomenon that no one could explain. This this the story of gravity defying beads that starts inSteve’s garage and ends 50 meters up a crane outside BBC Broadcasting House.

Together with the talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/coffee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t. 

Embrace Yourself

We are over the moon to announce that Sofie Hagan [sic] is our keynote speaker for Sunday Assembly on the 5th June. She will talk about her fat stomach, her wobbly thighs, her floppy arms and all of her chins and fat and how and why she learned to embrace and love every single kilogram of it.

Sofie’s assured, informed and deeply personal comedy has made her a star in the UK and throughout Europe. Last year Sofie won the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer with her debut show ‘Bubblewrap’. The show has since enjoyed two runs at the Soho Theatre, London and has been broadcast on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer as part of the series ‘Live from the BBC’. This year Sofie was invited to perform at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, adding the ever-expanding list of countries and festivals she has played. With sell-out solo shows and numerous projects in development Sofie is one of the most in-demand new voices going.

Together with Sofie, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

Adam Woodhall – This Much I Know – script link

Purpose

The keynote speaker for Sunday Assembly London on the 19th June is the fantastic Ernesto Moreno.

Ernesto was 9 years old when his mother tragically died in a car accident in which he was also travelling along with his younger brother and sister. However, that was only the beginning of what was to be a very difficult childhood and adolescence, a story that was going to include physical abuse, drugs and alcoholism.

Ernesto’s life was always filled with strong emotional difficulty. The struggle continued and at the age of 23, Ernesto decided to leave his home country, Venezuela, in search of a new life. He arrived in London 13 years ago with only £300 in his pocket, he didn’t know anyone and spoke hardly any English. Ernesto found work collecting the dirty laundry in a hotel and doing the washing up in a restaurant. Three years later he had completed a Masters in Business and had started his first business as well as working as a Management Consultant in The City. Anyone would have thought that at this point Ernesto was a fulfilled and happy man, but he went on to achieve even greater things in the years to come. In 2012, after having built a very successful career as a business consultant working for companies such as PwC, Ernesto decided to quit his job and continue his journey as an entrepreneur and pursue even bigger dreams. Ernesto’s life story is inspiring, a testament of resilience and the constant search for meaning and fulfilment. During his talk at Sunday Assembly, Ernesto is going to be sharing with us his views on Life Purpose as well as some of his own life experiences.

This week Sunday Assembly London is curated by the Earlybird Speakers, a part of Toastmasters which helps people develop their public speaking skills.

As well as this inspiring talk, we will hear real life stories from the community, sing some awesome songs, drink a vat of tea/cofee and eat a heck of a lot of biscuits afterwards too.

BSL interpretation will be provided by volunteer Lauren Harris.

We can’t wait to see you there and have fun celebrating life with you all!

Sunday Assembly London is free to attend and runs entirely on donations. Please support us if you can to keep it free for those who can’t.

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