Café Sundae, based at Timperley Methodist Church, opened in May 2006. Will Sudworth gives an update on the place that describes itself as 'church like you’ve never seen it before'
We're a bit like the Muppets…
Café Sundae wasn't planned at all. We hadn't heard of Fresh Expressions, but we simply felt we weren’t engaging with our teenagers. Yet now we have been running for over three-and-a-half years, have at least six churches in the UK using our material, and been responsible for leading alternative worship at a national youth event.
We started off with what was basically a youth group meeting every Sunday night but the members would never come to family services or any other service, it just didn't work.
We listened to the teenagers and they were pretty frank about it all, 'Sunday morning is a bad time, we're doing sports and anyway, church is dull.' So we transformed all-age worship into café multimedia worship on Sunday evenings. We thought we'd nailed it. In truth we had a half-hearted shot at changing it as a compromise but it didn’t come anywhere near hitting the spot.
It was time to do something radical so we brought together a team with multimedia and many other skills, and decided to do it properly on the second Sunday of the month from 6.30pm for about an hour-and-a-half. We cleared the church and all the chairs, put up a lighting rig, introduced café style tables, and got the young people involved. The teenagers came up with the name Café Sundae, and we were on our way.
Our vision included some key components. They were:
- Asking people what topics are relevant to their lives and then exploring what God has got to say about that topic;
- No communal singing;
Going out on the streets to interview and film people about the topic. We then edit the voxpops together and show the results on screen. As well as speaking to members of the public, we have also created our own presenters, like Jeremy 'Vile' and Miss Polly Titian, to help explore a particular subject;- Introducing role-play and tabletop games to help us really consider an issue;
- Involving teenagers in setting up the event and helping us to run it;
- Giving opportunities to respond to the message of that week;
- Carrying on the conversation afterwards in a blog.
We immediately welcomed people our church had not reached before. Numbers started at around 90, dropped to about 30 and ended 2009 at about the 70-80 mark, which is roughly the same size of our traditional church congregation. Today about half of the Café Sundae regulars are teenagers, with a good mix of male and female; and about 50% are adults aged 18-40. We make it clear that some of the issues covered are not suitable for younger children so our members need to be of secondary school age and older.
During the first summer we hosted a service for Churches Together. The feedback included the comment 'sacrilege' and the phrase 'I didn't feel as if I'd been to church'. We took the phrase as a compliment, even though it wasn't intended that way. When you're trying to make church for people who don't like church, could you get a better recommendation?
As to sustainability, we've seen our original minister move on, our team change, and new minister Revd Andrew Bradley getting to grips with it. Andrew runs a youth club on a Sunday afternoon and he brings them straight on to Café Sundae. Other youth clubs from churches of various denominations around and about have done the same.
MAYC asked us to lead Café Sundae at its Breakout event for young people. It may just have been the offer of free chocolate but we were packed to overflowing. We'll be back there this year with a full weekend of activities.
We also believe in sharing what we've done and learned so we package up our material and give it away for free on our resources website. We don't have a magic formula, and our ideas may not work everywhere. All we've really done is shape church around what our teenagers respond to. Why does it appeal to adults as well as younger people? We think it's because it's a bit like the Muppets in that it works on two levels so that everyone can enjoy it.
Even though we're still meeting in a church building it doesn't feel like church and it certainly doesn't look like what you'd find in your average service. We use multi-media green screen technology, which means that we have a video camera and a blue screen behind our teenage actors – they act out a scene and we can put any image behind them. It's much easier than getting a whole youth club to practice for weeks and hope they get it right when performing the thing!
Discipleship is an area we're looking at very closely as time goes on. Our plan is to follow the model of the cell churches – namely to have a big event once a month before members go their separate ways with the adults going to house groups and youngsters in youth groups.
Our first group of teenagers has now gone off to university; our big challenge over the next five years is to draw them back in after their studies to become part of the Café Sundae leadership. To be fair, some of the young people are already doing that; one is on the computer, another runs the lighting desk, and several of them go out on the streets to do interviewing, acting, and videoing.
Some people ask, 'Is it a fresh expression of church if it's still in the church building and doesn't meet all the fresh expressions criteria?', 'Should it be heavier on the Bible content?'
At the moment, we plan to stay in the church. We transform the interior, and our teenagers – and adults – are very happy to come into that building. As a result they change the atmosphere and it is very much a fresh expression of church, but we keep on grappling with all these things, and all we can hope is that we will continue to listen and explore these questions and others for many years to come.
Richard Moy, ordained pioneer minister explains how church is forming amongst those who have never been involved before, through Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries.
A small team of three gathered to pray every week in a local church and then gradually others joined in. After a year they began to gather in a café location in the centre of town and now a pool of about 50 people meets regularly for Sunday evening worship. On any one occasion 30 or so will gather together. Church 18-30 has been born.
Early on Richard decided that one size would not fit all. Based on differing learning styles, this fresh expression of church offers deliberately varied learning and worship opportunities. There's a gathering for 'reflectors' which has a real sense of the 'spiritual'. Another event is aimed at 'theorists' and encourages those who attend to think why they believe what they believe. A third gathering has a contemporary worship style and a fourth is based on food and sharing communion together.
And Richard believes what he is doing really is church. They operate as church – with regular worship, gathering around word and sacrament. People have been baptised as a result of joining Church 18-30 and mission is very much at the heart of things. If you see a couple of people sitting on a sofa in the middle of Wolverhampton, it is likely to be members of the church sharing their faith or offering to pray for passers by. And in a network church, 'some bits of the church will only last for a season and some bits will last forever', says Richard and that's OK.
It all happened very quickly. I started in post at the end of May 2009, discussions took place over the summer to sort out the BMO, and it was signed in December at a Beer&Carols event. We certainly reaped the benefits of the hard work that other BMOs had done before us in Exeter and Thanet.
In the middle of the BMO area is The Quay, a canal side pub which was itself part of a regeneration project a few years ago. It is now the base for Presence's midweek meetings, and some of those at Presence have become regulars at the pub’s open mic session on Thursday nights.
The regeneration of great swathes of the city means that new communities have become cut off from parish churches because the landscape has shifted, but by starting a fresh expression alongside those churches, we can redefine a pastoral boundary. It has just worked brilliantly in that it's possible to run a straight mixed economy which lets the existing parishes do what they do while we look at how we use these places in new and creative ways.
This is a minimum 10 year project, and part of the challenge is that the landscape will continue to change dramatically during that time. Large brownfield sites in our area are set aside for new developments but are yet to be built on, so we need to be flexible in our approach and planning.
We also very much hope to be involved at The Quay on St Patrick's Day. There are lots of possibilities but we might look at having a religious 'bit' followed by Open Communion using Naan bread – reflecting the type of area we're in. We want to reclaim these celebrations for God, and show that we're a church of festival and fun.