November 2010 - FX ARCHIVE...

The Order of the Black Sheep (The Gates)

Mark Broomhead, an Ordained Pioneer Minister in Chesterfield, is starting a new fresh expression of church for those who feel like the 'black sheep' of society. He outlines his hopes for the new community and its church, The Gates.

I am in the last year of my training at St John's on the mixed mode course. The first part of my curacy was spent at Clay Cross and Danesmoor where I was involved in planting Sanctum, a community based rock-oriented congregation.

I have been involved in the heavy metal music scene since my teens and have played in several bands so it has been very much part of who I am for many years. That interest has developed in all sorts of ways, one of which has seen me helping to lead the welfare provision at the annual Bloodstock festival.

It's one of the main heavy metal music festivals, probably the more specialist end of the market with Viking metal, satanic metal, pirate metal and all kinds of things. We offer a Christian presence in that sort of arena.

Sanctum offered an alternative way of being church and it continues to develop in its own way. The Bishop of Derby, Alastair Redfern, was very supportive as I moved on to Chesterfield in order to set up a new community called The Order of the Black Sheep. I chose the name, or the name chose me, because a black sheep was for many years seen as the worthless sheep of the flock, the one that couldn't produce any wool that was worth anything.

In medieval times it was even seen by some as a sign of the satanic. I really pray that The Order of the Black Sheep will be a home for the marginalised, for members of the alternative community who feel a little bit like the black sheep in society – and the church. Our motto will be along the lines of 'better a black sheep than a goat'.

The church will be known as The Gates. Gates are mentioned over 100 times in the Bible, including '…I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not overcome it' (Matthew 16.18) and 'Lift up your heads, O you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in' (Psalm 24.9). We want to build church in what is traditionally seen as the devil's territory and to allow the King of Glory to come in to that community and do what he wants to do.

The 'alternative' subculture is a difficult one to describe but it has grown from the 1950s and 60s Teddy Boys through Mods, Rockers, Hippies and people who generally feel themselves to be on the edge of society and don't fit in with the 'in' crowd. These days there are all kinds of different expressions of it, whether it's Goths, bikers, skaters – all sorts of things.

Our challenge is taking the Gospel to these groups; sharing Jesus with those who have a sometimes well founded mistrust of the Church and Christian culture. We're not planning to 'dress up' the Gospel for this culture because it is perfect and relevant to all as it is. I want it to be a place where the community can meet, a centre where it can be safe and talk through things, where the Church can be reached, where we can be accessible, where we can allow a space for worship and a space to meet with God in various other ways and for us to be of service to that community.

As a fresh expression we maintain that this project will be Church rather than a gateway to 'real' Church but we are keen for members to explore and take their place at the table of the wider church family as part of their discipleship.

G2

Christian Selvaratnam, ordained pioneer minister at St Michael le Belfrey, York, oversees G2. He traces its development since it was first featured on expressions: the dvd – 2.

This has been a six year story so we’ve been around a while, we're well known, well recognised and we've grown – we regularly get over 100 at our Sunday meetings and not everyone comes every week so the number of people generally involved is probably something more like 200.

We've got more structure to our gatherings so we meet on Sundays but we also gather in the week in a variety of small groups, cell groups, clusters, student groups and mums and tots.

A major change was moving the venue of our meetings. We're no longer in our original venue at the gym because we outgrew that and had to find somewhere bigger so we now meet in a community centre. Moving from the gym was a big formative thing for us. There was a great positive association and we made a lot of it – fitness for the soul and that kind of thing – and connecting with people at leisure. A few years on though, we’ve got our maturity, we've got our base and so I think we accommodated that move fairly well. In that first year it might have been really hard to move because G2 was all about being in the gym; now we're a community with a name and an activity so the place where we meet perhaps is not so critical.

We've moved our meeting time too. We used to get together in the morning which seemed the natural time when we started but we now meet in the afternoon because we find that it's a better time for the people who come and it's a better mission opportunity for us to be available then.

In terms of people coming to faith and their discipleship, our thinking has developed over the years. What we know we have done really well is to connect with people on the fringe, people who have got a bit of church in their background – perhaps they went as a child or years ago – and a lot of those people find the church building an off-putting threshold to cross. As a result we have got a lot of stories of people who have really seen their faith come alive, some have come back to faith and they've connected with us while others have returned to faith and then connected back to their local church.

We have seen amazing things happen with students, many of whom have seen their faith refreshed through G2. We have also had some connection with people of no church background but we recognise that is an increasingly large group and, for them, we think that the point of contact will not be on a Sunday. They can come to the meeting of course but to a degree there are the elements of church taking place – there is a talk, there is worship, people might pray, it might feel like church to them even in a very nice café style package. So midweek clusters have become our main investment in connecting with the very large group of people who don't have an interest in church but probably have an interest in issues of faith.

On Sundays, in many ways, we're trying to balance both those that are coming in with the core of people for whom this is their sustaining faith experience week by week so we need to be faithful to that. We also need to be thinking about what are we teaching from the Scripture. We have Communion once a month now and that's really important to us, and to many people who come. We need to have worship that’s not only accessible to somebody who walks in off the street but is actually meaningful to somebody who already is a committed follower of Jesus.

Behind the scenes there's lots of discipleship. We've used very simple one-to-one models – that may mean an hour a week in a coffee shop with somebody, maybe using a Christian book, working through a chapter a week as the basis of your discussion. That works very well; we've found a lot of people are happy to make time to do that and it pays great dividends. We try and apprentice people in leadership, public ministry and ministry roles and we just use a simple apprenticeship model where somebody watches somebody else do it, they talk about it, then they have a go with somebody there supporting and then maybe it gets handed on to them in time. It's not so much based on training courses and that kind of thing – valuable though those are – we try to focus instead on the very simple person to person approach.

We originally had one team whose work consisted of all the practicalities and all the blue sky thinking too. We now have two – the core team have got the overview of everything while there's also a larger group called the leadership team and everyone on that team has one, and only one, responsibility. They have quite a focused role. So far we've got about 14 people in that team and probably another seven to eight posts to fill as we find the right people.

We've tried to take a very high affirmation and accountability but low control and high support kind of approach to release them in their work – not so much a 'this is what we want you to do for us' but rather, 'here's the area, what would you like to do and how can we help you do it?' Already we've found that's enormously helpful in that it has really helped us grow and get that balance between getting things done really well and actually having an eye on the future as well because it's very fluid. We don’t want to stall or stagnate.

The big thing looking forward is that G2 itself needs to multiply because we recognise that we weren't just planted to stop, we were planted in order to plant out and that entrepreneurial, missional impetus that God has started, and is in us now, I think needs to spread further. Now that's a bit scary because you've got the dream team, it's just grown, you've got the buzz and you don't want to break it up but I think the right thing is that we've got our eye on this multiplying so that's what we're praying about at the moment.

At the moment it's early days for cluster groups, we've got two of them operating with a third just developing. The cluster is the outside profile and then they also meet as cells so there’s a community and discipleship focus behind that. One of the clusters is specifically for students; that's going really well and focuses very naturally on York University campus which is very near to where we meet.

We've got an emerging cluster that will probably focus on families with younger children and will connect with people at that age and stage. We've also got another cluster that's looking at other opportunities; for example we've had cell groups that have been formed through football. Guys that meet together, play football once a week, have a great time, then they meet in the pub and discuss something and maybe pray. We've seen quite a few people come into the community through that, it's very low key, it's a very patient form of mission but I can think of a number of people who actually now are card-carrying Christians as a result of it.

The Welcome

After 15 years in the making, The Welcome has become the 'newest' church in Methodism. Its minister, Rev Ben Clowes tells how the project developed in the Alderley Edge and Knutsford Methodist Circuit.

Cheshire is known to be one of the richest and most exclusive areas of the country but it’s a place of extreme contrasts. Around Knutsford we have the Bentley Garage for Manchester, Premier League footballers in £2m homes, charity shops selling Prada and Gucci – and one of the most deprived wards in the Cheshire East.

In the past, the community at Over Ward, Longridge and Shaw Heath missed out on a lot of support and possible grant aid because many charities only look at postcodes when considering applications. As soon as they saw Knutsford, that was the end of it for them.

It is interesting because The Welcome very much started as one thing and became another. Reaching out to the community has always been important at Knutsford Methodist Church and across the Circuit generally but the story of The Welcome really got going when Sue Jackson arrived as the project's first deacon.

Initially she walked around the estate, talking to people, getting to know them, finding out what was needed. The call was for second hand clothing so Sue started to provide facilities – usually the boot of her car – for people to bring and buy clothes. Moving on from that, we then got a lease on what was originally a doctor’s surgery and that became a Christian place to sell clothing and serve coffee. At that time it was called the Over Ward Project (Longridge and Shaw Heath).

By the time our second deacon, Margaret Fleming, came along, the church began to develop. There had always been a Christian ethos of meeting people where they were but increasingly the people themselves began to ask why the church was doing this.

As the church grew, the community named the place. They were very clear they wanted it to be called The Welcome.

Cris Acher was appointed Presbyter and he was here for three years before he moved on to Nexus in Manchester. The church still continued to develop and took on a lay manager who started to make further inroads. In time, less clothing was being sold and more coffee was being served and we started to see the growth of an educational project.

The next stage began with the next Presbyter, Richard Byass, who saw the acquisition of the next door lease so we had a cafe space and sessional space for the community. Last year we had a big funding hole but realised that we were giving out such mixed messages when applying for funding, we were café, business, education – and church. We did get a couple of grants to keep us going but then we got to work with Manchester CiC (Community in Communities) and they set us off on a new way of doing things.

By that stage the church had been meeting for 8 to 10 yrs and the questions were starting to be asked by the community as to why we were not being officially recognised as a church. What was the problem? We should be recognised formally, etc.

It was suggested that the best thing to do was to separate the two elements of the centre – the business side of it and the church. A new not-for-profit company called The Welcome CIC (Community Interest Company) will run the now refurbished community centre and the café (probably as the trading arm of a charity) while The Welcome Church itself was formally recognised as the newest church in Methodism at a special dedication service in September.

It was a great month because we had already celebrated confirmation of two members. We have now got 16 members and the two most recent additions are dual members – one from Knutsford Methodist Church and the other is our new business manager who is an Anglican.

Rev Dr Keith Davis, chair of the Manchester and Stockport Methodist District, conducted the dedication service held jointly at The Welcome and a local community centre. It was interesting when we were putting the service together. The Welcome style is very hands-on and experiential and the worship is quite distinct but in the end it was actually a very traditional service because people said, 'just because we normally do it differently doesn't mean we can't do it the standard way. We are not fixed to one style like some churches are.'

So we started to look at liturgies and it seemed to be a contradiction in terms that we were about to celebrate this non-traditional church in a very traditional way but the community message was clear, 'How dare you assume we can't do it another way?!' As a result, Faith and Order now want copies of the liturgy. What we have done changes further develops Methodist ecclesiology!

The important thing is that this has come up from the community, this is the way they want to do church but they also want to be recognised. They are very much for the moment. At one stage they weren’t ready in any shape or form to become a church but things change – and we have to be ready to react to those changes. Other developments include a youth café and a Travellers' Bible Study (that’s a Bible study for those on a journey with God not a Bible study for travelling people…)

Another recent visitor was our local MP for Tatton, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. He said he was thrilled to see what we were doing, describing The Welcome as 'The Big Society in action.'

Last year was a difficult one in that we had to make our cook and community manager redundant but this is a new stage and we are looking to God for what happens next. The first time we met as a church there were about 25 of us and at the special service we had more than 100. We don't open the doors and expect the people to come in, we go where people are – I don't think anywhere on Longridge or Shaw Heath is as busy or well loved as The Welcome.

Our former kitchen supervisor now works alongside me in pastoral work and hers reflects the story of The Welcome. Five years ago at interview she said, 'I'm very happy to do the job so long as you know I don't do God.' She is now a preacher in training and our Senior Steward! The Welcome has been and continues to be a place where God is at work and where people meet with him daily. Our prayer is that, even now we are a 'fully fledged' church, and have even held our first 'Welcome-style' Church Council, we will continue to listen to God and to follow his lead as we have done for the last fifteen years.

Ancient Faith Future Mission: new monasticism as fresh expression of church

The combination of Fresh Expressions and the explosion of interest in monastic spirituality is resulting in the emergence of new monastic communities inspired by historic patterns of religious life, but reframed for the contemporary world. This worldwide movement is seen as a radical expression of ecclesial community and was named in Mission-shaped Church as one of the leading new forms of church that would help people reconnect with Christianity.

A new monastic community may be a dispersed group of families and individuals meeting to share meals and worship, it might be a group connected virtually; it might be a youth group exploring monastic spirituality.

In this book, leaders of traditional religious communities and emerging 'new monastic' communities tell their stories and reflect on how an ancient expression of being church is inspiring and shaping a very new one.

This book includes chapters from practitioners in the UK and US which include:

Tom Sine (Mustard Seed);

Shane Claiborne (Simple Way);

Andy Freeman (24-7);

Ray Simpson (Aidan and Hilda);

Ian Adams (CMS small missional communities);

Ian Mobsby (Moot);

Tessa Holland (Contemplative Fire);

Diane Kershaw (Order of Mission);

Philip Roderick (Contemplative Fire);

Pete Askew (Northumbria Community);

Mark Berry (Safe Space);

Graham Cray (Archbishops Missioner);

Abbot Stuart (Mucknell Abbey).

The Terminus Initiative – update

The Initiative, on the Lowedges estate in Sheffield, was set up in 2002 through a partnership of four local churches – Greenhill Methodist Church, St Peter's CofE, The Michael URC and South Sheffield Evangelical Church. Revd Joy Adams, Methodist minister with responsibility for oversight of the Initiative, explains how things are developing.

Our community café at the bus terminus shops on Lowedges Road offers a safe Christian environment where everyone is welcome and respected. It's a very popular place now. As well as offering light meals and drinks, we also sell good quality second hand clothes and goods; practical help where possible and prayer support when requested. A weekly youth café, on Tuesday evenings, is also now building up relationships with young people in the community.

The Terminus Initiative is a model of the Big Society, without compromising what we believe. We never set ourselves up as a fresh expression of church as such; it has always been a partnership between four very different churches, committed to integrating new Christians and enquirers into those churches.

In this past year we have intentionally promoted the spiritual side of the Initiative – and over the last 12-18months there has been a definite development as we overhear conversations in the café along the lines of, 'this is my church' and 'I don't go to church, I go to the Terminus Café'. We are now exploring what that means for us as an Initiative and how we need to be developing in future.

We have a ministry with asylum seekers and refugees as well as being designated a Healthy Living Centre with the NHS Primary Care Trust, The PCT meets the physical health needs whilst we meet the spiritual. One result of this is our running Essence, a course in spirituality. We publicised it by asking, 'How would you like to improve your spiritual health?' There have been several takers for the course which is running through November and December.

We have both Christians and non-Christians as volunteers and there are signs of a real move among non-Christians to want to know more about why we do what we do. A wonderful 'sideline' to this is that some of our volunteers from the estate, after gaining skills and confidence at the Initiative, have now found work. The Initiative itself has certainly grown. The café is really flourishing and is a vital part of the community; it literally is the Initiative's shop window. At one stage we had an artist-in-residence for six months and she has been fantastic in contributing to a new look for the venue. She also designed a prayer tree and, although we have always had a prayer board for prayer requests, the tree is really popular.

All of the churches involved in this have been very supportive. It has been so important right from the start to work together and the ministers of the churches have been so generous – there has never been any sense of 'this is my patch'. These ministers – with churchmanship ranging from offshoot of house church to Anglo Catholic – regularly met together for prayer long before the Terminus Initiative was set up. They had recognised their differences but kept on praying together and that has been such a blessing. We continue to keep Jesus at the centre of everything and the majority of the events are not on church sites. On seeing what has happened as a result of that, the faith of the various church communities involved has also been built up.

All of this good news happens to coincide with some major financial challenges in the coming year: from April 2011 we have no assurance at all that our current partnership with the Primary Care Trust will continue and, even if it does, what shape that may take. Also, we only have 50% of funding for our Manager post for 2011 so far. Both of these issues will have a major impact on the services we provide for our community.

If we are not careful, external changes – like economic downturn – can negatively affect the way we think which in turn affects our attitude and behaviour. The words of the hymn 'May the mind of Christ my Saviour be in me day by day' is a reminder to keep focusing on God and simply try to keep in step with what He is doing here.

It is hard to believe that we are in our ninth year. When we look back, God has provided incredibly – and that reassures us for the future.

Moot

The Moot monastic community (featured on expressions: the dvd – 2) offers hospitality and welcome in the heart of the City of London to 'questers' or 'spiritual seekers'. Vanessa Elston, one of the community's core team responsible for developing mission and evangelism, describes its work.

As a monastic community we are seeking to deepen the ways we encounter God, ourselves and others in community, spiritual formation and mission.

Our worship draws deeply on the sacramental and contemplative traditions, bringing together the ancient-future dimensions of the faith. We aspire to a common rhythm of life that expresses our commitment to living sustainably, holistically and justly. We also explore spiritual practices, postures and virtues as means to the transformation and inner liberation required to live out our Christian vocation.

Hospitality and welcome are part of our rhythm of life; they represent a significant strand in the monastic tradition and have a long biblical and Christian tradition of practice that best describes how we are called to engage with the 'other', our 'neighbour', the 'stranger' – particularly those who may lack resources to support themselves.

Through our presence in the City, we regularly meet those who are increasingly dissatisfied with the assumptions and lifestyle offered by secular modernity. Many are looking for resources to support their quest for meaning, spiritual experience and practice but are not turning to the traditional church to do this. Our society is increasingly post secular and open to exploring the spiritual dimension of life but the Church has been slow to effectively engage with this shift in the culture. As a result we have been experimenting with two forms of welcome and hospitality on offer to those who are looking for more to their lives, but are resistant to traditional forms of church and evangelism.

On Wednesday evenings at St Mary Woolnoth's Church, opposite Bank Tube station and the Bank of England, you will see banners on the railing offering 'Free Meditation' to those who are 'stressed in the city'. Inside the church a group of 15-20 people meets every week to be led through a series of relaxation exercises into a 20 minute silent meditation, following the sacred word approach of the Benedictine Monk John Main. We are encouraged not to worry if our minds seem to leap about like monkeys at first, but to keep drawing ourselves back to our 'anchor word' or 'image'.

This method is to help us still our minds, so that we can begin to get beyond the surface clutter and distraction that prevents us from encountering ourselves at a deeper level and going beyond ourselves to encounter the divine. After the meditation we reflect on how our stress levels have, or have not, been lowered and there is an opportunity to share thoughts, reflections and questions on the process. In this way, those who are spiritual questers experience stillness and transformation. As a result some become regular visitors who are now in a process of opening up to Christian spirituality.

Twice a month on a Wednesday evening, in a large pub near St Mary’s, city workers share a drink or meal while a group of people meet in a back room for what we call a ‘Serum discussion’ based on one of the bigger questions around life, God and spirituality. The group starts with an icebreaker in which everyone introduces themselves and then there is a short 3 to 5 minute thought-provoking discussion starter which ends with a question.

We then split up into smaller groups where the conversation is facilitated so that everyone participates on the same level, feels listened to and respected. The ground rules of Serum are explained so that the goal is not 'to win the argument', or 'get the right answer to the question' but is about mutual learning. If you listened in to one of these groups you would become aware how this approach can take the discussion beyond an intellectual debate about ideas into something far more personal involving heartfelt searching and consideration. It is amazing how honest and open people can be with others they have never met before.

You would also notice how this approach works best when the Christian presence and voice is in the minority and how people find it much easier to listen when they no longer feel threatened by an atmosphere of dominance or control. A trainee ordinand described Serum as ‘unique in his experience’ in that the church was hosting an event where it was not asking people to move towards it but providing a genuine space of mutual encounter and dialogue.

In these ways Moot is seeking to engage with those who may be a long way from traditional forms of church but are searching for ultimate reality through spiritual experience and finding safe spaces where beliefs and perceptions can be explored and discussed in a non-threatening and non-argumentative environment. The meditation group has been meeting for over a year while the Serum discussion groups are a newer venture – both are attended by a majority of non-Mooters.

One of the challenges of living in a big city is sustaining and growing community and Moot is no different in this respect. We have big ambitions for a small community and are looking for new participants to help us develop our programme of spiritual and missional events in the heart of the City of London.

(CEN) We are all ‘for the parish’

Bishop Graham Cray is Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team. In 2004 he chaired the working party which wrote the Mission-shaped Church report on church planting and fresh expressions of church. Here he responds to the recently published For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions by Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank.

Key quotes:

…properly understood, the mixed economy is about the interdependent partnership between the traditional ministry of the parish and its extension through fresh expressions of church.

For the Parish rightly recognises the seductive and corrosive nature of consumer culture and calls for transformative patterns of ecclesial life and discipleship

The Church of England has a choice between its call to 'evangelize the whole country or decline into a sect' – such is the concern at the heart of For the Parish. Those who work in fresh expressions identify exactly this challenge but have a different strategy to address it. Both sides of the argument want the same outcome.

In many ways this book makes for a frustrating read because its misinterpretations detract from the important issues it affirms. The fact is that I am as much 'for the parish' as authors Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank, having spent 35 years of ordained ministry as a parish priest, training ordinands as parish priests, or exercising episcopal oversight for parishes.

The authors see fresh expressions as independent from parishes, claiming that 'until now the average Fresh Expression has had little or nothing to do with its parish, deanery or diocese.' In truth, the vast majority of fresh expressions in the Church of England are new congregations planted by parish churches and most of the remainder are deanery or diocesan initiatives. Fresh expressions often serve as an extension of the ministry of these parishes and deaneries, helping them to remain true to their calling to be the church for all.

The book's ignoring of the Fresh Expressions initiative's ecumenical nature is a major flaw too. The authors come near to making exclusive claims for their particular understanding of the Church of England that would fall far short of our existing ecumenical understanding and commitments.

For the Parish also fails to understand the strictly limited purpose of the Mission-shaped Church report, namely to:

provide a follow up to the 1994 Breaking New Ground: Church Planting in the Church of England report, and comment on more recent developments, and as a consequence;

provide 'some theological principles' for its proposals about church planting. It was never expected to cover the whole of a developed ecclesiology. The Mission-shaped Church report identified itself with, and assumed the ecclesiology of, two key reports: Eucharistic Presidency (from House of Bishops) and Presence and Prophecy (General Synod).

The Mission-shaped Church report gave considerable emphasis to the need for legally authorised network church plants to supplement existing parochial provision. It did so because this required legislation, now provided by Bishop's Mission Orders, whereas new congregations planted within a parish did not.

Criticisms and shared concern

Responding briefly to some of the criticisms the authors identify, I will also highlight some important areas of shared concern:

(1) Faulty methodology

It is claimed that the Fresh Expressions initiative uses a faulty methodology based on a philosophical mistake, making an inappropriate distinction between the forms and the meaning of the Faith. The authors rightly say that the meaning can only be learned, and embraced through the forms. But the quotations about fusing 'the meaning and the forms', or about the 'one gospel having many clothes' – which they criticise – come from international consultations at Lausanne and the Evangelical Fellowship of the Anglican Communion about the engagement of the gospel with diverse and changing cultures. What was being addressed was the danger of confusing culturally specific forms with the embodiment of the gospel itself. An example would be a conviction that Church's responsibility to teach the Scriptures could only be fulfilled if it used the Authorised Version. Such confusions distance the Church from culture in the wrong way.

(2) 'Inherently neutral' culture?

Fresh expressions practitioners allegedly lack a proper understanding of the mediatory role of the church because we see culture as 'inherently neutral' and merely there as 'clothing for the church'. For the Parish uses a fine quotation to explain the mediatory role of the church:

'In mission we share God's work: in mission we pass on the saving message through human words and communities, through human words, drama and music. Supremely, what we draw people into through mission is the life of Christ lived out – and thereby mediated – in the community of his Body the Church'

These words explain very well our understanding of the purpose and nature of the church in both fresh expressions and inherited forms. Culture is not regarded as neutral by fresh expressions practitioners; rather it is seen as providing a profound missional challenge to the church.

At various points Mission-shaped Church made it clear that the Church is called to be a countercultural community. Our present culture is described in sociological detail, not because we have no choice but to accept it – instead the detail aids understanding of our missionary context.

The disagreement between fresh expressions practitioners and these authors is between two different approaches to engaging our culture with the gospel, the former seeing engagement as the way to be countercultural and transformative, while the latter argue for more of a distinct parallel presence in society. This is worth a rigorous debate, but both approaches are committed to an understanding of the Church as a supernatural transforming presence.

(3) Inadequate individualised understanding of salvation

For the Parish suggests that fresh expressions are 'embarrassed' about the church and just see it as a means to an end rather than as a foretaste of God's final purposes. This does neither the movement nor the literature justice. Mission-shaped Church was about the 'Church' in mission in a changing context – not about individualized salvation – precisely because 'salvation has an ecclesial dimension.'

Mission-shaped Church, quoting Eucharistic Presidency, affirmed that the Church is 'a genuine foretaste of God's kingdom'. For the Parish suggests that fresh expressions thinking prioritizes the Kingdom over the Church in such a way that the church is reduced to less than its biblical dignity and identity. But the authors are in equal danger of collapsing the Kingdom into the Church.

(4) A 'flight to segregation'

For the Parish sees the development of fresh expressions of church as a 'flight to segregation'; claiming that the American 'Church Growth' idea of 'homogeneous units' provides the foundation for many of the Mission-shaped Church report's proposals. It is the case that Church Growth thinking was influential in some church planting circles. It offered at least some answers to the problem that many parish congregations were already more or less homogeneous units, in other words groups made up of a single people type or culture, and it opened the way to expanding their reach by engaging with groups which had been untouched.

This remains a major challenge in the Church today but the Fresh Expressions initiative now addresses it primarily through contemporary missiology, through the literature of the Gospel and Culture movement – and in particular through post-Vatican 2 Roman Catholic thinking on inculturation.

There is particular emphasis on the significance of the incarnation as being both (a) a unique salvific event and (b) the paradigm for the Church's mission as it crosses cultural boundaries with the gospel.

For the Parish dislikes this incarnational principle but it has been the theological basis of cross-cultural mission around the world, mission which is now required here. Many fresh expressions establish a bridgehead for the gospel through a particular group with which they have established a relationship but this does not mean they would settle for niche church as a final outcome.

In the New Testament, boundary-crossing mission led to new problems of unity which the church then had to address and resolve. That is the right order. The mission to the Gentiles was not put on hold because it created problems for the unity of the church, nor because all types of Gentiles were not being evangelized at the same time. When previously unreached people find faith it is the Church's task to resolve the new challenges to unity which have been created by the Missionary Spirit.

For the Parish tends to dismiss statements which contradict its reading of fresh expressions as being 'token'. This then colours the way it engages with the concept of a 'mixed economy church'. But properly understood, the mixed economy is about the interdependent partnership between the traditional ministry of the parish and its extension through fresh expressions of church. Difference can be a resource for a more representative unity.

(5) A flight from tradition

I have already distinguished a false dichotomy between the meaning of the faith and its forms, from the absolutizing of the forms of a particular era. The description of a 'Christian Imaginary in the Parish' in the latter chapters has many excellent features but also seems embedded in a literary middleclass culture alien to much of our population and to offer an inappropriate one size to fit all. What impresses me, by contrast, about many fresh expressions is the seriousness of their approach to worship, spirituality and discipleship. Many are engaged at a catechumenate level with friends with little knowledge of the faith or of the Church, and their creative engagement with the traditions of the church for a missionary context is a gift from which we can all learn.

For the Parish rightly recognises the seductive and corrosive nature of consumer culture and calls for transformative patterns of ecclesial life and discipleship. When fresh expressions adapt or translate the Church's historic traditions to engage with our society, that is also their intention. The ultimate test of the ministry of any Christian congregation lies in the quality of disciples being formed through the patterns of its ongoing life and ministry in Christ. To the authors I would say that they are right in claiming it is time for a proper ecclesiological debate – but not one that's based on caricature.

+Graham Cray

Divine Divas

What do belly dancing, Bollywood, Loose Women and Come Dine with Me have to do with a fresh expression of church in North Yorkshire? Revd Sue Sheriff, vicar of Tadcaster, gives the lowdown on Divine Divas.

It all started when one of our church members won the use of a hot tub for the weekend in a church raffle. She used it for a birthday party and we wondered, 'why is it that we can invite other women to this sort of party but we find that we can't really invite them to church?'

I wasn't sure if it was just me or if the other women felt the same so the first thing we did was have Women Who Lunch and Pray and I asked a small group to come together early last year for lunch to talk about some of the women we cared about and think about the type of leisure activities we could invite them to.

We then invited Christian women across the area to a Pudding and Prayer meeting so that we could discuss it in more detail. As a result of this, we decided to put on an event for women, one that was clearly Christian but not off-putting. Divine Divas was born with DIVA standing for Dynamic Inspirational Vibrant Adventurous women. Our first meeting was an experiment, and we decided to go for belly dancing…

We wanted to be very open and honest about the fact that there was the church element, we didn't want to get people there under false pretences and so we decided the topic and invited a friend of mine – a wonderfully 'DIVA' vicar, Laura McWilliams from Scarborough – to come and tell her story and it was great.

People seemed to go for the whole thing immediately. The venue we use is licensed and I think we set the tone by inviting them to bring whatever they wanted to drink. There are always ethical issues around these questions of course and we don't go so far as to provide the drink but we felt it important that they could bring in a bottle of wine if they wanted to. So far we haven't had any problems with this, people seem to respect what we're doing and only drink in moderation. If it was causing any sort of distress, we would obviously think again.

We didn't want to exclude people by always organising active events so we next organised a Loose Women panel. On the TV, they've discussed prayer and spiritual items several times and we thought it great that we could talk about anything and everything. I chaired it with three very lively Christian women who made themselves very honest, very vulnerable – all with a good experience of life. It was such an open and frank debate and I think an eye opener for many in the audience. Cosmopolitan magazine was taken as our source of information in the first half of the evening so that meant we had Christians talking about things like How to have the Best Sex Ever.

We set our age limit as being old enough to discuss childbirth without cringing and young enough to have a go at belly dancing. It's more of an attitude than an age limit but we tend to get 20 to 40 somethings made up of about 25% churchgoers and 75% non- churchgoers. Attendance has never really dropped below 40.

Bollywood Nights featuring Bollywood style dancing was another one that made the programme. It featured the testimony of a young woman, a Muslim convert to Christianity, who told us some of the complications that decision had brought about in her life. People were really moved when they realised the personal cost of being a Christian; that was the event when people started saying it was 'their'church. There had always been relationship stuff going on but that event was certainly a turning point.

Our next event is Come Dine with the Divine Divas. This is a women-only event so the men will help with the cooking and wait on the tables but once they have served the meal, they have to get out! Three of the fellas from church said they would ask some of their friends and they have now got a group together to do just that. We're calling them the Divine Men. They think this is a fun idea because they are doing something rather than coming to something – it could provide a longer term offshoot for the men.

A core group of seven of us is involved in the planning; there is a big denominational spread as we operate across a joint benefice. There are lots of us who are very conscious of the very worldly things around which we are weaving Christian themes in our events. Divine Divas doesn't seem to be a clear bridge to bringing people into church because, for some of them, Sunday church is not appropriate or convenient for them or they don't really relate to it. At the moment Divine Divas seems to be developing a community in its own right but it's very much at early stages.

The whole thing begs the question about what does church mean? What I hope that will come out of this is that people will develop a relationship with Jesus. I do find that, for instance even now with our friends they will ask us to pray and on occasions even non-churchgoing friends who have no particular claim to faith will text and say 'pray for me, this is happening' – sometimes even to sit and pray with them especially when it's something very emotional to do with family.

Similarly in conversation we'll chat Bible stories and talk about things like the woman at the well who had been married however many times and the man she was with wasn't her husband. So much of it relates to people's experiences today so I'm not sure – if Church were to be taken in its 'tight' term – that we will evolve into having an organised liturgy and singing hymns. However if we're talking about evolving to a place where people are happy to pray and to chatter about the Bible then I think it could easily evolve into that. I guess as we chatter together you could call it a cell group or a Bible study or church but I'm not sure we'd be too keen to try and pin it down too much.

Some of the more mature members of my traditional congregation are now coming along to Divine Divas and thoroughly enjoying it. People have been very supportive and they're just genuinely pleased to see people involved with church in its wider sense.

In future I would like to see Divine Divas growing in numbers. It would also be wonderful to see a change in the little slot where we invite a speaker. Instead of bringing in someone from the outside I would love to be able to say to the group, 'so has Jesus done anything for you? Has God made a difference in your life this week?' and the Divine Divas themselves would just stand up and tell their own stories.

Boring Wells

Boring Wells is a network of fresh expressions of church in and around Belfast. Each has a very different flavour but all share the same vision and core values. Adrian McCartney explains more.

Genesis 26 tells the story of Isaac who pursued the vision passed to him by his father, Abraham of re-opening old wells and digging new wells, sources of life and prosperity for anyone who chose to live close to them.

The collective vision of Boring Wells is to continue the legacy of faith in the Church of Ireland, to re-open old wells in old places of faith and to open new wells where there are signs that a new community could be expressed. The hope is to bring life and the presence of Christ to local communities who may have difficulty connecting with church.

Our ideas of what the church is like are fairly well culturally shaped and even when we apply scripture to them we tend to default back to something like it has always been. Wells is no different mostly. We are trying to be the family of God. If there is any difference it is that we want to be shaped by the mission and by those whom we engage with rather than predetermining the result.

We originally thought that we were to reopen old wells but then we found that we were re-digging wells where the church had gone a bit dead. Since then the main emphasis has been to try and open up new wells.

I am a Church of Ireland minister but I came out of parish ministry in 2003 when the Bishop of Down and Dromore gave me permission to plant a church in a commuter village on the outskirts of Belfast. We quickly discovered that trying to do that among unchurched people just didn't work in that area.

I had taken a year to recruit a group of people. Initially there were 35 of us who started meeting in a pub in Moneyrea. We organised a Sunday service but not one unchurched person ever came to it! We threw everything at that service; we had projectors and sound and lovely coffee and nice things to eat. We also had lots of visitors from other parishes, saying, 'O we'd love to do this' though there was always the underlying thought, 'This just looks like we are moving the existing church around.'

Then we read the Mission-shaped Church report and we began to consider how we do church and it became something that wasn't quite what the bishop or any of us had expected. Questions like 'when are you going to build the buildings?' became irrelevant. We had to say that we weren't going to be doing it that way any longer. Defining ourselves in a way that can be accommodated within a diocese when we cross parochial boundaries, and even diocesan boundaries, has been an ongoing challenge both for us and the diocesan head office.

Our main problem was, and is, that people find it difficult to recognise anything except the parish. We don't have the equivalent of a Bishop's Mission Order in the Church of Ireland so most people see us as something between a parish and a mission agency. The way we have moved forward is to become a company limited by guarantee with a charitable basis. We have a board of directors and have to submit our audited accounts to the Charity Commission. This allows us to have charity number but it doesn't give us any status within the Church of Ireland even though we would very much like to be part of the diocese. Representation at Synod and financial support are ongoing discussions.

Five wells, our attempts at creating mission shaped communities, go to make up the Boring Wells network. We found that people had a sense of call in different sorts of areas – not geographical as such but among certain groups of people. The wells each decide how they express church individually but we have a general sense of how the whole family of Wells expresses their love of God together. The wells are called Tinys, Resound, Shankill, Elk and Networks.

Within a year of us starting, we set up Tinys. It all happened when we were running that service in the pub; one night we simply came across a crowd of teenagers drinking on the windowsills of a row of shops. In time, we rented one of the retail units as a coffee shop for young people; there was no way those youngsters would or could transfer to the Networks church – then known as Moneyrea Wells. We needed to let them do something to express their experience of Christ where they were in their own way. That was quite a learning curve for the first group of people who had thought that what they were originally offering was a fresh expression of church only to discover that something very different was happening with the people who actually lived in the place.

We released some people to go and make Tinys their spiritual home. The original group of people now call themselves Networks. They have a non-local sense of connecting primarily with their natural contacts in work and through friendships. Members of Networks are now praying about the possibility of gathering somewhere closer to the city.

The bishop gave me an opportunity to work in two inner city parishes part-time. These small congregations are very elderly but we have found that the Networks group (about 30 of them) have been very supportive of those congregations who have actually come to like them.

Resound was originally a small outreach in an interface community comprising two working class estates on opposite side of a main road in Dunmurry on the outskirts of Belfast. There are two large secondary schools, one Catholic and one Protestant, and some community facilities that have been made available to Resound for youth activities. In the summer we have a fortnight of non-stop activities; the first week is aimed at primary school children – this year we had 400 children and young people every day with 73 leaders. In the second week we had over 100 teens daily. The regular Resound meetings, comprising a Sunday night session and drop-in stuff during the week, are organised by the late teens/early 20s.

The Shankill well is all about people serving in the area, a place at the heart of sectarian paramilitarianism. The Summer Madness festival started Streetreach to offer an opportunity of service to the community. Every summer for five years we used to take teams of people to do street cleaning and gardening in different parts of the city. Growing out of that was a group of people who had a strong sense of call to go and serve in Shankill itself. One couple have moved to live there.

Shankill well has a meal together every Monday evening. They are trying to be very simple in what they do, developing friendships from around the area and trying to incarnate the gospel in natural ways.

Elk well meets in my local pub in Dundonald, not far from Stormont. Our team get together on Thursdays to join the weekly quiz night. Friendships have grown and relationships have developed in a away that has allowed for many opportunities to share in prayer and care for this growing group of people.

All of our network team leaders are pioneer types and so are now really struggling with what to do when communities do start to grow. Launching out in mission has an excitement about it. Discipleship and pastoral care are the balance. The challenge for this autumn is come up with a better support system for those who make up the mission teams and the new family members who are becoming part of us. We presently organise a monthly gathering for worship and teaching supported by resources for small groups. None of this is easy and everything always feels quite fragile. As St Paul said, 'I am certain that He who began this good work in you will bring it to completion…' I pray that the Lord will help us to keep going.