The Beacon

The Beacon - Bart WoodhouseIt used to be an industrial heartland but the Dartford Bridge area became ripe for redevelopment and housing schemes began to spring up on Thames Gateway sites previously dominated by factories and business. The Beacon came into being when the local Methodist Church appointed Bart Woodhouse as lay leader of a new church plant team.

I moved on to the Bridge development in north Dartford with my family while the bulldozers were still very much in evidence in early 2008 so we were among the first five or six people to be here! At first we simply started just to try and meet anyone else who was around so we’d take our children out and about walking, bump into our neighbours and get some conversations going.

The Beacon - housesAs more and more people began to move on site, I was very keen to start a Residents' Association. We put letters through people's doors and organised an informal meeting in one of the new buildings; about 40 or 50 people come along to it.

We made it very clear that we were a church and that we wanted to work to try and build community here, firstly by getting residents together in that Association and giving them a voice.

That was a really effective way of initially getting the community together and being able to listen to what was going on. In new developments there are always issues with houses and how well the windows keep out water and so on – I was able to actually get some movement on those issues. We saw that as part of our role of building Kingdom. Part of our witness here as Christians was to consider how we could make this place a strong, vibrant and healthy place to be – so very early on we did things like holding a community carol service.

The Beacon - building siteWe then stumbled on the national Big Lunch initiative which encourages communities to get together for food and activities. We had a very popular tug of war, a bouncy castle and a barbecue. We also got local people to bring along some home-made food that expressed something of them and their background – a kind of signature dish. As a result of that we had goat curry and many other wonderful things! About 60 or 70 people come which, from the small community that we are at the moment, was quite a big proportion of the people here.

In our desire to help shape community we'll also be working to help create a community garden on a small plot of land on site that couldn't be built on because there's a high pressure oil pipeline underneath it. The youth club will be involved by creating a piece of art or sculpture for the centre of the garden.

The Beacon - threeWe had quite a small group of people with us when we started and now there is about nine and 10 on a core team. They all have a real sense of call to be doing this kind of work but we are learning again what it means to be community and what it means to be church together. We've also got quite a large and growing fringe group and we are using things like the Y Course and other things to encourage that fringe to maybe explore the Christian faith and then hopefully transition into the cell life of the church.

It has been very much about winning trust, listening, forming real relationships and friendships with people and trying to demonstrate something of God's love to them in a practical and real way.

The Beacon - Learning and Community CampusWe meet on a Tuesday evening in cell groups – or Beacon groups – and then on one Sunday in the month we all have a big meal together, maybe with some sort of interactive prayer time. The Dartford Bridge Learning and Community Campus has been built on site and we have a room there which is just the right size for us. We also launched a celebration service at the new school on the Bridge Development in January.

Some people want to try and argue that what we're doing isn't really church, saying that it's just an extended house group or something but I really would want to defend what we're doing here by saying that we are authentically church; we are a worshipping community together. We are also about God's mission, demonstrating the Kingdom in this place, worshipping him and finding ways that are relevant for us to do that. We certainly are creating disciples in what we're doing and encouraging others as to what it might mean to explore being disciples of Christ in this place.

The Beacon - brochureThere are a number of challenges that I think we face in trying to shape a full and healthy Christian community here. One of them is that I'm a lay person in the Methodist Church and so I'm not able to preside at the Eucharist meal. I think there needs to be a real integrity about these new communities we're forming in being able to celebrate that meal – and all that it means – together.

We aim to:

  • Build a strong church that is rooted in the fullness of God's grace and demonstrates the 'Jesus life' to our community and our world;
  • Always strive to foster a strong and real sense of community, one that isn't invasive but supportive;
  • Discover a pattern of Christian life that is 24/7, not limited or detached from the rest of our lives;
  • Follow Jesus, and by his Spirit, demonstrate his message to others.

Our long term vision here is to create a kind of pattern of church that is so integrally part of this new community and yet is authentically a church expressing all the Kingdom values and living out the message of Christ, seeing people discover faith in Jesus and having their lives changed as a result.

Crossnet – update Feb11

Crossnet - Nick CrawleyCrossnet, launched as an Anglican network church in 2004, has seen many changes since then. Its leader, Nick Crawley, gives an update.

Our vision is to be a community of people who love God and each other, learning to follow Jesus in every aspect of life and seeking to make him known outside the church. In what was a major development in September last year, I became the vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Hotwells – a parish church in the centre of Bristol – as well as leader of Crossnet.

I now split my time 50:50 between the two churches, a move that was totally in line with a suggestion made to Diocesan Authorities in the 2010 Crossnet Report. This structure brings greater stability to the pioneer work and will help to bring together the pioneer and inherited ministry patterns.

It is a significant boost to this pioneer ministry, as it is essentially a strong encouragement from the authorities to press on with the work. We still call ourselves a network church though 'network' can mean almost anything you want it to. Our experience, over six-and-a-half years here, is that our ministry goes in phases. We are now in our third phase and what we find is that people tend to come in batches and then disappear off to other places – almost always because we have a ministry with younger people, most of whom have been 30 or under. This means that we see quite a lot of people for a while and they then buzz off to go to London or abroad.

Crossnet - CaféIt hasn't been entirely what we expected. At the start we thought we would be planting something like a House Church or Vineyard Church within the Anglican system but, for various reasons, it's not looking like that at all. Yet we have learned not to be worried by that and instead we just work with what we've got.

We have occasional meetings in cafes and other public places but we mainly meet in our home for discipling and Bible study. The figures vary a great deal. Sometimes we have been up to about 50 and we are now fewer than 20 but in rather a strange sort of way we find that it carries on. There has been ample opportunity for this whole thing to die but instead it continues! At the moment those who come along are mostly from a church background, in the past it has often been non-churched.

I found the instability of it really quite difficult – it was a bit too vulnerable, too chaotic and I couldn't really cope with that – but becoming vicar of Holy Trinity as well has had a great stabilising effect. In terms of my own funding, I will no longer be paid by the Diocese on behalf of Crossnet from this summer though at this moment it looks like I will carry on.

Crossnet - groupI find that people here are very comfortable with the idea of 'mixed economy' working. Very, very occasionally I may get a comment along the lines of, 'All your young people can come and join us' but that really is extremely rare.

It has gone through many stages but my wife Lucy has played, and continues to play, an enormous part in it all. One of Crossnet's key aims – apart from a base ministry of meeting on Tuesdays for a worship service at our home – is to focus on teaching the Bible. I'm pioneering new forms of teaching that and Lucy, as a systematic theologian, is a teacher as well.

We also disciple people with specific, focused, intentional mentoring. We tend to find that men rather than women come to that because there's something about biblical discipleship that really appeals to men. Working out what faith means in your life and putting it into practice with the help of someone challenging you and helping you to do that is very rewarding.

Crossnet

Church of England minister Nick Crawley knew that he wanted his next post to be about mission not maintenance. So he wrote to the Bishop of Bristol to suggest launching a network church. After a series of meetings he began work on his new 'parish' of Bristol-based young adults in 2004.

We have no church building, no parish, no PCC, no inherited congregation,

Nick says.

I had no weddings or funerals to do so I was free to start from scratch.

An original team of three families drawn to the network church idea began meeting in Nick's family home in central Bristol. As the new church grew, it began to rent space in Starbucks. It now meets in a larger coffee house on Tuesday evenings attended by an average of 30 people who eat, worship, discuss and pray together. Roughly half of these were not previously attending or committed to a church.

One-to-ones and training teams continue the work of discipleship.

Nick attributes the growth of this network church, Crossnet, among students and young professionals to 'word of mouth'. The church has seen four conversions and others growing in their faith.

The two emphases are mission and discipleship,

says Nick.

There is no doubt that the commitment people have to loving one another is growing.

Crossnet aims to be self-funding by the end of 2009.