Derby Cathedral this week welcomed Graham Cray as the first in a series of speakers looking at key issues relating to the Church throughout the season of Lent. The programme of evening lectures and key speakers had been put together by the Bishop of Derby, Dr Alastair Redfern, and the Cathedral.
Graham Cray's lecture on Monday 27th February 2012 focused on the development of fresh expressions and its impact on the wider church.
You can read his address below or download it from the foot of the page.
Fresh expressions of church
When I look closely at what the Holy Spirit has brought into being, there is a threefold ecology in which this movement has flourished.
At the local level there is a new imagination about the forms the church can take for the sake of mission. Mainline Christians are imagining being church in ways they would not have considered before. Fundamentally this is a grassroots movement of the Spirit. If it were not, a national Initiative would not have been owned to the degree which we have experienced. The development of Ordained Pioneer Ministry and the Church Army's refocusing on this agenda have made a substantial contribution, and there are notable examples in this diocese, but the most significant factor is new imagination in many parishes.
At a senior leadership level there is a new era of permission for missional initiatives and experiments. Rather than 'the bishop would never allow it', parishes are discovering that the bishop would be very disappointed if they did not try.
This means that there is both a bottom up and a top down element at work.
As Bishop Steven Croft expresses it,
We have learned to connect the centre to the edge.
Finally, the national team provides resources to help parishes develop missional imagination, and training to help them learn best practice.
This combination of imagination, permission and resources has allows fresh expressions of church to develop across substantial parts of the participating denominations.
The other major factor has been the way in which Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has championed fresh expressions from the beginning. He had experience of church plants and imaginative mission initiatives in his previous diocese in Wales and had been very creative in his support for them. He grasped the significance of the Mission-shaped Church report immediately, wrote an excellent forward and appointed my predecessor Steven Croft to establish a team. He has continued to give this work visible and generous support. If the work of the last few years were to be reduced to a formula it would be MSC (Mission-shaped Church) + ABC (Archbishop of Canterbury) = FEI (Fresh Expressions Initiative)!
The Archbishop's other important contribution, also developed during his time in Wales, was the concept of a 'mixed economy church'. That there were two elements within the one economy of the church's mission: our long-term historic or inherited approach, and the newer development of fresh expressions of church. This is not intended as a device to enable the two to operate in parallel, let alone in competition, but is intended to be a partnership, where each is enriched by the other. Fresh expressions are not to replace more traditional approaches, but to complement them. There is fruitful work to be done by both.
This commitment, to honour our tradition and to develop it respectfully, lies behind the choice of the term 'fresh expressions of church'. Here 'fresh' has a dual meaning. From one perspective it is simply a coverall term for that which is new, fresh, to the Church of England. But the term is also deliberately drawn from the Declaration of Assent which every Church of England minister makes at their ordination and each time they are licensed to a new ministry.
The bishop declares that,
The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.
Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, p34
In response each minister affirms their 'loyalty to this inheritance of faith' as their 'inspiration and guidance under God in bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation'.
In other words 'bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation' requires a 'proclaiming afresh' of the historic gospel. Mission-shaped Church showed that this 'proclaiming afresh' may require an 'embodying afresh' in new congregations and communities. I wrote in the forward that
one of the central features of this report is the recognition that the changing nature of our missionary context requires a new inculturation of the gospel within our society.
Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, page xi
The core process
A working definition
In 2006, having surveyed the developing movement, the Fresh Expressions team drafted this provisional working definition:
A fresh expression is a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.
- It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples;
- It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.
'Fresh expression' is always an abbreviation of 'fresh expression of church'. It always involves the development of a new congregation or the transitioning of an existing piece of work into a congregation. This is usually a new congregation of an existing local church, but it could also be a church plant in its own right. We do not apply the term to bridge projects whose long term aim is to transfer people to an existing congregation. That is a perfectly good thing to do, but it is not a fresh expression of church. Fresh expressions begin as fledgling churches, with the potential to become mature, but they are church. When they become mature they will not look like the church which planted them, because they are designed for a specific cultural context which was not being reached by the planting church.
Recently we have developed a complementary definition, using four theological terms. Fresh expressions are:
- missional – serving people outside church;
- contextual – listening to people and entering their culture;
- formational – making discipleship a priority
- ecclesial – forming church.
Changing culture
These definitions emphasize that fresh expressions are 'contextual', 'a form of church for our changing culture'. The key context for the report, and for the whole initiative, is provided by the substantial cultural changes undergone by Western societies. Mission is now located where post-modernity interfaces with post-Christendom. These are both disputed terms, but I use them as shorthand for the changing shape of Western societies and the changing status of the Church within these societies. In Leadership Next, Eddie Gibbs wrote
The ministry training I received over forty years ago was for a world that no longer exists.
Eddie Gibbs, Leadership Next, IVP, 2005, p9
Over the last few decades the culture of the West has grown further and further apart from the culture of the church.
The most obvious evidence of this is England is in church attendance. 34% of adults have never had any significant contact with any church of any denomination. Another 31% used to be involved, often as children, but are involved no longer. 7% belong to other world faiths. To two thirds of British adults the Church is an alien world. Were those under sixteen to be included this proportion would increase substantially. The average age of regular Church of England worshippers is 14 years older than the average of the population. Church attendees are, on average, more middle-class than the whole population. On an average Sunday 7.5% of Brits go to church, but young adults are a missing generation. Only 3% of those in their 20s and 30s go to church. What we face is the need to re-evangelize our nation.
Once alerted to this reality there is a great deal that local churches can do, but revitalized traditional ministry, while essential, is not enough. As an Australian Archbishop said to me,
More of the same means less of the same.
Decline is not halted. In Mission-shaped Church we wrote,
The Anglican pattern of ministry, built around parish and neighbourhood, can lead to a way of thinking that assumes that all people – whether attending or not attending – are basically 'our people'. All people are God's people, but it is an illusion to assume that somehow the population of England is simply waiting for the right invitation before they will come back and join us. The social and mission reality is that the majority of English society is not 'our people' – they haven't been in living memory, nor do they want to be. The reality is that for most people across England the Church, as it is, is peripheral, obscure, confusing or irrelevant… The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under the Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture. The gap is as wide as any that is experienced by a cross-cultural missionary. It will require a reworking of language and approach, and it is here that both church planting and fresh expressions of church offer real possibilities.
Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, pp39-41
In other words, if the cure of souls, the responsibility for the spiritual wellbeing of all in the parish, is to be taken seriously, every parish is called to innovative mission, of which fresh expressions of church are one form.
Discernment in Context
The move from a 'they come to us' approach to mission to 'we go to them' cannot be achieved by taking church as we know it and putting it somewhere else. Nor will it be adequate to clone something that works somewhere else. There are no packaged answers for the re-evangelization of former Christendom nations. The stories we tell on DVDs and on websites are intended to feed local imagination, not provide an exact template to copy.
The key to planting a fresh expression is discernment in context. As the definition says 'It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples.'
Two phrases have emerged to summarize our most important emphases: 'Seeing what God is doing and joining in' and 'Dying to live' (Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, p30).
The first is based on the assumption that the Holy Spirit is the lead missionary and is at work ahead of us, when we 'go to' a new group or context. The second is based on the assumption that cross cultural missionaries do not impose their cultural preferences upon those they are trying to reach. This is not 'for' the missionaries. It is not about creating church that suits us, and inviting others in. It is about co-operating with the Holy Spirit to create authentic church 'for them', if necessary at the expense of our comfort and preferences. We believe this emphasis on 'dying to live', drawn from John 12.24-26, is a distinctive contribution to church planting practice and theory. Otherwise planting is really cloning.
We are aware that this sort of cross cultural planting cannot be reduced to a formula and that it is rarely a linear process, with one stage neatly following another. However, for beginners, we recommend this sequence.
The listening process – to God, the local church and the community or network where the fresh expression might be planted – is not just a starting point, but the ongoing foundation for all that develops. Serving – being good news before sharing good news – provides the points of contact. The essence of church is community. Building community and mutual relationships, rather than just ministering to unconnected individuals, is vital if the fresh expression is to be a community rather than a weekly event. From the beginning, in the context of the relationships being formed, the call is to long-term discipleship not just 'decisions for Christ'. A public gathering for worship can then be shaped which takes proper note both of the Gospel and its traditions and the specific people and context for whom it is intended.
A frequent mistake is to start with an act of worship before relationships have been formed that would guide the design of that act of worship. This is an incarnational approach, not an attractional one.
What shapes the ecclesiology?
The effect of both elements of cultural transitions (post-modernity and post-Christendom) has been to raise questions about what is essential to church in every generation, and what is unhelpful clutter from a previous era.
The Lausanne consultation 'Contextualization Revisited' recognised that
There are many who still fuse the meaning and forms of the Gospel.
Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, p91
Meaning that the specific cultural forms, which the gospel and the church take in a particular era, can be wrongly identified with the gospel itself. The requirement to make Scripture central is fused to the use of the King James Version alone, and so on. Rather,
A faithful Church is continually shaped by its inner dynamic: the flow of Apostolic Tradition, with Scripture as its norm. The Church is, however, also shaped by the kind of world in which it finds itself. This must mean a constant receiving of the Gospel into our particular context.
Michael Nazir-Ali, Future Shapes of the Church, House of Bishops paper, 2001, quoted in Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, p91
The theological convictions which underlying our understanding of fresh expressions of church are that the fundamental form of church is a community of disciples around and on the move with Jesus. The Church of Scotland report Church Without Walls understood church as
People with Jesus at the centre, travelling wherever Jesus takes us.
In his foreword to Mission-shaped Church, Archbishop Rowan states that
If 'church' is what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other, there is plenty of theological room for diversity of rhythm and style, so long as we have ways of identifying the same living Christ at the heart of every expression of Christian life in common.
Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, page v
For the Archbishop, 'church' is an event around the risen Jesus before it is an institution or anything else.
The further theological foundations upon which we then build are:
- That mission is missio Dei, the mission of God. That it is the triune God's activity before it is an activity of the church. That the church is both the fruit and the agent or instrument of the divine mission, in which we participate in Christ. As a consequence mission is of the essence of the church, rather than an activity of some Christians. Mission becomes 'seeing what God is doing and joining in'.
- That the practice of mission is to be incarnational. We have been greatly helped by Roman Catholic, Post-Vatican-Two, missiology with its emphasis on 'inculturation' based on the analogy with the incarnation. An incarnational approach takes seriously the way of the cross as the model of an incarnate life. It does not just emphasize that Christ took human form within a particular culture. The historic incarnation was a once for all divine act, but it then becomes the model for discipleship and cross cultural mission. Christology shapes missiology which than shapes ecclesiology.
- That mission is pneumatological. Not only does the Spirit empower and direct the church’s mission, but the Spirit brings the anticipation of the future into the present. The Spirit enables the church to live as an anticipation of God’s future in the present day, and within each culture. The presence of the Spirit is the guarantee that a local church can develop missional imagination for its context.
The term 'expressions of church' aims to hold together two truths. That Christ is fully present in each community of his people, and yet each community is incomplete without the others.
Only in Christ does completeness, fullness, dwell. None of us can reach Christ's completeness on our own. We need each other's vision to correct, enlarge and focus our own; only together are we complete in Christ.
Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, T&T Clark, 2002, p79
Or, as the Archbishop stated at one of the consultations which led to the establishment of the Fresh Expressions team
If Christ is the embodiment of God, and the Church is his body on earth. Then no single expression of church can ever exhaust Christ.
The capacity of the church to embody the way of Christ effectively in each culture and context lies at the heart of the concept of catholicity. According to Paul Avis,
Catholicity refers to the universal scope of the church as a society instituted by God in which all sorts and conditions of humanity, all races, nations and cultures, can find a welcome and a home. Catholicity therefore suggests that the church has the capacity to embrace diverse ways of believing and worshipping, and that this diversity comes about through the 'incarnation' of Christian truth in many different cultural forms which it both critiques and affirms. The catholicity of the church is actually a mandate for cultural hospitality.
Paul Avis, The Anglican Understanding of the Church, SPCK, 2000, p65, quoted in Mission-shaped Church, CHP, 2004, p97
Fresh expressions of church are a manifestation of 'cultural hospitality' giving birth to 'diverse ways of believing and worshipping' as Christian truth is incarnated, the good news proclaimed and embodied afresh, to make the cure of souls a fuller reality.