Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team, sees how God is blessing imaginative, contextually appropriate, mission when churches take the risk of attempting it.
In most parishes clergy and lay leaders can be overburdened simply continuing their current work,
he said.
But if they are willing to stop something, so that they have the capacity to start something new, or – as the following story shows – to release a key leader for a new venture, the results can be out of all proportion to the sacrifices being made.
Café Lite, a fresh expression of church, meets in Droxford village hall, Hampshire. Launched in September 2011, it now attracts up to 100 people to its informal gatherings. The Rev Stuart Holt is the Rector and says,
My parish released me from services in Droxford, Exton, Meonstoke and Corhampton twice a month so that I could front Café Lite and a puppet ministry in schools. This means that I now have two fresh expressions of church in these ancient, rural benefices.
It's really encouraging to see new people coming to Café Lite and they're bringing their friends with them. We've never seen these people before. The numbers have reached 96, which is quite something for a tiny little parish of 1,600 people in the middle of Hampshire. Our immediate challenge is that the hall is licensed for 120 people. If everybody in the Café Lite community turned up we would be over that! We're also having fantastic conversations. People have asked if I could do a wedding blessing for them because they were married in a register office; others have asked about preparing for baptism for themselves or their children.
Café Lite runs on the third Sunday of the month and we have Sunday newspapers, bacon rolls, worship and chat. I thought it important to offer excellence, which is why we've also got a professional Gaggia coffee machine for all those 'flat whites' we have to prepare! We have made it self-supporting with private individuals funding different components so – for instance – someone has sponsored the bread for a year, somebody else has paid for the bacon and another person buys all the papers.
When deciding what resources to use, I finally went for what was around when I came to faith in 1967, Norman Warren's Journey into Life – mainly because it's very clear and simple. For worship, I also returned to my roots to use Youth Praise because it really deals with key issues of faith; I found that it was as powerful now as it had been all those years ago.
We started from the beginning with the music because it's for the dechurched as well as the unchurched. I know it can seem strange to many people involved in fresh expressions that we would focus on worship and singing at such an early stage in the life of this community but the people really wanted the music to express some strong messages about God and Christianity.
It doesn't seem to be off-putting because we're drawing in a huge cross-section of people from all walks of life, including residents of a local social housing estate and those recovering from drug and alcohol addictions based at a nearby rehab centre. We are now also actively involved in Christians Against Poverty and have CAP money coaches on hand too.
Almost as soon as we started in the hall, I was asked, 'What is your strategy for these people?' My answer was, and is, 'Preach the gospel and be open to the Holy Spirit. That's it.'
When it became clear that people had taken up the idea of Café Lite, I was asked what my strategy was going to be for discipleship. I said the answer was definitely not to make them go on some sort of organized course; people wouldn't want that – especially as they had never been to church anywhere before and had actually turned up because we offered them a bacon sandwich! Instead we are now developing a nurture course to help them tackle some key issues in a way that's relevant to them.
We also have lots of children at Café Lite, usually around 29. It was suggested that we should 'do' something for the children as a separate entity but I said we needed to ban the words 'ought', 'must' or 'should' in our Christian lives and that I didn't want Café Lite to be turned into a Sunday school in the village hall. It's a church in its own right.
Interestingly some people got very indignant about seeing kids with iPhones at Café Lite. It doesn't bother me because that's what kids do, they text each other. What was wonderful was the fact that they were actually texting, 'I'm at Café Lite, it's brilliant.' Another girl filmed what was happening on her phone and sent it to a friend to say how good it was.
The churches here have been serving this stretch of the Meon Valley for hundreds of years and we are so thankful that Café Lite and Puppets in Praise are also helping to meet the spiritual needs of those around us.
I've no idea what will happen or who will come week by week but I want us to take some risks in spreading the gospel.