Day: 5 November 2012

Reverb

Dave Saunders tells how his faith journey led him from England's south coast to become a VentureFX pioneer in Scotland.

It all goes back to walking along Eastbourne beach with my church leader, pouring my heart out with frustration at the fact that my schoolmates didn't want anything to do with Church. He then asked, 'What would Church look like for young people?'

After going on to help establish a youth church, which flopped after about six months, I decided to take a year out with Youth for Christ. I had no idea where I might be living following my YFC training but I was looking for the sunniest location, preferably near to Eastbourne. When I heard that YFC was working with the Methodist Church to help plant a youth church, I knew that was where I was to go. I then found out they were doing it in Inverness; I put that down to God's sense of humour!

Reverb - give wayI was 18 when I came to Inverness for my year out. Nine years later I'm still here. I knew when I first arrived that I loved this city and felt called to the young people who don't 'do' church or want anything to do with Christianity. My heart broke for the young people I met and that we had failed, as church, to communicate the great message of hope to them. In some ways I would say I was angry with the church because of that.

I was placed in a Methodist church. This was completely foreign to what I was used to but I was struck by Peter Howson's deep passion, as minister, to help young people engage with God and life in a way they could understand. He wasn't about getting young people into his service; it was about giving young people a chance to meet their creator.

So Revolution youth church was born and after two years I was asked to be its leader (even though I have had no formal theological training). I had gone from feeling hurt and frustrated by Church to being passionate about what it can be: a force for peace and justice, and a family that truly loves God and the communities around it.

We enjoyed four great years as Revolution and then had a radical rethink. As a result we went from being a programme-led Sunday evening service to being a group of people called to serve all the people of Merkinch and Dalneigh in Inverness. Merkinch is known locally as The Ferry, an area which is in the top 3% of deprived areas of Scotland.

Reverb logoWe changed our name from 'Revolution' to 'Reverb' because we want to reverberate the love of God in the community around us.

We are now a group of 8 – with about 25 or so in a larger core group – and between us we have many connections with the community; including all the young people, now in their twenties, who I met while working in the school.

We hold a written 'evolving covenant' which we call the 'invisible bond' with each other to help us to be clear that we only exist to serve God and to share His love and justice with the community around us. Every Sunday we check that this remains our priority before we then try to work out together how we can be better at it. The conversation over dinner is about what opportunities God gave us during that week, what scripture says about it and how we can learn from each other's experience of God in the world. It's where faith and life collide.

We have several local expressions of love:

  • Reverb - glovesdig your heart out. Local businesses and churches sponsor garden makeovers for deserving local people and we get involved in this practical expression of love for the community;

  • wash your heart out. This is based on Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet as a way to get to know people. We're willing to be there to get to know people better by saying, 'If you tell us who you are, we'll wash your car';

  • sing your heart out. This took place last Christmas when we organised a carol service in the football field.

  • path people. A phone number that anyone disadvantaged can ring over the winter months to ask us to clear their path of snow and ice.

This is all relationship-driven ministry, not personality-driven. Looking to the future, I would say failure would involve everything depending on me and all falling apart if I moved on. It's important not to follow me but to follow Christ.

'Success' would involve inspiring people to love God and love their neighbour the best they can in small pockets of churches, maybe 10 communities of 10 members.

Reverb - tableHowever it shapes up, the crucial thing is to have small groups engaged in conversation and meeting over a meal.  You don't need a large group to achieve huge difference.  It's easy to engage in the 'attractional model' of large events, it's an entirely different ball game to create missional disciples.

Reverb's mission is to instigate and cause holy mischief and I pray that will continue and grow as we see what God is doing in this area.

The missional life is not easy! But the challenges and opportunities it throws up reminds me of St Paul's words,

We can rejoice when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. For we know how dearly God loves us.

Romans 5.3-4

Fresh expressions: time for a revolution? (Michael Volland)

Michael VollandMichael Volland asks whether it's time for a revolution.

The trailblazing Fresh Expressions initiative coming out of the UK… has generated some wonderfully creative new forms (of church) but it seems to have had only marginal impact on its organisations. Wholesale renewal has not come about through its efforts precisely because it is a skunk works project – operating far from the centre of the organization… Unless these experimental forums are heartily owned by the broader system, their paradigmatic change remains a pipedream.

Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim, The Permament Revolution, Jossey-Bass, 2012, p172

That quote comes from chapter 8 of The Permanent Revolution by Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim. The statement was tucked away at the foot of page 172 but I thought it was worth sharing on a Facebook mission forum. My post – on the page for the Missional Communities, Orders and Project Hub at CMS – generated 67 comments, including several from Hirsch himself. It has since prompted me to provoke further (constructive) thought and discussion around the question of the impact of the Fresh Expressions initiative on the DNA of its partner denominations.

Hirsch and Catchim argue that – after 1700 years of Christendom – the Church needs to re-establish the fivefold ministries of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. They:

  • focus especially on the Church's need to recover apostolic imagination and practice;

  • point out the need for a reformulation of '…the ways that we think about church and the ways that we envision ministry and leadership';

  • articulate their desire to liberate minds and vocations;

  • highlight the need to change the game.

They are also unapologetic about their provocative vision and, although their work is scholarly and highly nuanced, no one would expect a book with the word ‘revolution’ in the title to be awash with gentle suggestions or to shy away from confrontation with established institutions.

Hirsch and Catchim's analysis of the missional situation in the West rightly propels their writing forward with the sort of urgency that generates straight talking. 'Straight talking' by human beings can never come from a place of absolute understanding but it is useful when it emerges out of reflection on long experience and it can be just what is needed to generate a serious re-appraisal of a given situation. Few who are concerned about the way in which the UK Church is to engage in the mission of Jesus would dismiss Hirsch and Catchim's straight talking out of hand. Of course, having said all of this, it is still right to question whether their comment about the impact of Fresh Expressions on partner denominations is entirely fair. And we cannot ignore the fact that they are writing from the United States and are therefore not fully immersed in the UK scene. However, the relative fairness of a comment from across the Pond shouldn't keep us from hearing something that might be important!

Some UK-based contributors to the Facebook comment stream viewed Hirsch and Catchim as making an unfair and under-informed critique of the state of play here. They emphasised the huge number of new initiatives that have occurred in the wake of the Mission-shaped Church report (2004) and to evidence of significant changes at the centre that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, including lay and ordained Pioneer Ministry, Bishop's Mission Orders, FEASTs, mission shaped ministry, Pioneer curacies and incumbencies, partnerships with the other denominations and para-church agencies.

Clearly the Fresh Expressions initiative has had a hugely positive impact in the UK and further afield. We can already see significant fruit and there is much more to come as various initiatives grow into maturity and as those who have come to faith via various fresh expressions inhabit their denominations and begin to have a say in shaping them.

Hirsch and Catchim do not contest any of this. In fact they celebrate it (read the quote again!) Rather, their view is that the missional mindset at the heart of the Fresh Expressions initiative does not appear to have been heartily owned across the UK system. This means that the sort of wholesale paradigmatic change that they believe should result from the activities of an apostolic church has not occurred – and indeed will not occur. They say it is all well and good to point to the progress that has been made but there are still significant changes required at the very heart of the denominations. This is not to diminish the work already done or to knock the denominations for the sake of it. It is rather to challenge us to take more seriously the need for a fundamental shift of perception and imagination at the core of the denominations as well as at the cutting edges.

Becoming defensive is one response to Hirsch and Catchim. This might involve pointing to the fundamentally incarnational (and therefore theoretically missional) nature of Anglican ecclesiology or drawing up a long list of success stories. I suggest that defensiveness is a waste of precious time. Challenges like Hirsch and Catchim's are helpful because they provoke us to look beyond our progress (actual or imagined) at what has remained untouched and which might require wise and courageous fresh attention.

Hirsch and Catchim go on to say,

If entrepreneurial effort is only sporadic, then serous systemic missional change is unlikely.

In North East England (I'm aware it may be a very different story elsewhere) an entrepreneurial or apostolic approach to mission has, in my opinion, been sporadic. I know this because I work with clergy and churches across the region. While I love the Church and trust the God who is able to breathe life into barren places, I also see the need for 'experimental forms being heartily owned by the broader system'. In this sense (and in my context) I think Hirsch and Catchim's work is a useful spur to ongoing efforts in the direction of paradigmatic change.