Month: March 2013

Eaton and Millbridge Project

The Eaton/Millbridge Project is part of the Uniting Church of Australia's Wellington Regional Mission (WRM). Rev Karyl Davison and a team of volunteers support people in the area and are hoping to see a fresh expression of church take shape.

When a new housing development started to be built in the Eaton area of Western Australia, it had no community facilities. The Wellington Regional Mission saw an opportunity to do ministry there and I took on the role of creating community in Eaton and Millbridge.

A few years ago the WRM consisted of a number of small, declining semi-rural congregations plus one large congregation in Bunbury, the regional centre. As a result of hearing about fresh expressions of church, and with the urging of some forward thinking people keen on mission-shaped ministry, the WRM sold unutilised property and put the funds into a new community-based ministry.

Eaton and MIllbridge - parachute gamesA team of people went out into the community to see what God was up to. A process of listening occurred, including community gatherings and individual conversations, which identified that people wanted opportunities to do things as a 'family'. The WRM has invested in the Project by buying a manse in Millbridge (opposite a popular park) and I've been there since January last year.

As the Eaton and Millbridge area underwent dramatic residential growth, the WRM saw a great opportunity to help create a sense of community and bring the community together. The project had been a dream for a number of years but it was ready to move to the next level.

I have responsibility for Collie, Waterloo and Harvey congregations as well as the Eaton/Millbridge Project – being church in the community for the new housing development which will eventually cover about 500 acres of land. By its completion it will have over 1400 new homes, two government-owned  primary schools, and a Catholic school. The community is made up primarily of Anglo Australians, though there are a number of families from other cultural backgrounds.

The Eaton/Millbridge Project team is currently made up of volunteers from members of the Wellington Regional Mission congregations, a significant number of whom are residents in the area or have family living there. After 12 months we have got to the stage where other residents are becoming interested in joining the team.

Eaton and Millbridge - Santa workshopHowever, at this early stage of the Project we are still trying to make connections with people in the community. This is done mainly through events. We have now had two Easter Egg Hunts, a 'mini festival' called Christmas on Hunter, Movies by Moonlight as well as a number of smaller activities. Most are held in local parks as there are no indoor community spaces in the suburb.

We took part in the national Clean Up Australia Day by getting involved at Cadell Park, Millbridge. This year's Easter Egg Hunt was held in the same place and we had games and activities, plus the Hunt, and the all important coffee and cupcakes. We had over 150 people there, about two thirds of whom were children.

We continue to listen to the community and for the Spirit. At each event we have a comments board and invite people to make suggestions or tell us something about their community. We have also created a Community Banner featuring the handprints of all of those who come to our events.

Eaton and Millbridge - handprint bannerIn terms of 'advertising' what we do, we intend to connect with people electronically as well as face to face. All of our promotional material for the Project notes that we have a Facebook page and this enables me to let lots of people know about what's going on. I also send out reminders by email and we do a door-to-door leaflet drop before every event.

For those in the Project team, God's presence is much more apparent at their community events in a way that they never feel in regular worship. There is such a great sense of community and energy and fun it's a privilege to be part of.

We seek to engage with our community without an agenda of 'getting them to come to church'. We aim to be willing to receive hospitality as well as offer it; listen; and seek to identify what God is up to in our community. Our intention is that, as we gain the people's trust, we will begin offering different kinds of contemplative spaces at our events and invite them to engage in that alongside the fun activities such as games, craft, movies etc.

We hope the result will be some form of 'congregation' for unchurched or dechurched people but if we're true to our commitment to listen to the community and the Spirit, we can't set out to form a new congregation but to see what emerges.

Cookie-cutter Church (Kris Beckert)

Kris Beckert wonders whether we need a wider range of cookie cutters.

Most of my family and close friends know I am one of those people who will not be found baking tasty treats in the kitchen for hours on end. 

When I was a kid, the compulsion to bake only arose once a year around Christmas time. We kept our set of metal cookie cutters, maybe 20 of them in all different shapes and sizes, in a plastic bag. But year after year, as the dough was chilling, I would reach into the bag and select the same five shapes to use over and over again. The reasoning was simple: they fitted the season, I knew the dough wouldn't get stuck in them and their shapes baked well in the oven. I could expect my cookies to be ready to eat.

Duh. Why would you even risk trying anything else?

Years later and I've begun to wrestle with that same question as it applies to ministry. Apart from beginning my ministry with the launch of a church plant, much of my experience as a pastor has been in the shape of what most people would draw if they selected 'Church' in a game of Pictionary: a building with or without steeple; preacher/pastor; pulpit; choir or worship group; Christians studying the Bible; money given to the poor; a busy car park. If we took a drive around your town, most likely we could pick out at least a dozen churches with similar shapes, actions, ministries, and advertisement campaigns telling people their church is the best thing since the invention of the chocolate chip.

Kind of like a Cookie-cutter Church.

And the fact is, many of us really have wondered what Church could be like beyond those same four or five shapes we've been using year after year in stone buildings, brick sanctuaries, church plants, and historic communities. Many of us have experienced some kind of call from God tugging at our heart, calling us to reach into the bag and pull out a new shape of ministry to try—one that fits better around the countless people in our community who have no desire to enter the form of Cookie-cutter Church, yet who still need the Gospel. We find ourselves sitting in our offices, a sermon draft and the minutes of some meeting or other on the desk in front of us, a calendar dotted with parish socials, weddings and funerals; our most recent salary slip in our bag – and we feel that call.

But when you risk picking up a new cookie-cutter, you have to put an old one down and that's what scares us so much. We don't know HOW it's going to work or IF it's going to work. There's something comforting about having that sermon and minutes on your desk, those events and expectations on your calendar, that pay in your bank account. It's how your predecessor, your mentor, and your clergy friends from college have shaped their ministry all along. It's the expected job description of the pastorate that predicts how their cookie is going to rise and bake and what kind of story they will tell.

Then you realise that God doesn't want to write their story with you.

It's not that the traditional cookie-cutters of what we are used to as Church aren't mission-shaped; it's just that the Holy Spirit does not restrict us to using only them. Just as the early Church took on various forms in various places, led by disciples who understood the boundaries as well as the flexibility of the Spirit, God has gifted and called some of us to do the same. It's interesting how the attractiveness of following that call often varies with our present circumstance. Obedience to his call may mean you have no 'pastor's office', no building campaign, no pulpit or secretary or holiday bible school. Instead, you may be holding a support group for abused women, discussing theodicy in a pub, or praying with a running team before their first marathon – all exciting, scary, and not quite the prestige of the pastorate celebrated by many of your clergy colleagues and peers.  

As a relatively 'green' pastor, I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I didn't have to choose between mission and maintenance but instead be mission empowered and endowed by maintenance – as well as being given a share of the same materials and resources to get the new cookie-cutter started. I can't help but wonder what would happen if I followed the call to fresh expressions of church, regardless of what success or failure I may find myself in. I can't help but wonder if God might be waiting for us to use some of the other cookie-cutters he's given, those that arise in the dreams of you and me.

But first, we've got to step into the kitchen.

Quiet Days – update Mar13

Steve Tilley has run monthly Quiet Days in his north Somerset home for nearly six years. Demand has been so great that a second group is now set to meet in a neighbouring village.

It has taken some while but I have finally found someone else who shares the vision, has a passion for the Quiet Days and a large enough house to accommodate a second group three miles away.

As a result, after Easter, we will be doubling the available space for local Quiet Days by running two a month, one in Nailsea and the other in Backwell. There will be a fortnight's gap between the two, we'll use the same Bible passages at each one and ban people from going to both of them.

This is all in response to escalating demand for the Quiet Days – we have regularly had to turn people away – but we are separating the Days in this way because we want to make them available to more people, not offer more to the same group of people who already attend.

Quiet Days - backwell milestoneI am licensed to a group of six Anglican churches in the area and I had been thinking about how the ministry could grow because it takes a whole day of my time and I can't do that more than once a month. The leaders of the new group are a couple I know as members of one of those churches; we will stay in close touch so people can go to either session and keep a sense of journey.

The Quiet Days continue to attract three very distinct communities of people:

  • about five or six who come every month;

  • another 15-20 who turn up two or three times a year;

  • those who come once to sample it.

Most of those who come along are already part of a church and Quiet Days offer another way of exploring faith for them but one of our regulars would say that this is most definitely her church. She doesn't go anywhere else.

Our times together are not guided in the way that a retreat is guided but we decided to look at God's Word together so biblical content is at the heart of what we do. We generally read a Book of the Bible, one or two chapters at a time. I do a little bit of putting it into context, making connections with what we looked at in the previous month and the bigger picture of salvation, but we also make sure that people have space and time to share what they have gleaned from the passage themselves.

I think the main gift I'm offering is hospitality and not Bible teaching. That's why finding the right person to expand these Quiet Days has not been easy because we have been looking for someone who wouldn't be concerned or anxious about having strangers wandering around their home. We are building a community of people who want to journey together but it's a slow process.

(CEN) Remaining a prayer movement

One of the great dangers for any of church movement, including Fresh Expressions, is that work which began in humble dependence on the Holy Spirit morphs into reliance on human competence.

We are inclined to pray when we are out of our depth, and not to pray when we think we know what we are doing. One of the hardest biblical texts to believe is Jesus' blunt statement, 'apart from me you can do nothing.' It is not surprising that he went on to say, 'If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.' (John 15.5-7)

I am convinced that the extraordinary development of fresh expressions in the church in recent years is an initiative of the Holy Spirit, in which we have been privileged to participate, and for which we owe great thanksgiving. I frequently say that we have caught a wave of the Spirit and that central to my job description are the words 'don't fall off'. There has been a renewal of missional imagination in much of the church, a willingness to risk new things for God and a discovery of new gifts and pioneering callings. All of this is evidence that the Spirit is at work. The core principles of prayerful discernment and incarnational mission have been learned by watching what the Spirit has been doing, often at the frontiers of mission. These principles are essential but only remain fruitful if they continue to be carried out in humble dependence on the Spirit.

That humble dependence is expressed in prayer. When the 24/7 Prayer movement joined Fresh Expressions it was both recognition of the centrality of prayer and listening to God in our practice – and a challenge to remain true to this original DNA. Prayer is the bedrock of all that we do; it is essential for a mixed economy church in practice and it sustains, informs and breathes life into any movement within the church.

We know more about planting fresh expressions than we did when we started. That is good, as there is no benefit in ignorance. But 'knowhow' does not win disciples or establish contextual churches. In that we are assistants only, totally reliant on the Holy Spirit. We are dependent on God for the things that only God can do. Prayer is not a device to get God's seal of approval on existing plans. It is not a preliminary stage until we know what to do. It is an expression of trusting dependence. We are to pray in faith as we seek God's initial and continuing direction, whether for local mission or for national priorities.

This week we pray particularly for Archbishop Justin, as he takes up his public leadership of the Church of England, as it engages in its mission to the nation. We pray that God will bless him with the vision, wisdom and discernment that he needs.

Our next Hour of prayer for fresh expressions of church takes place on the day after Pentecost (Monday 20th May 2013) from 12noon (fresh expressions have spread to various parts of the world and people are invited to pray from noon local time, wherever they are in the world). If your church has planted a fresh expression, make it the gift of this focused hour of prayer. If your church is asking how it could reach those it fails to reach through its current activities, make that the focus of prayer, and be open to the possibility of a fresh expression. If your church has little focus on mission beyond the current congregation, pray for the missionary Spirit to stir its heart and open its eyes.

On the original day of Pentecost, as the disciples were praying, the Spirit was poured out for innovative, boundary-crossing mission 'to Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth'. But the chapters which follow show how hard it was for the church to cross cultural boundaries. They were wonderfully blessed at home in Jerusalem but Samaria and the ends of the earth were not originally in their sights. Pray that, locally, nationally and internationally, we will be open to hear the Spirit's call and to obey. Pray that we may not be blinded by all that has been achieved already, and so miss the further imaginative steps that God intends. Pray for continual wisdom and courage from the Spirit, locally, nationally and internationally.

Movements birthed in prayer are sustained in prayer. Fresh expressions of church are birthed in prayerful listening and they develop and mature through prayerful listening. Praying pioneers make praying disciples. The quality of our mission often provides the evidence of the quality of our prayer. We are all too busy not to pray.

Boring Wells – update Mar13

As a fresh expressions of church in and around Belfast, Boring Wells is a network of different communities of faith or 'wells' for people who may find the journey into the culture of church too difficult. Leader Adrian McCartney gives an update.

We have established wells in a variety of contexts, such as people's homes, a community centre, a school, around a pub community, a decommissioned church hall, and a coffee shop. Each well is a different stage of development and not every attempt has been successful.

As a complementary missional community to the inherited church structure, we work alongside parishes to:

  • stimulate, initiate and create missional opportunities;

  • disciple and support pioneer leaders and help them work alongside existing church programmes.

Boring Wells - bannerWe constantly aim to reach those who sit outside those programmes but we don't have a hidden agenda for trying to get them to go to a church somewhere. Instead the idea is that we allow and encourage faith to grow among them, seeing a community of faith develop in their context and for it to be expressed in whatever way that is. Some of the communities have developed a side to them that looks quite like a church type thing; others are way back on the journey and don't look anything like a church-type thing.

But we believe there is a journey in this and there's an exploration so we're working with all of them in that. They are all led by lay people who are self trained and self motivated but, because there are a growing number of people who want to do these things, we feel we have to support them more because most of them have probably come from church backgrounds where there was support and fellowship and belonging.

We have something called The Gathering which is a fortnightly opportunity for anyone associated or interested in any wells' activities to get together for worship, teaching and sharing. That takes place in St Colman's Church Hall, Dunmurry. We also have regular worship evenings in the home of wells' members.

Boring Wells - WOWA well called WOW is based in a school for teenagers with severe and profound learning difficulties; it is probably the best thing we do. It started when the parents of some of these young people told us that it was too difficult to take them into a traditional church environment. The name of the well comes from the question, 'What does Jesus say when he sees you walking in the door?' The answer is, 'WOW!'

The most recent well that we've been working on has developed in an interesting way. In the middle of 2011, another church closed in Belfast – St Christopher's, Mersey Street – with three parishes being amalgamated into one and two sets of church buildings closed down. I contacted the rector of the new 'conglomerate' and asked him, 'How are you going to cope with all of this? It creates an enormous inner city parish'. He said, 'We don't have the resources to do hardly anything'.

It was then I asked if he would let us bring a team of people to one of the disused sets of buildings. In early 2012 he gave us the go-ahead and we moved a crowd of people from another area of the city to meet there. St Christopher's is in the streets of terraced houses that were homes to the workers for the Titanic; the yellow cranes of the now defunct shipyard are landmarks in the area. The people who moved to St Christopher's fresh expression had started with us in a pub and then went from there to a school building – but we discovered that the well didn't work because we started doing services on a Sunday morning and all we gathered was disillusioned Christians from other places and that wasn't the aim. The aim, as always, was to reach people outside, beyond the edges of the church.

Boring Wells - larderThen, in late 2011, one of our guys said, 'Remember how we circled the wagons when we settled ourselves here to do church? It's time to put the wheels back on the wagon…' So put the wheels back on and moved the whole congregation down to inner east Belfast into an empty church building.

Our Bishop told us that the one thing we were not allowed to do was Sunday morning services. We thought, 'Well, that's OK because we now know that having Sunday morning services is exactly what we shouldn't be doing to start something!' Instead we have started a Messy Church, set up our own version of a foodbank called The Larder, organised craft/sewing mornings and provided second hand clothing – and been involved in a lot of community action in one way or another. We are loosely calling it 'The Larder, The Stitch and The Wardrobe' because CS Lewis grew up in this part of Belfast.

Now people have begun to gather, to become a new community of faith, and it's been really exciting to see something begin to flourish again in a place where it felt like the tide had gone out but actually the tide is coming in.

Abiding in the ‘old, new and being renewed’ (Nick Baines)

Nick Baines explores abiding in the 'old, new and being renewed'.

I sometimes wonder if it is a general human thing or just a Christian thing that we think in terms of 'either-or' rather than 'both-and'. Fresh expressions assumes that there are other expressions of church – not all of which are to be thought of as 'stale'. Alternative worship assumes there is something to be alternative to – and the need for an alternative need not imply that the original is wrong. In both these cases the language/terminology, whilst not of itself problematic, can evoke assumptions that are unhelpful.

In his Lent book, Abiding, Professor Ben Quash rightly draws attention to the importance of place and the Christian vocation to commit to particular place. Behind this lies a reality that has shaped the Anglican vocation in particular and which some people feel is in danger of being lost too easily. Bishop John Inge, among others, has worked on the importance of space and place for identity and Christian mission – trying to recover for the contemporary age an awareness of and commitment to location and physical community on the part of the Christian church.

The Anglican bit is simply that we organize territorially in a way that tries to ensure Christian presence in places where others have left. Until recently Bradford Cathedral was the only place of Christian worship within the inner ring road of Bradford. The visual landscape and the presence of people in a building in a place still count for a huge amount in terms of measurable commitment to a city and community. In some of our deprived areas the church is the only public space left – and the church the only body of non-professional people to remain engaged with otherwise potentially forgotten people.

Being visibly present in a particular place is a commitment that we must not lose.

However, that does not imply that such a commitment represents the totality of Anglican or Christian service. There has never been a time when the 'static' did not need the development of new forms or communities of worship or mission. And although I have been annoyed many times by pioneer ministry candidates telling me that they want to do the exciting stuff of church without the boring bits, I still affirm that our societies need both traditional and fresh communities of worship and belonging – and do not need such communities to be involved in some 'either-or' competition.

I want to ask some sharp questions of fresh expressions when hearing the language used. But, the same scrutiny needs to be applied to traditional churches, especially where challenges are being avoided, future development ignored and assumptions about future existence being made without regard for reality.

If I want my critique of mission-shaped church taken seriously (that it assumes a middle-class church and world where networking might transcend locality… and pays no attention to the deprived communities where people are condemned to a particular place), then I also have to critique a parish system that props up unviable churches and buildings for fear of addressing the complexity of change.

The world needs a church that is old, new and being renewed.

New Song Network – Mar13

Jackie Bellfield is minister of Bold St Methodist Mission, Latchford Methodist Church and Rixton Methodist Church, Warrington. She also leads New Song Network, which is becoming a fresh expression of church.

It all started four years ago with New Song Café at Bold St Methodist Mission; the New Song Network is a growing Christian community which has developed from that.

New Song Café was, and still is, a gathering of people that meet at 7pm on the fourth Sunday of the month at Bold St Church. Our initial intention four years ago was to start off in the church venue but eventually move New Song Café gatherings into a local Costa coffee shop to worship there.

I thought maybe 20 people would come to the first New Song Cafe. In fact, 65 people turned up so we quickly had to move from the church coffee shop into the upstairs hall at Bold St. We're still there. We haven't quite made it into Costa because 130 people are now meeting at New Song Café for worship, prayer and praise. Initially, our thoughts were that 7pm on a Sunday night was not the best time to arrange anything like this and we were 'warned' that no-one would come to church at that time on a Sunday night – but we discovered that it was a very good time for a lot of people. It's true to say that it has outgrown our expectations and become an amazing time of gathering together.

New Song - café tableIn fact the whole idea of New Song has grown more than we could possibly have imagined as New Song Network has developed. The initial impetus was to have a sense of being together and of fellowship and of doing something new that may attract those no longer being reached by our churches. Inherited church continued to be very important to us but we also felt that God wanted to do something different, something that sat alongside inherited or traditional church – not to replace it but to sit alongside it. At that stage we thought that would simply involve going into Costa as a new way of presenting worship but a much bigger picture emerged.

Among those who came to New Song Café were those who had drifted away from church for a variety of reasons; New Song has become a stepping stone or a safe environment for them to dip their toe back in the water of church. It also became clear that people wanted something to build on what they were discovering at New Song Café. That’s why we then started Discipleship evening, a separate teaching session, also monthly.

New Song - breakfastThen, just over fifteen months ago, we started New Song Breakfast – involving a lot of bacon butties – at 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning at Latchford Methodist Church. Attracting some of the same people different people also started coming to that and suddenly this Network of Café, Discipleship and Breakfast started to develop.

And then under the umbrella of our calling, the four strands of priorities within the Methodist Church – worship, learning and caring, service, evangelism – we felt that we wanted to look at other areas too so under 'services we began to explore how we could reach out to our community. We launched the Community Action Team and people started saying, 'Yes we want to be part of that too'.

What had started out in New Song Café as a place to worship in a different sort of way was developing into an ecclesial community as New Song Network. We realised that a fresh expression of church was beginning to form before our very eyes and God was doing something far greater than we possibly ever dared dream or imagine.

Some people go to Breakfast and Café, some just go to Breakfast and help with our Community Action Team; others get involved in the various aspects of the Network. It is so exciting to see this community being born and this church being developed.

New Song - community action teamWe are now encouraging people to step up and take responsibility for elements of the Network as part of the leadership. I already work with the most amazing team; they are kind, considerate, generous and they love being involved. People are passionate about what we're doing with New Song and they are passionate about worship, learning and caring, service and evangelism so we are urging more of them to take risks in the power of faith. There’s also a lot of fun involved because – in addition to the worship and the service – we have walking groups, quizzes, curry nights and lots of other things. There are many different ways to share the Good News of Jesus!

The relationship between New Song Network and the established churches is really strong and very, very important. New Song Café wouldn't exist without Bold St Church; the congregation supports the Café and the Café supports the church. After the morning service, people from the church go and set the hall up ready for Café and that means such a lot. It's a great relationship and they turn up en masse to support the Café in the evening too.

The same is true of New Song Breakfast; that has gone ahead because Latchford Methodist Church welcomed and embraced it. As part of what has happened there, families have now come into the church at Latchford so we see the growth there of inherited church and a new way of being church.

This is not about the inherited and the new being poles apart, this is how the two can work in tandem and, for me, as minister of both there is something beautiful and harmonious about that – how two can grow and learn together.

New Song - crematoriumOne of the most moving and far-reaching ways of serving our community takes place on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Mothering Sunday when we go to the local crematorium and cemetery to give out hot drinks to people leaving floral tributes in memory of loved ones. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2012, 35 volunteers gave out more than 700 hot drinks in what was an amazing and beautiful time. I'd previously heard of a small church that did this act of kindness to those visiting their local graveyard and we decided to pick up on that idea because I thought we, as Christians, shouldn't just be in our churches on those special and vulnerable days of the year, we should be out there with those who grieve. I asked the local council for permission, they agreed, and we're now in our fourth year of offering hot drinks and a listening ear.

We draw alongside people and hear their stories – whether it's their first year of being there or their 40th year of being there – hearing about who it is they've come to visit, showing that the church is not immune from their grief but stands with them. It's a way of saying, 'we're here' but actually more importantly, 'God is here, is alongside'.

New Song - welcomersSo many things have come out of these times. It has made quite an impact on the volunteers who come and it has also started so many relationships and conversations. There have even been occasions when a bereaved family has rung a funeral director and said, 'There’s a lady with purple hair, a minister, who gives out hot drinks at the cemetery; could she possibly do my loved one's funeral?' That only happened because they had seen us handing out those drinks where they were, that then became a link to church they hadn't had before.

In this, and many other ways, we have seen God in action as we join in with him in sharing alongside people in our inherited church settings and through New Song Network.

So what next? We are developing our weekly Advent and Lent study evenings (which have met in a local coffee shop) into house groups to further develop discipleship and learning together. Then there is a desire for Pub Church, a weekend away and other ideas as to how we develop this amazing community. It is so exciting – and we are thankful to our God.