Day: 10 December 2013

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

One of the most common misunderstandings about fresh expressions is the belief that they are new types of worship service. It is an understandable mistake as worship lies at the heart of the life of the church, and fresh expressions are new congregations or churches, (not rebranded or experimental church services). There is also an honourable stream within, and pre-dating, the Fresh Expressions initiative, called ‘alternative worship’. However, our recommendation is that the shaping of an act of worship normally lies near the end, rather than at the beginning, of the planting process.

There are a number of reasons for this. Ideally fresh expressions are planted following a process of prayerful listening, and making relationships through acts of service. But if the initial point of contact is a worship event it can only be one which it is hoped the relevant people will like, rather than one which they are involved in shaping, or which we can shape for them with greater care, because we know them. There is also a danger of self indulgence, of creating an event which suits us, or which relieves the frustrations we have with the worship in our own church. 'I like it so they will as well' is not the way to plant. What Mission-shaped Church called 'dying to live' challenges us to sacrifice our preferences for the sake of what is appropriate for others. Finally it is likely that the result will be an event to attend rather than a church community to which to belong. If there is no intention to form a new congregation, it is not a fresh expression 'of church'.

To begin with worship may be feasible for the de-churched, who retain a memory of what church was like (up to the point they decided to leave!), but it is less likely to be appropriate for the largest part of our adult mission field, those who have never been involved before. For many worship is culturally strange. They don't have the toolkit for worship. They don't know the Biblical story. They only community sing at football matches and they don't understand our vocabulary. With them we have to start much further back.

Of course, if a fresh expression is planted by transitioning an existing piece of work in the community, then the listening, serving, community forming and witnessing have probably already taken place. In which case you are not starting with worship, but introducing it at the right time. A culturally appropriate, recognisably Christian practice of worship, including baptism and holy communion, is the aim for all fresh expressions that hope to endure, bit mostly it is a later development, not the starting point.

+Graham

You can read another perspective on this in David Muir's post on the Share blog. The Guide also has more on the fresh expressions journey and the up dimension of church.

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

The fresh expressions initiative is not about fresh expressions of church alone. It is about a mixed economy church.

In February, the General Synod of the Church of England voted unanimously to 'affirm the mixed economy of traditional churches and fresh expressions of church, working in partnership, as the most promising mission strategy in a fast changing culture.'

The key word is 'partnership'. The mixed economy is not a strategic device to allow the newer to coexist with the older. It is a commitment to maintain the unity and common life of the Spirit across an increasingly diverse and fast-changing mission field.

'Economy' is an appropriate word to apply to the Church, as long as we draw its content from Scripture and not from the global economic crisis! In Ephesians 1:10 Paul speaks of God's 'plan' to gather all things up in Christ. The word translated as 'plan' gives us our word 'economy'. It is a word about the proper running of a large Roman household, applied to God's restoring of the universe through his Son. In the next chapter the church is called God's 'household' (2:19), from the same family of words, and has a vital part to play in the 'plan'.

But this also is a mixed economy church. The household of God is established through the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in Christ. In Judea the churches were predominantly Jewish. Elsewhere in the Roman Empire they varied from a mixture of Jews and Gentiles to some that were predominantly Gentile – depending on the mission field. But they were all part of the one household playing their part in the one economy of God.

It was not always an easy relationship. The problems it caused resonate through Acts and Paul's letters. Paul's churches sent generous aid to the Jerusalem church, which contained their sternest critics. It was what Christians did!

In the same way fresh expressions of church and more traditional forms are to honour, support and pray for one another. They are to recognise each other's integrity and distinctive gifts. The younger can learn from the older without having to use the same cultural forms. The older can have faith, for their own mission, renewed through seeing what God is doing among the younger. The older will need to exercise patience while the newer finds its own shape and identity. While the newer recognizes that the older gave it birth. Above all the mixed economy is about mutual generosity.

When Visions began in York, its primary mission field was the dance and nightclub culture, and the new community immersed itself in their mission and created appropriate forms of meeting and worship for their calling. But when the parish church's children's work was short of musicians, members of Visions, who had been in the clubs just hours before, led the children's worship, in a style they no longer used for themselves, because that was what you did in God's economy of grace. The mixed economy is about diversity and mutual generosity – for the plan of God. I conclude with a quotation from Archbishop Rowan's speech to the Synod.

The mixed economy takes both elements seriously, both traditional forms of church and emerging forms of church… and when we think about how partnership best works, we must surely realise that it's when both elements are taking each other seriously and gratefully and interacting with each other. Working together creatively in partnership is indeed the most promising mission strategy.

+Graham

You can read another perspective on the mixed economy on Malcolm Herbert's post on the Share blog.

Graham Cray’s monthly e-xpressions column.

What happens when the founding leader of a fresh expression, or a key member of the original team moves on? This is the point of transition when fresh expressions and church plants are particularly vulnerable.

Leaders move on for a variety of reasons. I have known volunteer lay leaders to move on because of anything from changes to their family circumstances, their employers redeploying them out of the area, exhaustion or even a call to ordination. Ordained or other stipendiary lay leaders may move because of a clear call of God to a new ministry, because they are running out of steam or money, or because their gifting is initial pioneering rather than nurturing a fresh expression to maturity.

Whatever the reason, one day most fresh expressions will have to face changes in leadership. There is never an ideal moment for a key person to leave, it is always disruptive and inconvenient, but much more so if no one has thought about it in advance. There are three main ways of going about it.

1. Recruit a new leader from outside.

For larger projects this may be essential and there are a growing number of recognised pioneers trained or in training. A new leader from outside can bring renewed vision, if, perhaps, the fresh expression has lost its missional edge. The danger, on the other hand, is that they may arrive with their own clear vision and pay insufficient attention to the DNA of what God has already been doing there. The listening process at the birth of a fresh expression is equally important at key points of transition.

2. An existing team member becomes the leader.

Ideally the founding team will have been established with the potential for this in mind. A fresh expression started by a team is less vulnerable to the loss of one leader. But this will only help if the ethos of the team is to help its members increase their leadership capacity.

3. Develop indigenous leadership from among the people for whom the fresh expression was established.

This is not always possible in time, if a leader moves on quickly, but it is essential to the DNA of a healthy fresh expression. If fresh expressions are to be sustainable they have to develop the capacity to grow leaders. Indigenous leadership is one of the keys to ongoing mission. So even those pioneers whose gifting is to initiate a project, and then move on quickly, still have a responsibility to develop or apprentice potential leaders, from the beginning of their work.

All of this is much easier if it has been the deliberate intention of the fresh expression from the beginning. Leadership development is directly related to disciple making and is an essential part of it. Disciples are best formed, and leadership potential identified, by involving people in mission from an early stage. Draw people into what you are doing and allow them to flourish.

A leadership crisis might raise important questions about that fresh expression. If it is primarily a gathering or an event, rather than a community with a mission, which is served by the gathering or event, it will tend to gather consumers rather than grow disciples. Be a fledgling community on mission with God and disciple making and leadership development may prove (a little) easier!

+Graham

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

At the changing the landscape event on the Lincoln Showground, Archbishop Rowan reminded us that

Fresh Expressions is not a quick fix. It's not an instant solution to the Church's problems of membership and support, or whatever – it's not a quick fix for the issues and needs of those involved.

We live in an impatient society and an instant culture, often under financial and other pressures to demonstrate 'results'. But some things simply can't be done instantly. They take time and require the right conditions. The planting of a fresh expression of church, and the growth of men and women into Christ, both fall into this category.

As the Archbishop said,

It takes time to be a Christian. There are things that instantly make sense and make a difference and there are things that slowly, and sometimes rather painfully, find their way into your mind and heart.

I found one image from the Lincoln event particularly helpful. Chris Russell, the vicar of St Laurence Reading, spoke of the need to 'lay a path' for young people to Jesus. 'Path laying' is a good image for both the task of establishing a fresh expression, and for the task of helping those who belong to it to grow in Christian maturity.

Through listening to God, and meeting and serving people where they are, we discover where the path has to start. We are also clear where the path is not intended to go. It will not normally lead out of the community or network to which God has called you and will call them. But it is intended to lead to faith in Christ in a community, which will embody and serve him there. But the path will be laid one step at a time as Christ prepares the way. At the simplest level we call the steps 'loving and serving', 'building community', 'exploring discipleship' and 'church taking shape'. But these are only outline descriptions to help provide an overall sense of direction. There is no alternative to the patient process of listening to God and to people as each step is laid. We are path-layers to Jesus for those who don't know him, and don't know how to find him. We should not be surprised that it takes time.

But we are also path-layers, so that those who belong to our fresh expression can grow, with us into Christian maturity. This requires a well-beaten path of Christian habits and practices through which the Holy Spirit forms Christian character. The style and language of these will need to be appropriate to the fresh expression and its content, but we need to be aware that there is something deeply counter cultural about Christian disciplines – regular prayer, learning from scripture, worship, Holy Communion, community and sacrificial service are intended to make us something that we will never become naturally. They are the pathway to becoming like Christ. And that also takes time.

+Graham

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

Funding is always a pressure. In church life, as in home life and business, there always seems to be more demand, or desire, than there are resources. So when new initiatives are proposed there is pressure about funding them. That is particularly the case at the moment, when the global Credit Crunch has hit the church's resources just as hard as any other part of society. So how do we fund fresh expressions of church?

To begin with, don't make your fresh expression too ambitious – as I wrote last month, don't overstretch yourself. Better to start small and grow a new congregation gradually. It may well prove more stable in the long run. Fresh expressions do not necessarily need large budgets. The resources they need most are people and time. This may also be a resource in short supply, but the key to planting could well be the release of a small dedicated team, who are freed from other responsibilities to major on the task.

Church councils and similar groups also need to look at how they budget. The danger is that resources may be allocated to maintenance without proper consideration of mission. If the church sets aside, say, 10% of its income for overseas mission partners and Christian development agencies, should it not also set aside a percentage of income for its local outreach, and then use the remainder to live within its means for maintenance. As churches we need to learn to budget for the future. More than a third of adults in Britain have never had a meaningful contact with a church. The average Church of England worshipper is fourteen years older than the national average age. Just to invest in maintenance, and more of the same, is to make decline far more likely.

If resources are tight, when we budget at home, we say that we can only add something if something else is removed. If there is to be planting there may need to be pruning. Regular prayerful review needs to check whether existing projects and financial commitments are still fulfilling the purpose for which they were established.

The positive side of all this is that imaginative mission often releases new giving. People, who are reluctant to give more for maintenance, may pray and give sacrificially for projects which are for others rather than ourselves, and which see a local church willing to risk and step outside its comfort zone. The call of the Holy Spirit releases money as well as workers.

One way of affording to start a fresh expression would be to set a team set aside to plant it, and to set aside their existing giving for the new project. In some church plants team members with full time employment contribute together to support a colleague to work full or part time on the project. All fresh expressions of church, irrespective of the source of their start up funding, should build the call to discipleship and stewardship into their life from the beginning, and work towards being both self-supporting and sacrificially generous. This takes time, but if it is not in the initial DNA it is very difficult to add later.

If the fresh expression is being planted in response to the leading of the Holy Spirit we may be sure of the resources needed. If new ones are needed God does provide. But often we find he has already provided: but we need to reorganize our budgets, lifestyles or giving.

The Fresh Expressions Initiative itself was funded though the release of new giving, through the Lambeth Partnership.  The first phase was a gift to the churches, rather than an extra demand on their resources. The second phase is largely funded from charitable sources with only a limited part coming from the partner denominations.

+Graham

Graham Cray’s monthly e-xpressions column.

It is often easier to get something started than to keep it going long term. When you are still setting out chairs and tables, preparing a power point, or putting up notices, a year later; the first flush of enthusiasm and excitement can fade.

If, as I believe, we are sharing in an initiative of the Holy Spirit, we will be sustained. He will give the growth (1 Corinthians 3.6-9). But it still matters how we plant and water the gospel message.

If you are involved in leading a fresh expression of church, make sure that you maintain your own spiritual life with God. You won’t be able to take people further than you have gone yourself. If your relationship with God becomes stale or routine why should anyone else be attracted by it? Don’t live off a reserve tank with God because you are so busy leading a fresh expression. Adrenalin can’t sustain you in the long term.

Provide ‘dip in’ opportunities where not yet Christians can ‘try’ prayer, or explore Jesus for themselves; or where de-churched friends can put their toe back into the pool. One fresh expression in Norfolk provides a café environment through the morning , with a menu of twenty minute events in the next room – (prayer stations, a guided meditation, a Bible study etc.) Allow people gradual steps to seek Christ for themselves. An Alpha, Emmaus or Start course could be provided as a next step.

Connect the content of your fresh expression to people’s daily lives, perhaps having a spot, each time, where someone shares about their job or daily responsibilities, and how faith or prayer have made a difference. Research into people giving up on church shows that many people found the Sunday gathering irrelevant to what they face in the rest of the week. One of the aims of any fresh expression is the development of whole life discipleship. So connect the faith to daily life as soon as you can.

Finally, don’t overstretch yourselves by being over elaborate. If you take too much time making the environment where you meet ‘just perfect’, you will wear yourselves out. There is such a thing as ‘good enough’ hospitality. Don’t invest so much time in the gathering part of your fresh expression that you have no time to attend to further networking and discipleship. Rather, invest in particular individuals or families, helping them to faith and drawing them into sharing some responsibility within the community you are forming. If in doubt, invest in people.

There is further helpful material available on the Guide pages How can we sustain our fresh expression?.

Establishing the mixed economy church, and growing a fresh expression to maturity is a long haul, not quick fix.

+Graham

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

Fresh expressions of church are for all generations, from pre-school children and their families to the 'Jagger generation' (Old Mick is a pensioner now!) and every possible local combination. But it is particularly good to see older generations blessing God's work among younger ones.

The Methodist chapel on Polzeath beach had just four members left – the longest serving being 90 and 85 years old – when the suggestion was made that the chapel be developed as a fresh expression for the surfer community who flocked to that beach most of the year. It took them a whole thirty seconds to agree to the idea, and then to actively bless the work as it took shape as Tubestation.

A group of senior members of a Women's Institute, many in their eighties, once told me that they were worried that none of their grandchildren ever came to church. 'Do you think they would ever come to a church like ours?' they asked. When I replied that I did not think they would, they asked what could be done? There is now a monthly, all age fresh expression of church in the barn where we were meeting.

In Luke, chapter one, there is a lovely example of this cross-generational blessing when Elizabeth, 'in her old age', greeted her relative Mary, who was probably about fifteen, with wonderful Holy Spirit inspired word of praise and encouragement. 'Blessed are you'. Elizabeth thanks God for something which, she could not yet see, which would take place through some one else, and which still awaited God's fulfilment: namely the kingdom which would come through the child Mary was carrying. Then she encouraged her young relative to continue in faith – believing that the Lord would fulfil his promises.

One of the evidences of God's Spirit at work is when we can rejoice when God does something in the next generation, which we have not seen in our own, and encourage young disciples to trust God's word.

Mary's response, which we call the Magnificat, reminds us all that God's mercy  is for those who fear him 'from generation to generation.'

+Graham

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

A risk-free existence can look very attractive for a while. Although the fine line between risk-free and unbearably boring is easily crossed. But those who want risk-free should never become Christians. To follow Jesus means risking all to follow him. I was recently reminded that the Church of Scotland report 'Church Without Walls' says that the essence of church is 'People with Jesus at the centre, traveling wherever Jesus takes us.' The whole fresh expressions initiative is about allowing Jesus to take us to those whom our existing churches do not reach, and working with him, as he forms a new group of people, who are willing to go wherever he takes them. That inevitably involves risk.

All churches and congregations are 'expressions of church'. Christ is fully present wherever two or three (or 25 on a cold Autumn morning) gather in his name. But no church fully and maturely expresses Christ. Each has a capacity to mature and each needs to be complemented by others. The risky thing about inherited expressions of church is that we know how to do them, and sometimes fail to take new risks for God. The risky thing about planting a fresh expression of church is that we are only just beginning to learn how to do them, and will need to learn from our mistakes. It is hard to be part of something that does not live up to our hopes and expectations, or to discover that a venture is not as easy as it seemed to be in advance. It is painful to realise, too late, that we have made a mistake. But without some failures we will never learn a better way.

Saying, 'I wish I had known that earlier' may be exasperating, but it is a vital part of the way we learn. The disciples' journey with Jesus was full of getting things wrong and (sometimes) learning from mistakes. That is how he formed them for their mission 'to the ends of the earth' and that is the way he will form us.

There is no guarantee that we will succeed, but we will never succeed if we are not willing to try. God is faithful but there is no such thing as failsafe, in fresh expressions or any other aspect of discipleship. Whether our early attempts at planting fresh expressions work out as we hope, or not, lets stay on the learning curve together.

+Graham

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

Its time to show we believe in the whole mixed economy church and not just our part in it. People involved in inherited forms of church sometimes complain that all the emphasis is on fresh expressions of church. While the fresh expressions people tend to complain that all the resources are allocated to inherited church. Isn't it time for some more joined up thinking, which first asks questions like 'To whom do we owe the gospel?' – 'Where around here is God's Kingdom most needed?' – 'Who could we never reach just by doing church the way we do now?'

Questions like that will give us more possibilities than we have resources – so we will need to listen to God together, and discern where he is calling us, or is at work ahead of us. There is no way of avoiding the task of local discernment if we are to join in God's mission.

But once we believe we have heard God, we all need to be committed to all of it: praying for and supporting both the inherited ministry and the fresh expressions of church. If this is to be more than token we all need to take responsibility to ensure that there is an appropriate sharing of limited resources across the different aspects of the work. This applies at every level of the church – the local congregation, the deanery or circuit, and the district or diocese. It is particularly important that those who are directly involved in ministry and mission and those who allocate resources and manage finances, are all working with the same priorities.

We are a mixed economy church, just as the New Testament church, which engaged with Jews and Gentiles, was a mixed-economy church – all baptised into the one body. When one part was in need the whole body suffered. When one part was blessed the whole body rejoiced. The weakest was treated with the greatest concern, and so on. Let that be a picture of the mixed economy church in practice.

+Graham Cray

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

Some of us view our churches unfairly. We want them to be more hospitable, more outward looking and to draw more people to Christ. So we should, but the unfairness comes when we assume that anyone should be welcome in our church, and any and everyone be able to fit in.

The first part is right – whoever turns up or is invited should be made welcome. But the second part – anyone could fit – needs more careful attention. Yes local churches should comprise of a wide variety of people – God never intended them to be 'homogeneous units' – collections of the like minded. But we too often assume that people should come to us, and be expected to fit into church as we have established it and like it.

But Christ commissioned his church to go, not to tell people to come. If we limit ourselves to those who might come we probably cut out whole sectors of the population. And these are people for whom Christ died and to whom we owe the gospel. So the challenge is to go where they are and plant different kinds of congregations – fresh expressions of church – which are not as we like church, but which, rather, are appropriate to help them to discover Jesus.

The way to increase diversity in the church is not to try and create single congregations where anyone can come: because many types of people won't come. Rather plant a variety of congregations which act together as one church. That way you can enlarge the range of people whom your church reaches and serves. It has been said before, but fresh expressions are meant to be a Holy Spirit anointed Heineken factor – reaching the parts which church as we like it doesn't reach. In the end, which is the more important – only having church as we like it, or also planting fresh expressions of church, so that far more of our society can believe in Christ?

+Graham Cray