Month: August 2015

The changing face of church planting in the countryside (Sally Gaze)

Sally Gaze explores the changing face of church planting in the countryside.

CowsA few years ago, when the working party for the best-selling Mission-shaped Church report asked questions about church-planting in a questionnaire, there was a less than enthusiastic response from rural areas. As one Church of England official wrote,

With 648 churches in this diocese, there is little incentive to plant more.

This is understandable; in the countryside there are typically many more churches per head of population than in urban areas – and some of those congregations struggle to keep going. A person might well conclude we don't need any more.

However, deep down, we know that when we think like that we've got it precisely the wrong way round. God's mission isn't there to keep existing particular congregations going. Rather it is the church as God's people, which has been called into being to participate in God's mission – the sharing of his love with his world. The whole point of church is God's mission – doing what God sends us to do. The need for church planting is often something that emerges when people consider what church in a particular area of countryside would look like if we started from that perspective: If God has sent his people to this rural area, what is it that they need to do to carry out his mission, including the making of disciples?

One particular characteristic of good rural church planting is the degree to which it works in a complementary way to older forms of church. This is partly aiming for the Heineken effect: Reaching the parts that other churches have not reached! It is also about appreciating the strengths of other churches and loving them. A church plant which is great at communicating the gospel to teenagers through contemporary youth culture, might struggle to make Jesus real for elderly people and vice versa. When those two churches meet for joint projects or to socialise together, they give a glimpse of the kingdom of God.

Urban church plants with larger numbers and working in larger populations may get away with independent witness. In a rural village, everyone can see whether the Christians truly love and support one another. As Jesus said, 'By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.'

To find out more about the Rural Churchplanters' Forum, including how to join, please contact Peter Hallsworth, the current convenor.

Losing my church shoes (Beth Keith)

Beth KeithBeth Keith discusses losing her church shoes.

When I think about what I think about church

My head automatically jumps to what I already know

What I have already experienced

What church has meant for me

With all its practises and churchologies

I am not a missionary heading off into the unknowable

I have baggage, church baggage, church shoes

During the last four years I have been involved with ReSource, developing training with pioneers starting churches in emerging culture. One of the themes we have revisited is: What makes something church? What is essential and what is negotiable? When given the chance to step back and think about what we do as church and what we believe about church, time and again people show genuine surprise at the amount of church practice which is habitual but not essential to what it means to be church.

Rowan Williams recently suggested that the church should be prepared to risk everything except 'those things that hold us to the truth of his presence – Word and sacrament'. But it's not just that it's risky to leave behind what you're comfortable with; isn't it also tricky to imagine what something could be like that is beyond what you've experienced?

Any discussion on essential elements of church prompts quite a bit of debate. As we've talked there has been recognition of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic (or words to that effect), but even with these as defining marks there is still enormous scope for diversity of both expression and understanding.  And the question remains: How do we move beyond all the extra stuff we do which isn't essential and give more time to the things we may value most about being church?

In last week's blog on Share, Richard Sudworth talked about the need for real listening in mission, listening which is active, transforming and relational: 'let the draught go both ways'. I suppose it would be fair to say that we have found that alongside this missiological conversation there is also a dynamic ecclesiological conversation to be had between our experience in mission and the historic, present and future church. It is a conversation that involves letting go of our church experience and stepping out of our church shoes. Only then can we come to the conversation open to the creative and imaginative Spirit. Only when we embrace the messy and improvised dialogue between mission and church do we find the essence of what being church is about.

360 degree listening (Richard Sudworth)

Richard Sudworth explores 360 degree listening.

Richard SudworthIn one of my all-time favourite TV shows, an American police sergeant used to send his officers out onto their beat with a: 'Now, make sure you do it to them before they do it to you!' I have lived and worked amongst Muslims in Britain for over five years now and there's a lot of talk about mission and church planting that sounds worryingly like that clarion call to arms. I wonder, though, whether you've ever considered mission as, primarily, a task of listening?

It takes incredible security and self-confidence to listen well. Good listeners don't feel the need to interrupt and make their point. Isn't it obvious when someone is not listening but just waiting for a pause to say what they want to say? Too much of our mission is like that!

In the church where I am based we have a slogan: 'Let the draught go both ways'. We used to have a draughty corridor connecting Sunday worship (the main church building) with nursery services, stay-and-play, youth and after school clubs (church hall). We figured this was a good metaphor for what God's vision was for us as a church community. The 'draught' of our prayer, worship, Scripture reading (in traditional terms, the 'Sunday' stuff), needed to impact the community Monday to Saturday. But that was not all. The life of the community needed to impact us; Monday to Saturday would change us.

The thing is, real listening changes us. Conversations become different; relationships deepen. And genuine listening isn't passive; you need to check you've been understood, reflect back, and sometimes to challenge. In one sense, my own mission context of other faiths, and in particular, Islam, raises the stakes. Dare I say that we as a church community have learned from our Muslim neighbours? Can we say that part of our mission is to be able to receive something from our community too?

I can say that we have, and when I look at our example of Jesus, that we ought. It's not to deny the times when we have had to challenge, present Jesus explicitly, more boldly explain the hope that underscores all that we do. But active listening as an approach to mission is less about knowing in advance what you will do. Rather, it's being prepared to be vulnerable; it's mission as relationship rather than strategy.

Why I’m not totally comfortable with emerging and emergent church (Brian McLaren)

Brian McLaren explains why he is not totally comfortable with emerging and emergent church.

Brian McLarenPeople often associate my name with the emerging church or emergent church. It's actually a term I'm not totally comfortable with because in my mind the last thing we need is to slice the pie up: 'We have all these different kinds of churches, and now we have emerging or emergent churches too.'

I actually look at it differently. Instead of thinking of a slice of the pie, I think of a tree. If you think of a cross-section of a tree, the outermost ring of the tree is the part of the tree that represents its current life in relation to today's weather conditions. So if you think of a big historic beautiful tree, maybe this part is the Catholic part of the tree, and this part is the Anglican part, and here's the Presbyterian part and the Pentecostal part. There are all these different parts of the tree.

But the whole tree in today's world is living in a time of great change. We don't even know how to describe it, so we stick the prefix 'post' on things. We say post-modern, post-colonial, post-enlightenment, post-Christendom. We use this word 'post' because we can tell it's changing, but we don't exactly have a handle on what the change is and means. But it's putting stress on the whole tree.

So a Catholic who's part of that outer ring in a certain sense has more in common with a Pentecostal on the outer ring than he might have with a Catholic who's dealing with the issues of the institution that are two or three rings in. So … I like to talk about the emergent conversation. It's a conversation among Christians in many sectors of the church about what it means to be faithful to Jesus Christ in this time of change.

The beautiful thing about a conversation is it's not a programme. We're not saying: 'Here's the way to do church. For £40 we'll give you the programme.' We're saying, 'No, let's get together. Let's talk. Let's experiment. Let's share our ideas. Let's look for fresh expressions and what it means to be followers of Christ, and let's learn from one another.'

Another thing I like about the idea of a conversation: it's not a monologue. More than ever before we need to get out of the idea of the big hero, or the big model in this or that place and everybody will imitate it. There's a place for that, but the kind of creativity we need now means we need to listen to our brothers and sisters from Africa, Asia, Latin America. In the west we need to listen to the folks who are working in poor neighbourhoods and rough communities and people with high unemployment rates and high poverty rates. What are they doing to live out the kingdom?

More than ever before we need to get out of the idea of the big hero, or the big model in this or that place

There won't be a 'one size fits all' answer in this, but what we will find then is the growing edge, the green edge of the life of the church. And that's not against what's happened before. It's being faithful to the tradition of the church. If we were to think of a cross-section of a tree, each of those rings represents the emerging church of our various eras and we're just continuing that tradition.

This blog is an extract from an exclusive interview Brian McLaren gave Fresh Expressions during a recent visit to the UK.

Where is the place for pain within Messy Church? (Lucy Moore)

Lucy Moore asks where the place for pain is with Messy Church.

Lucy MooreMessy Church is far too much fun to be proper church! Where's the endurance? Where's the grind? Where's the discipline? Why aren't my Puritanical masochistic itches being scratched? Can we really be truly church and still enjoy it so much? (I shall try to remember this jollity when I'm down on my hands and knees grimly scrubbing off glass paints from the hall parquet floor or sweatily frying up half a dead cow's worth of mince.)

While I don't have an issue with enjoying church, one question I have been musing on recently is: where is the place for pain within Messy Church, or indeed any form of church with children present? Given that the UK is statistically one of the most miserable countries in the developed world for being a child, there is a mass of suffering out there among the under-twelves as well as the more-often-acknowledged pain of teens and adults: bullying, loss, self-doubt, fear, peer pressure, life.

If Messy Church is only a place we can bring our thanks and praise to, if it is simply a place of creativity and bonhomie, surely it can't be a true church? We need to learn to paint with the colours of Good Friday as well as those of Easter Sunday, to model the thorny crown as well as the Easter bonnet.

Crafts can be a space to place our pain: we have made 'God's tears' out of acetate and hung them with silver thread from a cross, drawing on them what makes God cry. We say 'sorry' as well as 'please' and 'thank you' in our prayers.

But where do we find the place and courage to tell the stories of suffering from our own lives that release the stories – and pain, and tears – of others, young and old?

The use of new monasticism as a model of church for some fresh expressions (Ian Mobsby)

Ian Mobsby explores the use of new monasticism as a model of church for some fresh expressions.

Ian MobsbyIn the last five years with the Moot Community, and in the previous ten with the Epicentre Network, I have been on a journey attempting to do worship, mission and community in the context of post-modern spiritual tourism. You will have come across this every time someone says the mantra: 'I am not religious; I am interested in spirituality.' It has been a journey where this context has really changed me quite profoundly.

For too long the church has been bound to unhelpful binaries: lay and ordained, Catholic and Protestant, activist or personal piety, radical and mainstream, and so on. The truth is, if we stand a chance of ever making an impact with the de- and unchurched who are interested in spirituality as a mission imperative, then we will need to draw on variant elements of the wide traditions of our Christian inheritance.

We need to get away from this ridiculous 'them and us' which finds its foundation in misunderstanding, lack of love and fear. I think practitioners of emerging and fresh expressions of church in a post-modern context understand the post-binary holistic need for this more acutely than their predecessors. So, as practitioners, we can draw on 2,000 years of resources of the church to assist us in this task.

The prevailing church culture remains cognitive and propositional rather than experiential

Many people interested in spirituality today trawl the internet seeking spiritual communities that do – and are – what they say they are. They seek communities of integrity where there is love, openness, honesty, inclusion and participation. Unfortunately, too many churches feel like incredibly dysfunctional families where few of these qualities are evident. They are, in effect, spiritually impoverished. The prevailing church culture remains cognitive and propositional rather than experiential.

At the same time, many people are seeking something that goes beyond materialism, consumption and technology. Many have become aware of this need through personal tragedy, addiction, life stages, illness or study. So the challenge is: how to provide opportunities for authentic worship, mission and community for people who are seeking to become more deeply human, unaware that this is a spiritual quest. Such people often do not know who they are, let alone that they have a need for God!

How do you engage with spiritual tourists whilst being authentically Christian? Well, I would encourage people here to really consider models of church. Why? Because if you don't your project will end up with something that is dumbed down, individualistic and consumptive as a default position. This is where the new monastic or new friar model can really help if you are engaging with spiritual tourists.

One of the main mistakes we made with the Epicentre Network is that it was held captive to deconstruction, consumption, individualism and was somewhat anti-theological. Yes, it was very participative, but the lack of a model made it difficult to have a healthy basis. It was a collective of individuals that was never fully able to become a community because of its inability to re-envision or reconstruct. We ended Epicentre after ten good years of exciting and innovative mission activity because it was impossible for it to grow into being fully church. This was a painful lesson.

With Moot in its early days, we focused on the need to balance hospitality and inclusion with the authentic practice of the faith. Yes, experimental and contextual, but authentically Christian all the same. We were struck with the question: 'How do we have a community that allows people to belong who do not believe; that allows them to experience the community; that is authentic and life-giving without dumbing down on the faith?' It was Steve Croft who suggested to me the use of a rhythm of life as a focus to the community, so that it be Christ-centred.

Moot, inspired by the monastic pre-modern rules, crafted a rhythm of life through a communal bottom-up process to form an aspiration for how we wanted to live. Its language was not churchy but spiritual and embodied the gospel. So now we have a mixed community of both committed Christians and those who are spiritually searching, all desiring to live out these aspirations as a form of discipleship, where people are at different stages of the journey.

The pre-modern model of the monastics – and in particular the friars who had a spiritual rhythm of life and were sent to service particular localities – enables us to reframe new monasticism as a helpful model for an open, accessible Christian community with a focus on experience and exploration, that assists people to shift from being spiritual tourists to communitarian co-travelling pilgrims. Moot has developed sacramental (focusing on God's presence with us) and experiential forms of worship, mission and community drawing on this new monastic basis.

So, ancient forms of Christian contemplation reframed into post-modern language and sensibilities become the resources for prayer that work in terms of bringing centredness and peace. Mission then becomes seeking to catch up with what God is already doing in loving service by the whole community through social justice projects, the arts and other imaginative pursuits, and worship becomes an event of encounter of God and other pilgrims as a place of inspiration and hope-sharing.

If you are interested in going deeper with this, check out my two books: The Becoming of G-d and Emerging & Fresh Expressions of Church.

Two challenges for fresh expressions (Mark Russell)

Mark Russell poses two challenges for fresh expressions.

Mark Russell and Desmond TutuI hope this post will be an interesting thought from my perspective as CEO of a church organisation. Church Army is at the forefront of the fresh expressions agenda and our people all over the UK and Ireland are establishing fresh expressions of church, seeking to connect the transforming good news of Christ with those who would otherwise never enter a church. You can view some short films of them doing this. I love seeing how God is releasing his people to pioneer new things to help people to come to faith through creative new Christian communities.

I am a huge supporter of the fresh expressions agenda, both personally and as the CEO of Church Army, but (yes, you've guessed it, there is a 'but' … two, in fact!) I have two worries that niggle me. Nothing I can prove, but I wonder if this is what you think as well?

  1. Many stories of fresh expressions of church seem only to be about Christians who are disaffected with church. OK, so all of us know people who dislike church, but my fear is that sometimes fresh expressions are set up by these people just to satisfy their own needs and the needs of people like them. The great purpose of church, though, is mission, not congregation, and I wonder if fresh expressions are at their best when they reach out to new people outside our church walls.

  2. Many fresh expressions are for middle class, educated white people. I am hardly one to talk – most of those in my church are white and middle class. But I recognise the major need for the whole church, not just fresh expressions, to be more respresentative of our communities. Running through Church Army's DNA is the call to reach those on the margins of society. Our founder said: 'Go for the worst' – those on the edges.

Fresh expressions are at their best when they reach out to new people outside our church walls

I passionately believe fresh expressions are the best way to engage the poor, those on the edges, those in marginalised groups. Colleagues working on estates in London, Sheffield and Belfast are discovering that fresh expressions enable church to happen with the poor in a way that traditional church cannot. I passionately want to see more fresh expressions on the edge, and I dream of them reaching different ethnic groups of people as well.

So, the two buts become two challenges for us.

Let's together ask God to raise up more pioneers, more evangelists, people who want to help us create relevant Christian communities that reach those on the edge, and help disciple people beyond the reach of traditional church.

We have come a long way with fresh expressions. Let's catch a fresh vision and keep pressing on towards the goal!

The credit crunch will change the church (Graham Cray)

Graham Cray, incoming leader of the Fresh Expressions team, gives his thoughts on the future of the church.

Graham CrayI think the church over the next few years is going to hear the word of the Lord through the credit crunch. A former diocesan secretary in Canterbury used to say:

The Church of England as it is now structured cannot afford the Church of England as it is now structured.

And my guess is, that is true for almost every historic building with plants and churches and manses and so on.

The critical question then is, if we have to be a more lightweight church in terms of plants and bureaucracy – not in terms of theology and spiritual vision – then will we find the way to live the mixed economy in the new realities? I'm quite convinced that means a townwide partnership of every church willing to take part; that we dare not compete with one another. We do need to complement one another's strengths. And one of the threads that runs right through that sort of ecumenism is actually fresh expressions.

The real changes will be renewing of imagination to do church with less of the very costly historic resources

So it may be that in God's economy – and having been taken by surprise by what he's done already, I'm just having a guess at how he might take us by surprise in the future – that this becomes critical in enabling the energetic partnership of churches together doing lighter weight church in serious mission and involvement in their communities. Hope08 gives a hint of that. I think fresh expressions gives a hint of that.

The real changes, I think, will be renewing of imagination to do church with less of the very costly historic resources. That doesn't mean the mixed economy disappears, because we will still in historic denominations do beautiful liturgy, do dignified worship. But I am convinced that there's got to be some significant change in the use of our available resources.

Is it really Church? (Rowan Williams)

Rowan WilliamsRowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, asks 'Is it really church?'

The "strength" of the Church is never anything other than the strength of the presence of the Risen Jesus. And one thing this means is that, once we are convinced that God in Jesus Christ is indeed committed to us and present with us, there is a certain freedom to risk everything except those things that hold us to the truth of his presence – Word and sacrament and the journey into holiness. These will survive, whatever happens to this or that style of worship, this or that bit of local Christian culture, because the presence of Jesus in the community will survive.

Fresh Expressions, I've suggested, has helped us see something of this liberating vision. It's true, from one point of view, that this takes us beyond a concern with denominational identity; and for some this is worrying. Is it really Anglican, or Methodist, or Baptist? What I hope is that, in the next phase of the work of Fresh Expressions, as it continues to enter more fully into the bloodstream of the churches, we start asking instead – of Fresh Expressions, but also of some of our inherited patterns – 'Is it really Church?'

Mixed EconomyThe remainder of this article can be found in the debut issue of mixed economy, a new journal from Fresh Expressions, which is available free of charge from the Fresh Expressions website.

Other articles include Howard Mellor (on evangelism as parable), Steven Croft (on milestones on the journey), Brother Damian SSF (on mission and spirituality) and Ian Adams (on international perspectives and developments).

An encouraging blog (Jonny Baker)

Jonny Baker concludes a recent blog with this heartwarming sentence: 'it's very encouraging'. What is he encouraged by?

Jonny BakerJonny writes: 'i sometimes get asked about the relationship between fresh expressions and emerging church. it's all part of the wider change in response to mission in postmodern cultures. fresh expressions is the anglican/methodist initiative. emerging church was the name given to the earlier experiments at the edges that was not denominational that inspired the c of e to write mission shaped church. the edges are blurred and it's not really that important. i know of very few other mainline denominations around the world that have been so prepared to pave the way for newness in response to the changing mission context. it's very encouraging.'

Jonny's blog is in response to the announcement that the Fresh Expressions initiative is to continue for a further period of five years. The Rt Revd Graham Cray, currently the Bishop of Maidstone, is to be the next Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team. The Methodist Connexional Missioner for Fresh Expressions is to be the Revd Stephen Lindridge, currently Evangelism Enabler in the Newcastle District.