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Reconnect

Known and loved by many as a tourist hotspot on the Dorset coast, Poole is also home to missional community Reconnect. The community, which has been meeting in the area since September last year, celebrated its commissioning in a town centre café in March. Revd Paul Bradbury, Pioneer Minister for Poole Town Centre and Hamworthy, and Community Leader of Reconnect, explains more.

Reconnect's intention, our vision, right from the start was very much to see people become Christians from an unchurched background. We are still finding out what happens after that. Reconnect may help to create new communities for these people, or perhaps they will ultimately feed into existing churches, or join us. We are not sure really, but we do know that we are open to what the Spirit is saying, and are working closely with other churches in a bid to do what God wants us to do.

When I became Pioneer Minister in September 2008, the then Bishop of Sherborne, Tim Thornton, conducted the licensing ceremony at St James' Church, Poole Old Town and then on the Quay. We walked from the church in a bit of a rabble down to the seafront where there was an exchange of symbols – I was given a bucket of seeds and a fishing net to represent the Kingdom and the work I'm doing.

On 21st March, the Bishop, Dr Graham Kings, came and commissioned us as a community at a café in the town. We had about 70 people there and started off with some children's activities before the bishop led the commissioning and we signed the rule of life – something we had been developing in our meetings since Christmas by looking at Acts and the gospels to find out what it means to be a community of disciples. The rule was signed by all the community and the commissioning was essentially a commitment by us all to seek to live the life expressed in the rule.

We organise felt making sessions as part of our outreach activity, and we made felt 'stones' on the commissioning day to be included in a prayer cairn. People came up and prayed for Reconnect as they put down one of the stones. The bishop also seemed to enjoy the day, even having his face painted (after the ceremony!)

The vision to gather together a missional community emerged after six months of prayer and listening, and Reconnect came into being in September 2009.

As Pioneer Minister to central Poole, my area includes the town centre and lower Hamworthy. This area is undergoing large amount of development and a huge proportional increase in population. It's a relatively small area, ranging from a small housing estate which is in one of the most deprived wards in England to converted warehouse apartments whose owners have a yacht just off the Quay. Tourism is also a major factor with people coming to work here, usually seasonally, from all over the country.

We see Reconnect as a shop window to say Church is not just about Sunday mornings, it's about many other things. Our aim for Sundays is to meet in such a way that our energy can be put into making friends with non-Christians in the area and serve the community. One of the most effective ways so far has been to clean the local beach a couple of times! It was an easy thing for us to go and do. The first time we did it we had various people ask us what were we doing, and the second time we had four local residents come and join us to help.

Avenues for mission that we are exploring include workplace ministry, a felt-making group and a grow-your-own project on a small housing estate. As a community we are generally nomadic, quite deliberately so, as that offers a chance for people to reflect on where they are in this journey. But it soon became clear that people felt they needed a place as a focus, a place to meet that is central to our mission.

We have a monthly pattern of meeting one Sunday in a local school, the second Sunday in our homes, third Sunday 'out and about' serving the community and fourth Sunday worshipping at other local churches. We dub this 'Festival' Sunday when Reconnect regulars go to a church somewhere else. We can't provide the experience of a bigger church, worshipping in a larger fellowship, so we say go and enjoy that experience and feed back into Reconnect. We also meet as adults on a Tuesday evening to worship, pray and explore our mission and community values together.

Funding was made available for three years, and I'm very aware how things take time to come to fruition. At the moment, we are really just feeling our way but we remain very committed to laying down firm foundations for a community. We aim to be invitational and participative in everything we get involved in, and work towards living out that rule of life which will provide us with our core values and shape all we do.

Loving Hands

Knit one, purl one, create a fresh expression of church in the Warrington Methodist Circuit. Support worker Sue Jackson explains how the simple idea of knitting groups has led to a loving community wanting to help those around them and find out more about faith.

How wonderful to be paid for something you love doing, what a gift from God! To start off, we had heard of a similar initiative operating in Ellesmere Port and we visited it. We were amazed by what we saw because it was so vibrant. We developed the resources they gave us, and incorporated the devotional at the end of the time together. Now it's simply church on a Thursday afternoon, and we love it.

It's fantastic to see that church taking shape as people come together, enjoy time together and with God, and create something that really makes a difference. I get my knitting devotions by going online; Christians around the world are doing similar things and there are some inspirational studies to use.

People's lives have been transformed by Loving Hands. One of our members, Robin, first came along with his wife Eileen. She duly gave him some needles and wool to knit a square, but he quickly moved on to lacy blankets and all sorts of things. Robin is well known locally as a choirmaster but found himself unable to conduct while awaiting hip replacement surgery, he was glad to put his hands to good use by knitting instead.

A lady turned up and asked me to teach her to knit. I helped her to cast on, and she told me that I wasn't doing it correctly! She then said she had been a knitter when she was younger but hadn't done anything for years. Next time I saw her she was knitting quite a complicated basket weave blanket. Now the lady who 'couldn't knit' is on the internet all the time learning new stitches and teaching them to everyone else.

When people arrive they have a rummage through the wool and needles and patterns we've got and then decide where the results of their efforts are going to go. We've done things for the Mission to Seafarers, and the Children of Honduras Trust, but we've also knitted lots of fingerless gloves for all the local ministers…

We meet on alternate weeks at Lymm Methodist Church hall, Eagle Brow, Cheshire, and the Ryfields Retirement Village, Warrington. One 95-year-old lady, who is registered blind, said she hadn't knitted for 'donkey's years' and feels her life has been transformed by this simple act. We've also got a knitting corner in the coffee shop at Padgate, where people knit squares for blankets while they chat, eat and drink.

If we know of anyone who has been bereaved or ill, or could do with a bit of comfort, the Lymm group make them a scarf and send it with a card. Every time they are feeling lonely or desperate, they wrap these scarves around their necks or cuddle them.

One lady took three scarves to friends who were unwell. She said to me:

Now I understand. I knew we were a group knitting things for charity, but I didn't see the bigger picture until I took those scarves to people who needed them. One of my friends wrapped it around herself straight away; it was so comforting and meant so much to her. It's not the knitting, it's not knitting at all, it's God.

Methodist minister Revd Jackie Bellfield is thrilled at the church's development.

Knitting is one of those things that used to be very commonplace, and every family had someone who could create that much-needed jumper or baby outfit. Then it went out of fashion as people bought ready-made items off the shelf but now it's making a comeback, and Loving Hands is part of the revival.

What started as an opportunity to create knitted goods for charities and community groups has developed into a place where people talk, share their problems, pray and take part in a short devotion. Church in a new sense has emerged, and it’s about a lot more than people getting together and having a chat.

The group makes all sorts of things, including items for the local premature baby care unit, and the stillbirth and neonatal death charity, Sands. As a result of that, some of the women in the church have talked about miscarriages and stillbirths they suffered 40 or 50 years ago. These are things they have never talked about before, and would never have talked about to this day without Loving Hands. That can only come from God.

Café Sundae

Café Sundae, based at Timperley Methodist Church, opened in May 2006. Will Sudworth gives an update on the place that describes itself as 'church like you’ve never seen it before'

We're a bit like the Muppets…

Café Sundae wasn't planned at all. We hadn't heard of Fresh Expressions, but we simply felt we weren’t engaging with our teenagers. Yet now we have been running for over three-and-a-half years, have at least six churches in the UK using our material, and been responsible for leading alternative worship at a national youth event.

We started off with what was basically a youth group meeting every Sunday night but the members would never come to family services or any other service, it just didn't work.

We listened to the teenagers and they were pretty frank about it all, 'Sunday morning is a bad time, we're doing sports and anyway, church is dull.' So we transformed all-age worship into café multimedia worship on Sunday evenings. We thought we'd nailed it. In truth we had a half-hearted shot at changing it as a compromise but it didn’t come anywhere near hitting the spot.

It was time to do something radical so we brought together a team with multimedia and many other skills, and decided to do it properly on the second Sunday of the month from 6.30pm for about an hour-and-a-half. We cleared the church and all the chairs, put up a lighting rig, introduced café style tables, and got the young people involved. The teenagers came up with the name Café Sundae, and we were on our way.

Our vision included some key components. They were:

Asking people what topics are relevant to their lives and then exploring what God has got to say about that topic;

No communal singing;

Going out on the streets to interview and film people about the topic. We then edit the voxpops together and show the results on screen. As well as speaking to members of the public, we have also created our own presenters, like Jeremy 'Vile' and Miss Polly Titian, to help explore a particular subject;

Introducing role-play and tabletop games to help us really consider an issue;

Involving teenagers in setting up the event and helping us to run it;

Giving opportunities to respond to the message of that week;

Carrying on the conversation afterwards in a blog.

We immediately welcomed people our church had not reached before. Numbers started at around 90, dropped to about 30 and ended 2009 at about the 70-80 mark, which is roughly the same size of our traditional church congregation. Today about half of the Café Sundae regulars are teenagers, with a good mix of male and female; and about 50% are adults aged 18-40. We make it clear that some of the issues covered are not suitable for younger children so our members need to be of secondary school age and older.

During the first summer we hosted a service for Churches Together. The feedback included the comment 'sacrilege' and the phrase 'I didn't feel as if I'd been to church'. We took the phrase as a compliment, even though it wasn't intended that way. When you're trying to make church for people who don't like church, could you get a better recommendation?

As to sustainability, we've seen our original minister move on, our team change, and new minister Revd Andrew Bradley getting to grips with it. Andrew runs a youth club on a Sunday afternoon and he brings them straight on to Café Sundae. Other youth clubs from churches of various denominations around and about have done the same.

MAYC asked us to lead Café Sundae at its Breakout event for young people. It may just have been the offer of free chocolate but we were packed to overflowing. We'll be back there this year with a full weekend of activities.

We also believe in sharing what we've done and learned so we package up our material and give it away for free on our resources website. We don't have a magic formula, and our ideas may not work everywhere. All we've really done is shape church around what our teenagers respond to. Why does it appeal to adults as well as younger people? We think it's because it's a bit like the Muppets in that it works on two levels so that everyone can enjoy it.

Even though we're still meeting in a church building it doesn't feel like church and it certainly doesn't look like what you'd find in your average service. We use multi-media green screen technology, which means that we have a video camera and a blue screen behind our teenage actors – they act out a scene and we can put any image behind them. It's much easier than getting a whole youth club to practice for weeks and hope they get it right when performing the thing!

Discipleship is an area we're looking at very closely as time goes on. Our plan is to follow the model of the cell churches – namely to have a big event once a month before members go their separate ways with the adults going to house groups and youngsters in youth groups.

Our first group of teenagers has now gone off to university; our big challenge over the next five years is to draw them back in after their studies to become part of the Café Sundae leadership. To be fair, some of the young people are already doing that; one is on the computer, another runs the lighting desk, and several of them go out on the streets to do interviewing, acting, and videoing.

Some people ask, 'Is it a fresh expression of church if it's still in the church building and doesn't meet all the fresh expressions criteria?', 'Should it be heavier on the Bible content?'

At the moment, we plan to stay in the church. We transform the interior, and our teenagers – and adults – are very happy to come into that building. As a result they change the atmosphere and it is very much a fresh expression of church, but we keep on grappling with all these things, and all we can hope is that we will continue to listen and explore these questions and others for many years to come.

Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries

Richard Moy, ordained pioneer minister explains how church is forming amongst those who have never been involved before, through Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries.

When the Methodist and Anglican churches in Wolverhampton realised there were 23,000 people involved in the 'night-time' economy of the city, most of whom had no Christian commitment, they decided to do something about it. Richard Moy was appointed to start to form church with those who often only came into the city to bars and clubs after 10pm. The first thing he did was go to a monastery – to pray hard! Then he visited St Thomas' Crookes Church in Sheffield to find out about their 'Life Shapes' program and that visit was followed by 40 days of prayer and fasting.

A small team of three gathered to pray every week in a local church and then gradually others joined in. After a year they began to gather in a café location in the centre of town and now a pool of about 50 people meets regularly for Sunday evening worship. On any one occasion 30 or so will gather together. Church 18-30 has been born.

Richard is particularly pleased at the mixed nature of this new missional community. The age range is about 16-32 but members come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some are graduates, others come from 'very difficult backgrounds in terms of education'. Some are unemployed and others are destitute.

Early on Richard decided that one size would not fit all. Based on differing learning styles, this fresh expression of church offers deliberately varied learning and worship opportunities. There's a gathering for 'reflectors' which has a real sense of the 'spiritual'. Another event is aimed at 'theorists' and encourages those who attend to think why they believe what they believe. A third gathering has a contemporary worship style and a fourth is based on food and sharing communion together.

But Richard's eyes light up when he mentions 'Man Night'. Every Monday a group of men meet to share a simple form of communion, watch a DVD or get to work on a Playstation! This is church literally out of the box! 10-15 attend regularly and Richard is seeing real discipleship growth amongst the group.

Richard believes the venue is vital. There's a weekly midday meeting in McDonalds – an opportunity to share Bible, burgers and fries! Yates' Wine Lodge provides another meeting place, along with a city centre church café. Recently Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries has acquired a flat and that is slowly becoming a centre of ministry for the church.

And Richard believes what he is doing really is church. They operate as church – with regular worship, gathering around word and sacrament. People have been baptised as a result of joining Church 18-30 and mission is very much at the heart of things. If you see a couple of people sitting on a sofa in the middle of Wolverhampton, it is likely to be members of the church sharing their faith or offering to pray for passers by. And in a network church, 'some bits of the church will only last for a season and some bits will last forever', says Richard and that's OK.

Wolverhampton Pioneer Ministries grew out of local Christians' concern for those who had no connection with church. It's still growing and Richard Moy is very open to what surprising things God might have in store for the future.

I love going to Church 18-30's Vitalise service because it does what it says on the tin. It really revitalised my relationship with God through John's Gospel and smoothies.

Katie, 18

I went to Church 18-30 because my faith was at a really low point and needed strengthening. Church 18-30 helped me to rediscover my faith and strengthen my relationship with God having fun along the way with the most amazing people!!!

Helen, 22

Presence

Beer and a singalong helped to launch Leicester-based Presence as a Bishop's Mission Order. City Centre Pioneer Minister and Presence leader, Revd David Cundill, looks back at a whirlwind year and outlines his hopes and plans for the future.

It all happened very quickly. I started in post at the end of May 2009, discussions took place over the summer to sort out the BMO, and it was signed in December at a Beer&Carols event. We certainly reaped the benefits of the hard work that other BMOs had done before us in Exeter and Thanet.

Bishop Tim Stevens started the ball rolling when he gave me a brief to 'just go and plant a new church in the city centre. I give you permission to fail; you have got to take risks.'

That church was to be in an area of new apartments, waterside redevelopment, and the DeMontfort University campus. The result is Presence… a fresh approach to church. We describe it as a church for people who don't do church or go there, never did, don't anymore, don't think they fit in, doubters, sceptics, seekers and the spiritually curious.

In the middle of the BMO area is The Quay, a canal side pub which was itself part of a regeneration project a few years ago. It is now the base for Presence's midweek meetings, and some of those at Presence have become regulars at the pub’s open mic session on Thursday nights.

My first task is to develop a 24-strong planting team to reach out to the area's diverse communities; including those based around a series of tower blocks in gated developments at Freemens Meadow, Westbridge Wharf and Leicester Square.

These new blocks are in stark contrast to the area's traditional terraced streets. Each tower block looks in on a quadrangle, and you have to get through two gates to get into the heart of it all. There are no community facilities. When you look at the ads for these apartments you'd think that we had so many stockbrokers just about to nip on their bikes to Canary Wharf – and yet the development stands at the edge of the country's biggest Hindu population, but you’d never know that from the marketing image portrayed.

The regeneration of great swathes of the city means that new communities have become cut off from parish churches because the landscape has shifted, but by starting a fresh expression alongside those churches, we can redefine a pastoral boundary. It has just worked brilliantly in that it's possible to run a straight mixed economy which lets the existing parishes do what they do while we look at how we use these places in new and creative ways.

In other areas people may say, 'we are all in this together', but underneath the surface they are worried. In Leicester I believe it has worked – and, with God’s help will continue to work because of the unique circumstances surrounding redevelopment of this city.

This is a minimum 10 year project, and part of the challenge is that the landscape will continue to change dramatically during that time. Large brownfield sites in our area are set aside for new developments but are yet to be built on, so we need to be flexible in our approach and planning.

But some of our plans are very firmly in the pipeline, including the launch of a film club in the Highcross area; the setting up of a Christians Against Poverty (CAP) centre and money management course; and a term time Street Pastors scheme around DeMontfort University.

We also very much hope to be involved at The Quay on St Patrick's Day. There are lots of possibilities but we might look at having a religious 'bit' followed by Open Communion using Naan bread – reflecting the type of area we're in. We want to reclaim these celebrations for God, and show that we're a church of festival and fun.

Messy Church, Cowplain

It's truly a family affair when crowds flock to the home of the original Messy Church in Hampshire. Babies, toddlers, teens and adults can all be found at the fresh expression of church in St Wilfrid's Church hall, Cowplain, but helper Lesley Baker also has much more of a personal interest in some of the venue's regulars.

Six years ago, Lucy Moore spoke to several of us at St Wilfrid's about the idea for a place where those on the fringes of church life would be happy to come without it being threatening in any way. It was a kind of pulling together of people who may come to the church building for a toddler group, for instance, but who had never actually looked at something God-centred as part of their life.

Soon after that Messy Church was born, Lucy began to oversee the whole thing and I got involved in the planning of the sessions. My mum Doreen, who will be 80 this year, was originally running an activity table where she would help the children to make things. She loved it. Unfortunately she can't do as much as she would like these days but she is still very much a part of what we do each month.

The wonderful thing is that my daughter Kathryn also comes to Messy Church with granddaughter Molly, aged three; and one-year-old grandson Joshua. That means four generations of 'girls' from our family (and Josh!) all get together to take part in the sessions and enjoy the food afterwards.

I have seen people come along, perhaps reluctantly, but once inside the door they are amazed. The atmosphere is great, and doing something across the generations is seen as returning to traditional values where people sit down and share a meal together, chat to one another and care about each other – no matter where they're from and whatever their age.

I don't take notice of any criticism that says "it's not real church" Our vicar, Paul Moore, is wonderful in that he says we are very blessed here to have three churches, St Wilfrid's, Westbrook, and Messy Church. This is a special place, for my family and for many others because it speaks of God and shows the love of God in action. To me, that's got to be church.

My husband Derek's involvement came to the fore when we took Messy Church on the road to Greenbelt. He's a churchwarden and is someone who likes a lot of tradition, so to be thrown in the deep end and set up on a site of that scale was a huge thing to do.

Kathryn is a teacher so she gets to the session as soon as she can after the end of the school day. Her husband Pete, who is diocesan youth adviser, also gets along when he can. It's a huge joy to be sharing something like this with not only my Christian family but also my mum, daughter, and grand-children. My special prayer? That Molly will know the Lord, and know that He is with her through life. I also want it to be her decision to follow Him, not just because four generations of her family happen to come together in the same place at the same time.

Food for Thought

How do you set up a fresh expression of church in an affluent 'commuter' village? Klynn and Susan Alibocus have been helping to lead Food for Thought in Winterslow near Salisbury for the past three years. They're still on a steep learning curve, as they explain.

Changing work commitments saw us move from suburban Kent to a large south Wiltshire village, and that was quite a shock at first. It really was a very different world but we chose Winterslow for many reasons, mainly its busy community life and the fact that it was home to four active churches of different denominations.

At the time, before the term 'fresh expression of church' was commonly known, Winterslow did benefit from having a number of outreach activities going on in the area. Despite that, we still felt there was a gap in bringing the message of Christ to the unchurched and dechurched community in a new and fresh way.

Some years previously we had been involved in setting up The Carpenter's Arms, Sandwich, working with a team experienced in instigating one of the earliest Anglican church plants in Deal and we had a heart to carry this work on.

As an affluent 'commuter' rural village, Winterslow's needs aren't as obvious as those of other places. Setting up a fresh expression of church to make the message of Christ relevant to such a community was therefore somewhat more challenging.

A few of us who went to the parish church of All Saints, Winterslow, started to look at the possibility of creating a more accessible, non-traditional and complementary fresh expression of church in the village.

We came up with some specific ideas after a workshop exercise in which we looked at How To Make The Worst Church Service Ever! In it, we listed all the things that we normally do as part of church that may put someone off if they haven't been to church before. Then we tried to understand those barriers and come up with ways to remove them.

We decided that the new-look church service should involve Welcome, Word, Worship and Witness. Much prayer and planning went into the original proposal. Thankfully our vicar, Revd Nils Bersweden, and the PCC, gave us their blessing and we got the go-ahead to begin a monthly meeting in the village hall.

Food for Thought emphasises good food, short services, plenty for children to do and an informal atmosphere. Many people have found that it's right for them, and we continue to welcome in newcomers who want to find out more about us and more about God.

Many commuters miss out on daily village life. Food for Thought connects people, particularly families, to hear the message of Christ, have fun, eat together and bring back that sense of community.

Using our rural environment to our advantage we regularly go on picnics, nature walks, and so on; often networking with other village organisations such as the Scouts, Brownies, conservation groups and local charities to see how we can support each other. On one occasion we were granted private access to Salisbury Cathedral for a treasure hunt followed by fish and chips in the cloisters. About 60 people came to that.

The Ven Alan Jeans, Archdeacon of Sarum, really helped us to look at where we were going with Food for Thought and why. We looked at questions like: 'Are you really a fresh expression or have you just moved "church" into the village hall?' We also considered: 'How will Food for Thought nurture people into the wider Church?'

We think it very important to keep it truly fresh so we're encouraging leadership potential with different people taking on responsibility for organising services. For the first six months we were pretty much running the whole thing but we didn't want to be seen as the husband and wife double act who do it all. That doesn't help us, or encourage discipleship and the building of community.

We also regularly change the layout of the hall; it sounds quite a small thing to do but it's very effective in staving off complacency about the way a place 'should' look. Varying the activities or location or timings or leaders is all useful in keeping the momentum going.

A survey told us, yes, people like it and we must continue, but we feel there's still so much to do. To say it's been easy and a record of successes would be far from the truth. On the contrary, there have been highs and lows and that learning curve can be very steep. However, we marked our 3rd birthday on 24th January with a Scottish ceilidh – plenty of food, dancing and live music from a piper. There's plenty to celebrate. The Revd Cynthia Buttimer, a team curate at All Saints is tremendously supportive and she joins in as one of the many wonderful Food for Thought volunteers who make it all happen.

Looking back, it's clear to see that when you're willing to take that leap of faith, God will be with you every step of the way. At times it's exciting, frustrating or just plain old hard work, but there's nowhere else we'd rather be.

Bloomfield Estate

Kevin Metcalf, Church Army Evangelist, describes his early attempts at pioneering in Bangor, Northern Ireland.

My job title is community outreacher worker and I work alongside a Rector of a Church of Ireland Parish Church in the town of Bangor in Northern Ireland. My role is largely to reach out to the Bloomfield Estate in the southern part of the town and to build some fresh expressions with those who do not relate to more traditional forms of church.

The Bloomfield estate still has a lot of sectarian problems, so this type of work is hard but important. It takes a long time to build trusting relationships in a community like this, so I recognise this is a vision that will take time to be realised. At the moment, we are reaching out to children and young people, and through the children, making connection with families who live in these communities.

At present there is very little for younger people to do on the Bloomfield Estate, so I have been developing relationships with community workers to identify needs. I am passionate about children's work, so I have been focusing on activities that engage with younger people and provide positive opportunities. Although local young people have a lot of religious and bible knowledge through school education, many do not have a form of the Christian faith that resources their life. For example, at the local school of three hundred and fifty young people, only fifty have a stated religious affiliation, leaving three hundred with none. So in the context of Northern Ireland this is a bit of a paradox. Even though it is a very ‘religious' country, many do not have a committed faith that they find to be spiritually resourcing. My aim then is to enable younger people to come to faith and experience Jesus in a real and living way, not just knowing about him, but knowing him personally. Through this, I want to see whole families come to faith.

So far, I have built up connections with a local school, and a community association in the Council Estate. At the school I have been engaged with children through assemblies and after school clubs. In these times I have been using crafts and other activities as well as talking about God. In the Community house we have been running a 'Kidz Klub', using similar activities with a limited number of children as the space is quite small. To build on these relationships and see the work develop and grow, we have started running another Kidz Klub in the local primary school and a team of Christian volunteers visit the homes of the children who attend. Our first night we had 48 children! Through this we are building relationships with families on the estate and discovering how we can help support the wider environment of the children and witness to God's love.

The use of this primary school, I think will give us the space to build up a fresh expression of church. We are very aware that the local middle-class forms of traditional church are an alien environment for many people coming from the Bloomfield Estate. So we hope that a 'Messy Church' approach will be flexible, accessible and more laid-back and therefore appropriate. This will enable people to explore Christian spirituality, and the big issues of life, but also an opportunity to build relationships with local people.

Sunday Sanctuary

Moving out of a church building into a tower block may not be everyone's idea of progress but The Sunday Sanctuary in Portsmouth is proving to be a hit with newcomers to this fresh expression of church.

Revd Mark Rodel, Portsmouth's city centre pioneer minister and associate priest at St Luke's Somerstown, Southsea, led the way when the 20-strong congregation set up base at Wilmcote House to encourage newcomers. And encourage them they did. In the first month, 24 extra people came to get-togethers at the 11-storey high-rise. Mark is encouraged but aware of the challenges ahead.

This is about taking seriously the call to be where people already are, rather than expecting them to come to us. We often expect people to cross the threshold of our churches and immediately start singing or speaking words that they don't yet believe or understand. Our gathering is much more conversation-based.

We don't always judge our success or failure on the basis of numbers, as the quality of relationships is also important. But I'm very encouraged; we moved locations specifically to encourage local people to join us, and they have. Several of them have been more than once. And the people we're meeting seem to be genuinely open to what it is that we're doing.

In fact, we had thought people might pop in and out for just a few minutes of our morning get-togethers. In fact, many of them have stayed for the entire morning.

We had a trial run at Wilmcote House on four successive Sundays earlier in the year. As a result of that, one family – who live in Wilmcote House – decided to join us. At Christmas we had the Wilmcote House Nativity. All ages were welcome and children had the chance to dress as an angel or shepherd to hear the Christmas story, enjoy a free breakfast and take part in some craft sessions.

Our vision is to be a mission community that plants congregations, and ultimately we'd like to see a network of small, local congregations in this area. In the meantime, this is a massive step and there is excitement and trepidation. We recognise that it's a risk, but we think it's a risk worth taking.

Worship is continuing at St Luke's church building from Monday to Saturday, and the venue is still being used by community groups. There are lots of other things going on in the area too. Across Portsmouth diocese, there are multi-media 'Blessed' Eucharists at St Thomas's Church, Elson, in Gosport; Messy Church at St Wilfrid's Church, Cowplain; meditative alternative worship called 'Ethos' at St Nicholas Church, North End; and a Café Church will launch in Waterlooville's Costa Coffee from January 2010.

I have also started a new thing on Sunday nights when I offer a chance for 'spiritual-but-not-religious' people to meet up at a local pub to talk about faith, spirituality and life over beer.

Weatherspoon's kindly set aside a table for me at the Isambard Kingdom Brunel pub from 8pm-10pm. The evenings are called 'Sanctuary' and are publicised as 'spirited conversation and skinny ritual'.

It isn't a church in a pub. There's no worship or preaching involved. It's just a chance for people who would feel uncomfortable in church to talk and think a bit more deeply about what they do believe. My aim isn't to get them into church, but simply to give them space to explore these issues. So far I've chosen some fairly broad discussion topics, like life after death, or what things we might regret.

Nightchurch

Make your way to Exeter Cathedral on a Friday night and you may be surprised at what you'll find in this ancient place of worship. Near its medieval entrance, the weekly barbecue provides food for visitors – whether they're cathedral regulars, the homeless or the downright curious. Inside, and the 'congregation' for Nightchurch is meeting in small chapels and spaces throughout the building.

Steve Jones, as Pioneer Team Co-ordinator and a former youth advisor for the diocese, talks of his hopes for the initiative's future.

We meet on Fridays from 8pm to 10.30pm, and our initial aim was to help those born after 1960, as Generation X and Y, to find a way back to God. But of course it is open to all and if it grows, Nightchurch will become another part of the cathedral community.

Nightchurch launched in 2007 and is a joint partnership between the Diocese of Exeter and the Cathedral. It is being funded by them, and a grant from the St Luke's Foundation, for the first three years. It's all a bit of an adventure.

I have no real idea what it will look like in a few years' time except that I would see it as more of an organism than an organisation. Our values, or DNA, are to be an inclusive community with Christ at its heart; and to learn how to be generous with hospitality, creative in spirituality and passionate about justice. We'd love to share that common DNA but express it in our lives and communities in unique and creative ways.

Lots of us involved in Nightchurch are connected in some way to a small group meeting in homes, pubs, places of work, or sometimes a chapel in the cathedral. That's what we call Go Small.

Friday nights see us get together to explore social justice, enjoy the creative arts in poetry or music, and become involved in discussion, prayer and meditation and lots of other things.

Every two to three months or so we bring together everyone involved in Nightchurch and their friends and have a bigger than normal Friday night in the cathedral. That's Go Large.

In a way there's nothing new about Nightchurch, because – borrowing the idea of the ancient Minster Model – a cathedral is a gathering place for the Christian family.

Our leaders have regular gatherings for training, support and looking at new monastic practices. We also look at being a 'missional movement', namely a leadership community that grows each month with new leaders; and we are using a contextualised mission shaped ministry course as the way in for those people.

Nightchurch has become a very special place for many, and May 2010 will mark our first wedding! David Morgan and Erika Davies met each other at Nightchurch, and the couple have decided to get married by special licence at an evening service in the Cathedral. They will be surrounded by family, friends, Nightchurch regulars – and anyone else who happens to be visiting the Cathedral at the time.

David is manager of the Big Issue Exeter office so he expects to see some of the organisation's street vendors at the celebration, and he couldn't be happier about it. He was a volunteer with the homeless when he came to Nightchurch and then realised that his calling was to make it his full-time work.

Nightchurch has changed David and Erika's lives, and our hope is that the work will touch many, many more. That really would be an adventure.