Category: Graham Cray

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

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

The Fresh Expressions initiative has flourished in many parts of the church because of a combination of three factors:

• New imagination about the church – we are planting congregations most of us could not have imagined a few years ago;
• New permission from church leaders – in many places local church leaders can no longer say 'we can't do that, because the bishop or chairman or moderator would never allow it'. Rather our senior church leaders encourage it;
• And there are new resources – from the Fresh Expressions team and other mission agencies.

Under God and following the Holy Spirit, this combination has enabled a remarkable degree of innovative mission. All three factors need to be sustained, but I want to focus on the 'permission' one this month.

Permission needs to be more than general goodwill. It needs to be embodied in the structures of our churches, in particular the structures and procedures which control limited resources. Each deanery and circuit should be encouraged to commit itself to the mixed economy, actively planning to encourage the planting of fresh expressions of church alongside the mission of our existing churches.

But on a larger scale – a diocese, district or regional synod – The 3Ms of church life: mission, ministry and money all need to be coordinated if the mixed economy is to flourish. Mission cannot survive alone. Ministry – the recruitment, training and deployment of authorised ministers – faces the challenge of staffing the mixed economy church, rather than adding a few pioneers to a team overwhelmingly engaged with inherited church. And there is no point in senior leaders supporting fresh expressions if the subject is not even on the agenda of their finance board or committee! Finance committees have a vital role to play in the mission of the church. Either they manage decline by spreading existing resources thinner and thinner – and thus further the spiral of decline – or they resource growth by investing in proactive mission, for which fresh expressions of church are key.

If, as we believe, 60% of the population would never be reached by our existing churches, it is simply good stewardship to invest in new initiatives to engage with the majority group in the population. The difficulty is that limited resources mean that planting new initiatives may have to be accompanied by pruning posts which are neither sustainable nor a priority.

We have the opportunity to re-evangelise our nation. Fresh expressions of church are a part of the resource that God has given us, but a mixed economy church will only flourish if it is a 3Ms church.

+Graham Cray

Graham Cray's monthly e-xpressions column.

As I reflect on 2013, there are many encouragements.

This year, the central statistics reported to the Methodist Conference were extremely heartening and we have also had some really good research information drawn from in-depth studies of dioceses carried out by the Church Army Research's Unit. Watch out for news of the full findings, which will be released at the Faith in Growth Research Conference on 16th January 2014 and on our website.

There is clear evidence of momentum.

There are tens of thousands of people in fresh expressions of church, the great majority of whom would not be part of any church apart from this; indeed many have never been part of any church before this! Both the Methodist statistics and the Anglican research show that the greatest momentum has been in the past few years. God's Spirit is clearly at work and the planting of a fresh expression of church is proving to be one of the most fruitful means of re-evangelising Britain.

I am encouraged by the diversity. In the first dioceses to be studied by the Church Army's Research Unit, there were as many as 20 different models. There is evidence of missional imagination – rather than the cloning of ideas which worked somewhere else – with local context and the leading of the Holy Spirit clearly being taken seriously.

We are learning more about developing discipleship in fresh expressions of church. Our Discipleship Round Table includes leaders from a number of very different fresh expressions which have all been established for some years. Much of the learning was summarized in my recent booklet, making disciples in fresh expressions of church.

Another feature of the research was the considerable number of new lay leaders involved. This raises questions about training and support. I strongly recommend that anyone involved in leading a fresh expression should complete the mission shaped ministry course as soon as they are able. Details of current courses are on the website – please contact us if there isn't a course in your area and you would like one to be offered.

This year has also seen ecumenical growth with the work developing further in the United Reformed Church and in the Congregational Federation and new partnerships formed with the Church of Scotland and The Salvation Army. In addition, courtesy of our partner the Council for World Mission (Europe), we held a consultation day with church leaders in Wales. Similar ecumenical partnerships have begun in other parts of the world in 2013, in particular in Germany and South Africa.

There is clear evidence of momentum and growth and I am delighted to be able to hand over the leadership of the team to Canon Phil Potter, currently Director of Pioneer Ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, when I retire at the end of April. Phil's experience is ideal for the next stage.

Momentum does not mean there are no problems. A number of obstacles still remain. We have not yet reached a tipping point in the churches and the default setting in many places is still, 'If we can only do what we have always done better it will all turn out all right.' That is not so. There is indeed growth to be had when inherited model churches are both missional and hospitable: the mixed economy is still vital but is has to be the mixed economy. We will not turn the tide without both dimensions. Just 'more of the same' is a guarantee of further decline.

This obstacle is also evident in deployment policies. Pioneers, lay or ordained, funded, self supporting or voluntary, are seen a luxury extra, rather than the key to reaching otherwise unreached people.

We live in times of financial austerity where the new is often the first thing to be cut. Most denominational funding is for developing work internally. The Fresh Expressions team struggles to fund the work it does, and the resources it provides, for the denominations in the partnership. We are still heavily dependent on charitable giving and have more to raise for the next phase.

We are always happy to hear of trusts or donors who would be interested in supporting our work, so please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to know more of what we do! Individuals are also welcome to donate directly through our website.

2013 has been a year of God's faithfulness. Please pray for the momentum to continue, for the team and for the provision of the resources we need.

+Graham Cray

The Fresh Expressions initiative began as a result of the publication of the Church of England report Mission-Shaped Church. It developed as a partnership between the Church of England and the British Methodist Church, and now includes the United Reformed Church, the Congregational Federation, the Church of Scotland and the Salvation Army. This work, and its training materials has been taken up in a variety of parts of the world, including Australia, Barbados, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA.

A fresh expression of church is defined as:

a form of church for our changing culture established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church. It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples. It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.

No blueprint

The emphasis on 'listening' (discernment) and 'incarnational mission' (with particular emphasis on the specific local context) means that a key element of the praxis for planting fresh expressions of church, as developed in the UK, has been the recognition that the planting pioneer or team will not know the shape, model or cultural form of the fresh expression when they start out on the process of planting.

This contrasts with earlier approaches to church planting, which operated on more of a blueprint or architect's drawing model, where the plan was drawn up, the team formed, the resources gathered and only then the work begun. Often this was also a franchise model whereby a standard model of church was regarded as suitable everywhere, based on a particular denomination or tradition's history, whether recently established or centuries old. Success would be determined in part by the resemblance of the final project to the initial design. Did it look like church to those who commissioned the plant, was often more important than whether it was it an effective and authentic church for those it was trying to reach.

Some models of fresh expression of church do have a franchise element. Messy Church, for example, has spread round the world. But the point is not that every fresh expression should be unique, but that it should be appropriate to context. In a culture full of brands and franchises it would be surprising if this were not also a component of contextual church planting. However, in a recent study of the Church of England's dioceses of Canterbury and Liverpool there were 19 different models of fresh expression among the seventy or so examples in each of these very different dioceses.

A discernment led process

Best practice, which has developed as we have reflected on the hundreds of fresh expressions which have been planted since 2004, is a discernment led process, following a sequence of listening, serving, forming community, making disciples and only at the end letting the public form of the fresh expression emerge.

Contextual planting

This turn to contextual planting has developed through a number of stages of thinking. The first was the recognition that there is no culture free Christianity: That the missionary movement of recent centuries had not taken 'proper' church to other cultures, but had often imposed its own culture as the norm for others. Preparation for cross cultural mission then became the norm for those called overseas. We sent them to missionary college so that they could learn how they might engage with their new context. It took the missionary insight of Lesslie Newbigin, combined with the recognition that culture at home had changed substantially, before it struck home that cross cultural mission might be needed to reach across the street rather than across the seas. In practice, because there is no culture free Christianity, all churches contextualise, but only some know that is what they are doing and not all do it well! The Lausanne consultation Contextualisation Revisited called for a move

From contextualization as merely a strategy for cross cultural mission [to] Contextualization as a necessary and conscious practise of all churches in mission within their own cultures.

Contemporary cultural change is not from one stable form to another. Cultures are never static, but the accelerated speed of change, the complexity of a joined up multicultural world and the fluidity of the resulting cultures make our times profoundly unpredictable. We live in a time of discontinuous change. To quote Zygmunt Bauman

…the behaviour of complex systems with a number of mutually independent variables is and will forever remain unpredictable. Not just unpredictable to us, because of ignorance, negligence or dim-headedness, but by their very nature. Because the world we inhabit is as complex a system as can be imagined,its future is a great unknown, and it is bound to remain unknown whatever we do. The future is unpredictable because it is, purely and simply, undetermined.

Zygmunt Bauman, 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World, Polity, 2010, p107

Theologically, of course, this is not the case. Christ has secured the future. We live towards that future which he has already secured, through his incarnation, death and resurrection. As we shall see, that future is to shape the present. But in the praxis of mission we live at a time when previous experience, and previous models as keys to reaching a culture, are very fallible guides for the future.

Although there is a dominant Western culture, which should be taken seriously, the key to planting a fresh expression of church is the local context. What forces shape a locality, whether neighbourhood or network or a combination of the two? Mission and disciple-making becomes a process of contextualisation or inculturation, involving the reading of a local culture. The complexity of contemporary society makes it even more important to recognise the distinctiveness of each local context. It also makes the cloning of models, which work elsewhere, the least appropriate contemporary church planting strategy. One size cannot fit all.

Rooted in a living tradition

But neither can the local context, or missional expedience, be the sole factors shaping a fresh expression of church. I write as an Anglican by conviction, so it is a matter of central concern to me to be able to establish how a local church can be a recognisable expression of the universal church. The church in each era and culture is the latest expression of a living tradition. Rootedness in that living tradition is one of the vital keys for local discernment about the shape of the church. There are key praxis questions about continuity and discontinuity with the past when discerning the appropriate local form of the church. Jurgen Moltmann identified this creative tension when he wrote

Where the retrospective bond with the apostles is concerned, the historical church will ask about continuity, and strive for continuity. But where the future its apostolate serves is concerned it will be open to leap forward to what is new and surprising.

Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, SCM, 1977, p360

It is here, at the interconnection between living tradition and contemporary context, that I find some ancient theology helpful. It is not a matter of practitioners learning ancient or new doctrinal theory and then trying to put it into practice, but of theological insight opening the way to missional practice, because it enables missional imagination. Puzzled practitioners, who know that existing ways are no longer fruitful or appropriate, can turn to the living tradition for the insight they need. The purpose is not to find ancient practice to romanticise and clone, but to be guided by the tradition to new windows on current contexts.

Two hands better than one

In the second century the church Father Irenaeus (Against Heresies in Stanley M. Burgess, The Holy Spirit: Ancient Christian Traditions, Hendrickson, 1984, pp59-61) called the Son and the Spirit:

the two hands of God.

Church planting, which is both to be anchored in the Christian tradition and contextual, needs to be a two handed process! Both Christology (the doctrine of Christ) and Pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit) need to be brought to bear. The Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan John Zizoulos wrote that,

Christ in-stitutes (the Church) and the Spirit con-stitutes.

The 'in-stitution' is something presented to us, more or less a fait-accompli… The 'con-stitution' is something that involves us in its very being, something that we accept freely because we take part in its very emergence.

John Zizoulos, Being as Communion, SVS Press, 1985, p130

In other words the person and work of Christ is the given of the gospel. Any attempt at translation or embodiment of the gospel has to be faithful to that which is given. The church is only 'the body of Christ' (1 Corinthians 12), if it is the Christ of the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15) and creeds, who is being embodied. The body of Christ is called to bear the image of the biblical Christ. But translatability is also of the essence of the gospel.

Christianity is culturally infinitely translatable.

Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process Christian History, T&T Clark, 2002, p29

The early church quickly dispensed with the culture and language of its founder and opened up other languages and cultures. Our Gospels are missionary documents in which the original words of Jesus have been translated into Greek, as the primary first century language of mission. The translation was not of words alone but from one culture to many. The Holy Spirit was and is the chief translator and interpreter. The Spirit works 'with' the church to enable it to take Christ-like shape, appropriate to its context.

We shall consider each hand in turn.

The Spirit of God

It has become matter of fact to recognise the central role of the Holy Spirit in mission. But there is a danger that this is little more than an agreed theory which leads to little change in praxis. Newbigin warned that

It may seem that in stressing the role of the Holy Spirit in the mission of the Church I am simply repeating what everyone knows. And yet I have become convinced that even when this belief is present and vivid, there are factors in the structures and traditions of our work, which can prevent the belief from becoming effective.

Lesslie Newbigin, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today's Mission, Paternoster, 1998, p74

There have been two main recent emphases on the role of the Spirit in mission. Both place discernment in context at the heart of the missionary task.

The Spirit as missionary leader

The first concerns the role of the Spirit as the active leader of the Church's mission. John V Taylor's classic book 'The Go-Between God' opens with these words:

The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise. The mission consists of the things that he is doing in the world. In a special way it consists of the light that he is focussing upon Jesus Christ.

John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission, SCM Press, 1972, p3

The Spirit is identified as the director of mission, not from head office, but ahead of the church on and beyond each front line. If this is the case then obedient faith, setting out to follow wherever the Spirit leads, without knowing the outcome at the beginning, is normal for Christian mission.

The shape of empowered mission is not arrived at ideologically, or even pragmatically. In mission we ask not just 'Is this action good and necessary?' We also ask, 'Where is God leading? Is this God's undertaking?' … Spirit leadership is central.

Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: a Theology of the Holy Spirit, IVP, 1996, p145

I am convinced that the power of the Spirit is fundamentally power for witness beyond our comfort zones and familiar practices. In Acts 1.8 the move from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth conveys the essence of the missionary gift, rather than being incidental to it. In Luke Timothy Johnson's recent study of Luke/Acts, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church he identifies openness to the Spirit as the contemporary equivalent of the itinerant ministry of Jesus and then of the apostles.

The narrative of Acts suggests that a community truly led by the Spirit will be led in new and surprising directions.

Luke T. Johnson, Prophetic Jesus Prophetic Church, Eerdmans, 2011

A careful reading of Acts, reveals a church continually surprised by the Spirit. Much which we now take for granted was a surprise to the church at the time. Why should it be different for us? The church takes shape by following the missionary Spirit. Bevans & Schroeder summarised their study of Acts by affirming that,

The church is 'missionary by its very nature' and it becomes missionary by attending to each and every context in which it finds itself.

Stephen B. Bevans and Roger Schroeder, Constants in Context: a Theology of Mission Today, Orbis, 2004, p2

Following the missionary Spirit involves us in more than spotting opportunities which have been prepared for us, it involves the possibility of significant change, as the story of Peter and Cornelius illustrates.

God is already ahead of all evangelism, carrying on his mission to the world… More often than not respectful discernment will demand drastic changes of heart and mind, as for Peter with his own traditions.

David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy, Praising and Knowing God, Westminster, 1985, p151

One pioneer minister, who led his people out of their church building to plant into the local tower block, described how they were all 'evangelised by the process'.

A foretaste of the future

The second insight concerns the eschatological nature of the Spirit's work. The Holy Spirit is and brings the anticipation of the future Christ has already secured.

The Spirit is 'The certain evidence that that future had dawned, and the absolute guarantee' of its final consummation.

Gordon D. Fee, God's Empowering Presence: the Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul, Hendrickson, 1994, p806

In biblical language the Spirit is first fruits, foretaste, down payment and guarantee of the final harvest. According to Newbigin:

…the Church in each place is to be the sign, instrument and foretaste of the reign of God present in Christ for that place: a sign, planted in the midst of the present realities of the place but pointing beyond them to the future which God has promised; an instrument available for God’s use in the doing of his will for that place; a foretaste – manifesting and enjoying already, in the midst of the messianic tribulations, a genuine foretaste of the peace and joy of God‘s reign.

Lesslie Newbigin, A Local Church Truly United, 1976

This has two implications for praxis. First, the key to planting contextual church is not just a matter of establishing relevance but of local prophetic foretaste of the future which Christ has secured, as it can be demonstrated in that time and place. In other words contextual churches are to be sources of hope, pointing to a future in which people can invest their lives.

Second, as Alan Roxburgh emphasizes (The Missional Leader, Jossey-Bass, 2006, p5,9), the key to missional church lies in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Missional imagination is possible because of the presence of the Spirit, even when such imagination seems little in evidence. This was promised from the beginning. The dreams, visions and prophecies, foretold by Joel and poured out at Pentecost are the gifts which equip missional leaders to plant churches which are provisional foretastes of the future. These gifts take form with greater diversity than some Charismatic circles allow, but they give substance to the promise of missional imagination. Good leadership cultivates an environment where that imagination can emerge. There is clear evidence that the vision for fresh expressions has released large numbers of new missional leaders in the Church of England and the Methodist Church. If empowerment for witness beyond one's comfort zone is of the essence of the Pentecostal gift, then missional imagination is the key to discernment.

The Son of God

It is obvious how the Spirit is central to missional praxis. But how does Christology help us? The incarnation of Christ is unique. The once for all event, when the word became flesh, is the basis for our salvation, But

The event defines how it is to be embodied and thus communicated.

Darell Guder,The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness, Wipf & Stock, 2004, p15

The pattern of God's unique, once for all, saving act, also provides the pattern for mission. Paul’s statement, in 1 Corinthians 9, is based in the incarnation.

For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel

He engaged each culture from within, to the full extent possible, while remaining faithful to Christ. In summary he says 'Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ'. (1 Corinthians 11.1) To proclaim the cross faithfully, he imitated the incarnation.

Mission involves moving out of oneself and one's accustomed terrain, and taking the risk of entering another world. It means living on someone else's terms, as the Gospel itself is about God living on someone else's terms, the Word becoming flesh, divinity being expressed in terms of humanity. And the transmission of the Gospel requires a process analogous, however distantly, to that great act on which the Christian faith depends.

Andrew Walls, Christian Scholarship and the Demographic Transformation of the Church, in Theological Literacy for the 21stCentury, Eerdmans, 2002, p170f

The more we pay attention to a local context the more necessary an incarnational approach becomes.

Christian faith is embodied faith; Christ takes flesh among those who respond to him in faith. But there is no generalized humanity; incarnation has always to be culture specific.

Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, T&T Clark, 1996, p47

The body of Christ

The fundamental meaning of the church as 'the body of Christ': that is, Christ taking flesh in each context, is often overlooked because of the other applications of the metaphor, concerning the role and gifting of each member of the church, and the quality of relationships within it. But the essence is that Christ takes appropriate shape within each culture and context, while remaining recognisably the Christ of the gospels. This is made most explicit in the letter to the Ephesians where the church is introduced as 'his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all' (Ephesians 1.23). Christ fills (or completes) each place by taking appropriate shape in a community of its followers. In this community there is reconciliation with God and across cultural divides. A new humanity has been created. It is the people of the new heaven and the new earth, living in advance of that reality (Ephesians 2). Through it God demonstrates his manifold wisdom to the forces which shape the present age (Ephesians 3). This new humanity is the body of Christ (Ephesians 4).

This makes mission a voyage of Christological discovery as we see Christ 'take shape' in contexts with which we are unfamiliar. The Lausanne Haslev consultation saw

Practicing contextualisation as a way of discovering the fullness of the gospel through a living, growing encounter between the gospel, proclaimed and lived; the Bible and the personal, social, political, economic, religious worlds in which we live.

Lausanne Committee, Gospel Contextualisation

Further riches of Christ are revealed through mission. Guder says

They were not expanding the gospel as they followed the missional mandate of our Lord across all the safe boundaries of their world. The gospel was expanding them. It still does.

Darell Guder, The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness, Wipf & Stock, 2004, p38

Christ locally expressed

This has substantial implications for the culture of the local church, if it is to be in any sense missional or incarnational. To quote Newbigin:

This will mean that the character of the local church will not be determined primarily by the character, tastes, dispositions, etc., of its members, but by those of the secular society in which and for which it lives – seen in the light of God‘s redemptive purpose revealed in Jesus Christ for all men.

Lesslie Newbigin

Christology shapes ecclesiology in praxis not just in doctrinal theory.

In the introduction to Mission-Shaped Church Rowan Williams defined church as an event. It is

what happens when people encounter the Risen Jesus and commit themselves to sustaining and deepening that encounter in their encounter with each other.

This provides

plenty of theological room for diversity of rhythm and style

and we would add, of context. But the Archbishop added one condition,

so long as we have ways of identifying the same living Christ at the heart of every expression of Christian life in common.

Rowan Williams, Introduction, in Mission-Shaped Church, CHP, 2004 pv

Each contextual church is a local expression of the body of the same Christ. How then can we be sure that the context does not distort the way Christ is locally expressed?

Connected and rooted

First we need to note that every context will distort to one degree or another. That is why each local church has to be related to other local churches and to the universal church. Walls says

None of us can reach Christ's completeness on our own. We need each other's vision to correct, enlarge and focus our own; only together are we complete in Christ.

Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process Christian History, T&T Clark, 2002, p79

Isolated contextual churches create a distorted form of corporate Christian life. Solitary confinement is a form of cruelty, not a condition for local flourishing.

Rootedness in Christ provides our immune system against such distortion. Practitioners need to immerse themselves in the Gospels to learn how Jesus engaged with Israel in his day.

As Jesus to Israel so the Church to the world.

NT Wright, God's future for the world has arrived in the person of Jesus, quoted by Andrew Perriman

Dallas Willard's definition of discipleship as

being with Jesus in order to learn from him how he would live my life

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, Fount, 1998, p283

has direct application to church planting and fresh expressions of Church. This involves a lot more than asking 'What would Jesus do?' The Gospels are not source books for bright missional ideas. Before we ask for wisdom about a context we need to see it through the eyes of Christ. The gift of the incarnation, revealed for us in Scripture is the gift of being able to see (imperfectly) as God sees, the gift of viewing all of life from the perspective of his Son.

In order to obtain a God's eye view… we merely need to hold true to the narratives which identify Jesus and organise the rest of our beliefs accordingly.

Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p169

It is the long term, disciplined praxis of immersing ourselves in the narratives about Jesus, which train our eyes to read a context Christologically and act incarnationally. This is not a matter of Jesus becoming increasingly familiar, but of our allowing him to continually surprise us. Archbishop Stuart Blanche spent years studying the Gospel of Mark day by day. He told our congregation in York

Everytime I think I have grasped him, I discover something else which astounds me.

Training to follow the surprising and unexpected leading of the Spirit comes through being continually surprised by the Christ of the Gospels and the remainder of the New Testament.

Christ in Scripture provides the unchangeable foundation for all mission. Of particular significance is Christ’s praxis of mission, and the way in which that is contextualised into Gentile cultures in the New Testament church. Faithfulness to the gospel involves more than faithfulness to our understanding of the message, it involves a contextual application of the method.

Double handed mission

The two hands belong to one body. There is coordination between them. There can be no setting the Spirit against the Son or vice versa. In Revelation 2 it is Christ in all his glory who says

Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

According to David Ford this cry of Jesus

constitutes the church as a school of the wisdom of Christ, alert to his words and his own embodiment of them.

David F. Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p188

The Spirit points to the Son and the Son to the Spirit. If rootedness in Christ is our immune system, then our capacity to identify the leading of the Spirit, provides our missionary flexibility.

Perhaps the greatest weakness in contemporary church planting is that we find it much easier to plant something culturally appropriate than something prophetic. We have always known how to recreate the church of the past. We are learning how to plant church which is relatively contemporary, though often too comfortable. What our world needs is church which is prophetic, in the sense that it offers an imperfect foretaste of a believable future, secured by Christ. This would be a church where repentance was primarily turning from the inadequate and sinful to something better, something believable, something which sustains hope in community. If we are to plant such churches we must pay close attention to context, we must accept that we will probably not know the end at the beginning, and above all we will have to be two handed.

Fresh expressions of church are now developing in many denominations and traditions and Fresh Expressions is delighted to have welcomed the Church of Scotland and The Salvation Army as its most recent partners says Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team.

At its heart, Fresh Expressions is an ecumenical, missional, movement encouraging and resourcing the rediscovery of creative, contextual mission as a norm for local churches.

It is true that official reports, senior leaders and governing bodies have endorsed and commended local initiatives and promoted them across their networks. It is also true that the Mission-shaped Church report told the stories of local projects which had the potential for national significance, but the fact is that the fresh expressions movement has grown and developed from grassroots level.

However counter-cultural it may seem in our individualistic society, the Christian faith is essentially corporate and we belong to one another in Christ.

From the beginning, the life of the early church was characterised by fellowship (koinonia) – a generous mutual sharing of lives and gifts (Acts 2.42). This generosity was not just an internal matter but was demonstrated in mission as well. Paul thanks the Philippian church for their sharing (koinonia) in the gospel, which involved prayer and sending both finance and co-workers for his pioneering missionary work.

It is this sense of partnership which is characteristic of fresh expressions and the mixed economy at its best. At the local level, churches are releasing some leaders and resources to develop fresh expressions to establish a mixed economy of outreach where each contributes to the whole church's mission by engaging people unreached by the other congregation. As one part is blessed so is the whole.

At an area level, churches can combine ecumenically or within a deanery to supplement their existing work with a new missional community, such as a network church or a youth congregation. Regionally, Fresh Expressions Area Strategy Teams (FEASTs) allow the sharing of prayer, resources and training, and ensure that we never church plant competitively – out of ignorance.

Nationally, denominations partner one another so that each can benefit from the learning of all. We are on a learning curve about contextual church and we have the privilege of learning new things for one another and all benefitting together.

In the words of the movement's first team leader, Bishop Steven Croft, we have been learning to 'join the centre to the edge'. The models of fresh expression which have proved to be 'viral', such as Messy Church, Contemplative Fire and some forms of café church, all began as local initiatives. More generally, the publication of local stories has fed the imagination and given the courage for imaginative mission in many different forms in many different contexts. Many local churches are paying new and closer attention to the work of the missionary Spirit.

The Fresh Expressions initiative came into being in response to an emerging pattern of the Holy Spirit's activity. In celebrating God's leading, we shouldn't forget that the Spirit is not only the instigator of creative mission but also the sustainer and maturer of the Church. That's why we can now see further indications of this as a movement of the Spirit – with the capacity to last – through growing interest in:

• whole life discipleship;
• rules or rhythms of life;
• missional communities;
• new monasticism.

We shouldn't be surprised by this because those who pioneer the 'new things' quickly find that they need deeper spiritual roots to sustain them. It is wonderful to hear of increasing numbers of fresh expressions but few of those fresh expressions will have grown quickly. They do not provide a quick fix to overturn years of decline but are part of the Spirit's call to long term, patient, incarnational mission. In a variety of different ways, often drawing on disciplines and traditions from previous eras of the church, the call to mission is also becoming a call to deeper discipleship. The term 'ancient future' church is evocative of much of this.

The Spirit is stirring up the same concerns in a range of denominations and traditions with the mission shaped ministry course proving to be an appropriate form of learning together ecumenically. Pioneers from different denominations easily recognise a similar DNA among their peers with stories from one tradition inspiring new imagination in another. In many places, FEASTs are simply a more formal recognition of a partnership which is already developing.

Fresh expressions are here to stay because:

• they are now a proven part of the mission of the churches in this country. The movement is making a substantial numerical difference, and helping hundreds of local churches to engage in new ventures of creative mission. It is part of the emerging mainstream.
• the task has hardly begun. New ecumenical partners are just starting this work. A recent study of six dioceses shows 14,000 people in fresh expressions of church, about 10% of total attendance. For every person involved, another four are drawn in – but there is a lot of work to do to help many more parishes understand the possibility.
• networks of pioneers are forming for mutual encouragement and mutual learning, and there is now the beginnings of a learning community of dioceses.
• the partnership of mission agencies – and the 24/7 Prayer Movement – alongside the denominations in this country is another example of this shared missionary life, which the Holy Spirit is inspiring and empowering. This is even developing internationally as fresh expressions work gets underway in various parts of the world, providing new sources of learning.

The crossing of cultural and other barriers is very much part of this generous shared life. As fresh expressions are established in communities and networks previously untouched by the church, so the church locally becomes more diverse, and in the mixed economy its unity can have more of the breadth which God intends for his Church and Kingdom.

Something which first came to the attention of the national Church through a report to the Church of England has turned out to be a rich partnership of partnerships – experiencing the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the leader of the Church's mission. May this partnership deepen, grow and extend, for the sake of the gospel.

Bishop Graham Cray looks at discipleship, in an article written for the Church of England Newspaper.

The ultimate test of any local church's ministry, whether in 'inherited' mode or a fresh expression, is 'what sorts of disciples are being made?' To what extent is that expression of church shaping people to be like Jesus? How effectively does it help those who belong to it to live their daily lives as Jesus would live their lives? Are they a community whose life together shows the wider community a better way of living?

At the heart of the fresh expressions' praxis is discernment, listening to God in context, learning how to engage with local issues, serving appropriately and planting a new indigenous community rather than cloning from another context. Accordingly, Christian discipleship must take local shape.

Those who are moving into a new context know that they need to follow this process because they are aware that they don't know their new community but those who are planting a fresh expression in their own well-loved home community need to follow it as well. Many of our assumptions about local community prove to be misleading once we have done some prayerful listening.

But how do you get started? The key is to identify the issues which most concern those you are wishing or trying to serve while, at the same time, prayerfully 'reading' the local context to identify the bigger issues which the gospel needs to address. This should not be a negative exercise; you are not looking for things to condemn. Often you will be looking for healthy longings and aspirations, things that are causes for hope.

It is this listening and looking which is vital. Once the key local issues, or the primary issues for the network you are creating or engaging have been identified, it is not hard to work relationally towards a local light touch rule of life – focusing the community and worship life of a fresh expression around these first priorities in partnership with local people.

I recommend two prayer-soaked approaches:

• conversation: you need to build relationships so ask people about their community, their pressures and their aspirations as a way of getting to know them. Test out how your understanding of the gospel translates in ways that make sense to them.
• 'Participant observation': this has a greater degree of analysis, a more detached and intentional approach, which tries to identify the main features of a culture by trying to get an insiders' view of it. It is a way of looking for shared patterns of behaviour, not just knowledge of particular people.

Set out to create community from the very beginning rather than at a later stage. If the fresh expression has developed from listening to serving to forming community, then you have a community before you have a worship event. If fresh expressions of church are going to equip new Christians for whole-life discipleship, then these new communities of faith have to be more than a Sunday or weekday event. Context will shape your precise planning but there are all sorts of patterns of smaller meetings which could help. You might consider:

• regular cells;
• prayer triplets;
• a Messy Church, or other all-age approach, can develop materials for 'church in the home';
• occasional courses – on anything from parenting to self-worth – give people the opportunity to have time together. As long as the content is relevant it really doesn't matter what the topic is because it all creates an opportunity to build relationships;
• a locally appropriate rule or rhythm of life, built around the issues, habits or Christian practices most pertinent but most challenging in that context. This can easily be supported by daily texts or emails. Social media allows us to support one another when our community is dispersed and keep us in touch until the next time we gather.

Getting together in occasional gatherings of whatever shape and size offer a starting point, not the destination because the essence of Church is it being a community. The chief Biblical metaphors are corporate: the body of Christ, the family or household of God, the people of God, and so on. It's worth remembering that the term 'one another' appears more than 50 times – primarily in Paul's letters and John's gospel or letters.

All of this leads us to ask how the participants in a fresh expression can grow together as a community in order to develop personally and communally in discipleship. Remember too that such discipleship must be 'glocal' – both global and local:

• global – recognisable as an embodiment of the historic Christian faith as it is lived across the world. All Christians are to live the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount and our faith must engage with the shared features of Western culture. Consumerism shapes our lives in the UK so we need to engage with it wherever we are.
• local or contextual – because the gospel is not detached from ordinary life but is the power of God to transform local living.

And finally, here are a couple of 'health' warnings. We are seeking to grow warm communities which are easy to join so don't let the depth of existing relationships act as a wall which keeps new people on the outside. We are to grow together as we grow in numbers.

Pay more attention to how people live than what they claim to believe or disbelieve. Christian character is as important as doctrinal belief and our logic about the way in which the Holy Spirit should engage with a person – or a community's life – is not necessarily the same as the way the Holy Spirit will choose to work. Once again we need to see what God is doing and join in!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new year and a time for taking stock. Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team, glances back at what has gone before and looks to the future in 2013 and beyond.

The Fresh Expressions national day conference, in late 2012, was a special time in many ways. Following the missionary Spirit – going forward with fresh expressions' gave us the opportunity to thank Archbishop Rowan for championing our cause. It also provided a place for him to give his last word to us while in office.

His address offered much to reflect on but he used the occasion in particular to reassert his conviction that

the church gets renewed from the edges, not the middle

and that fresh expressions were evidence of that renewal through mission.

He went on to reflect on the 'extraordinary life stories' which had been shared with him as he visited different fresh expressions of church.

For me one of the greatest privileges is the experience of sitting down and listening to how people got there. Someone who has rediscovered or discovered for the first time, Christian commitment, in all the turmoil in personal lives. Somehow, out of all that has come an act of trust, a willingness to belong, and to bring that story into the community.

He then took us on a journey into the heart of being the church.

There's a quiet revolution in how we're thinking the word church,

he said. From the beginning of the Christian mission the gospel, and so the church, was about belonging.

That we should belong together as a human family with him,

turning from our own inadequate ways of belonging, that actually exclude.

Why should people still be interested in the church? Because the church is what speaks to us about the possibility that all human beings can belong together by the grace and acceptance of God, if they'd only just… turn round, repent and believe, turn round and trust, look to the generosity of the God who created and redeemed you, look into the face of the stranger in a completely new way.

So what we've been looking at and thinking about in terms of fresh expressions (of church) is… belonging being created. People who thought they didn't matter, they weren't welcome, are discovering that they are; suddenly finding there's a challenge about community that only the Christian vision or the Christian community can help them with.

It was essential to understand 'why the church matters', because otherwise 'we won't grasp the opportunities' when God has given us 'any number of open doors'.

This was a last word, but no means the end of the chapter. In a poignant moment, the Archbishop was prayed for by the President of the Methodist Conference, Mark Wakelin; Moderator of the URC General Assembly, Val Morrison; and a group of young adults from re:generation, a Methodist fresh expression of church in Romford. The baton was passing from one generation to another.

Martyn Atkins, General Secretary of the Methodist Church, had been in discussion with the Archbishop on behalf of the Methodist Church right at the beginning of the Fresh Expressions story, ensuring that the initiative would always be ecumenical. The Archbishop commented how

we've learned in this process that God does not pay denominational subscriptions.

Looking to the future, Martyn acknowledged that

fresh expressions have rescued the church in numerical decline… and the introspection and desperation that come about from that.

He added,

I don't buy the narrative that fresh expressions is simply a knee-jerk reaction to how you get more bums on seats, rather I see it as an impulse of the missionary Spirit that rescues is from the introspection of certain kinds of ecclesial thinking.

He also called for an 'evolving and real theological narrative' which addressed the inherited church and fresh expressions in equal terms.

We must move in the future, at a level of proper theological engagement, from the approach of some people, that the whole of inherited church is all right, to be defended without question, and anything that is seen in their eyes to detract from that needs to be held up to the light every five minutes or uprooted every two years to see whether or not it is growing. Or indeed, to be knocked around the head to be asked if it can still stand up straight!

Fresh Expressions is to continue its work well beyond 2014. New ecumenical partners are joining. Longer standing ones are identifying the work that is needed and the international network is expanding. The team will continue to network pioneers, gather learning, publish stories, and provide the training needed across the country.

As the Archbishop said,

God is giving us any number of opportunities.

The challenge for the future is not so much the scale of the task, great though that is, but being open to all the

occasions when we have the extraordinary privilege of being invited into people's lives, into their needs, their hopes and bring their this amazing vision of a universal belonging centred on the one who went from the centre of reality to the edge of human life and beyond. And in so doing made the whole creation new.

This distinctive chapter of the mission of God through the church in our land has many more pages waiting to be written.

You can watch and listen to full video and audio clips from all the contributors to Following the missionary Spirit.