Category: Kim Hartshorne

Kim Hartshorne asks whether we offer a 'plausible structure' to others.

As a Bishop's Mission Order and small missional community, we at the Upper Room in Cirencester ponder how to appropriately and effectively do mission in our context. How do we reach people who have never heard the good news of the Gospel in a way that makes sense? How do we make sure we show and tell the Jesus story so that our actions and words work together to communicate clearly?

What we've learned over six years is that telling, proclaiming, witnessing and evangelising is just not enough – nor is inviting people into 'our church' and then expecting them to get the hang of it because it makes sense to us. This is somewhat to do with British postmodern society where experience and authenticity tend to make more sense to people than believing a list of doctrinal truths. It also makes sense in our context, where the group of people we're trying to reach have no recent history of following the Christian faith. In the main, they are marginalised people who have not had direct links with Christianity for several generations – or more.

They have no foundation to start from, given that many schools have not held Christian whole-school assemblies for years now and no-one said prayers with them at bedtime. Childhood Bible stories, cheery hymns, Sunday school treats and family Christenings have not been a part of their history. The language of faith is now foreign to many people of white, working class backgrounds.

Life in the Upper Room community is about opening up a space where people, who've lost their thread of connection to the gospel, can come. It is a space where people can be introduced to the narrative and try it on for size, question and explore, begin to find where they belong in the story, taste and see and participate in it. We offer the Upper Room as a 'plausible structure' to others, sharing the story of Jesus, who he is, what his coming, living, dying and rising is all about – and what being in the family of God feels like, eating and praying together.

The idea of 'plausibility structures' was first discussed by Peter Berger in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, Penguin 1979) and explored further by Sam Richards in Mass Culture (ed. Pete Ward, BRF, 1999, pp116-130). The idea is that we all need spaces, relationships and experiences that enable us to understand, process, internalise and begin to believe and live the gospel. In a surrounding culture that no longer has this belief explicit in its daily story, this becomes important. In order for the narrative to make any sense, people need to be able to experience it, participate in it and chew it around, taste it, see what it feels like, try it out with others.

The need to 'have a go' is a very human characteristic and a facet of learning and growing. We need spaces to practice, and learn from each other's questions and reactions. A community where it is assumed we all agree and believe the same things is often a place where authority and the pressure to conform is subliminating the process of questioning that is a natural part of learning.

Richards posits acceptance into the ritual of communion as access to tasting and experiencing the action that surrounds the death and resurrection of Christ. In joining in, sharing the peace and the bread and wine, people are drawn into the welcome of God at the heart of the faith community. We always ask new people to offer the cup of wine to others at communion, and all are welcome to take bread and wine, as we have seen how transformative the invitation to participate is on people's journey to faith.

Rowan Williams writes in Lost Icons that our development as a person and a self occurs over time, in communities with others, and our self-awareness is shaped by shared understanding (pp140-143). This means we need to be aware that each person brings themselves into dialogue with tradition and culture. Where that has broken down, in terms of our shared understanding of the Christian faith, new spaces need to be made for this dialogue to occur. Williams believes we need a sense of ourselves being held within a narrative, even as this narrative is constantly being re-edited over time (p144). Every event that happens is connected to others and to the gospel and re-orders who we are and will be, so that 'every telling is a retelling, and the act of telling changes what can be…' (p144). In this way, new identities can be explored and inhabited.

This offering of a space and community of fellow humans to journey alongside, a place to retell and reshape our stories in the light of Christ's redemptive story, is what we are all about as we seek to offer a 'plausible structure' at the Upper Room.

Kim Hartshorne gives an update on the Upper Room at Cirencester as it is granted a Bishop's Mission Order.

It has been a time of celebration at the Upper Room; five people were baptised and/or confirmed from our community in November and Bishop Michael of Gloucester conferred a Bishop's Mission Order upon us. This makes us officially a part of the Church of England, whereas before we were independent of any denominational affiliations. It may seem like a very odd move, for a project that had its own charity status and finance already in place, and so perhaps that requires some explaining.

We were established almost six years ago by four women who between them represented three different churches. The church that may have been the obvious sponsor of this mission project declined to be involved. A second church offered to consider if we were to be one of its 'spokes' but this too came to naught. After a while, we ceased to notice and just carried on doing what we felt God was leading us to do, which was to offer a space where people who were far off from the edges of church could explore faith and spirituality and receive prayer and a sense of belonging. We were hoping to 'show and tell' the Gospel message, and to bless and care for struggling people in practical ways. This was enough to keep us out of mischief and the question of whether we were or weren't a part of the church in any broad sense was not high on our agenda.

A few years later, we had our first part time staff member and some other new leaders and together we began to ask the question whether we should give up going to the various churches we attended and meet together to worship on a Sunday at the Upper Room. Up to that point our activities had taken place on Mondays and Fridays and we had considered them part of our individual offering of worship to God. At around the same time, a new vicar came to one of the churches in the town and he joined the Street Pastors team that operated out of the Room on Saturday evenings. We decided to approach him to ask if he would lead us in an occasional communion service, which over time turned into a monthly communion service followed by a community lunch.

So I guess we officially and publically began to offer formal public worship at that point and others gathered to join us. The people who came along to other activities at the Upper Room quickly gravitated to these times of worship and ate up the rituals offered, along with the obligatory quiche. We began to go together twice weekly with our folks to the brief midday communion service at the Parish church and get to know the team of vicars that led the services there. Then Archbishop Rowan Williams came to visit us last year; this made a deep impact upon many and people began to ask to be baptised and confirmed, much to our surprise. As post-moderns, and also some of the team recovering from hurt and disillusionment with church, formal liturgy and religious ritual was not at all on our agenda, but the truth is when you set something up to serve a people group who are unchurched and they ask for liturgical rituals and find deep meaning and resonance in them, you have to decide if what you’re doing is about what you want personally, or if you are willing to be the servant of what the people want. Sometimes our call is to die to ourselves and our right-on ideas and listen to what the people we hope to reach are asking for, and this has been our experience. Of course we wouldn’t say this is what everybody should do, and we know many new start-ups have had a much more difficult time trying to build bridges than we have. The Church of England is by no means perfect and we are aware of the potential domestication or commodification that could threaten our creative mission.

The reality is we have grown towards the Church of England over some years as relationships on the ground in the parish have been slowly built and invested in; at times this has not gone well, there have been misunderstandings and we have had to re-group and try again. At the same time, the people we journey with have responded positively to reimagined and adapted ritual and liturgy but in our very different setting, which has spurred us on. And our team here have been blessed by the grace shown to us by the Church and have felt the convergence of spirit and relationship that has culminated in the Bishop issuing us the first Mission Order in the Diocese. This is a bit of legislation enacted out of the Mission Shaped Church Report 2004, which allows us to join the body of the CofE but gives us freedom and elbow room to breathe and space to keep our missional identity and purpose. We don't report directly to the parish but gather around the Bishop; we maintain our trustees, charity status and financial independence. (We do not receive any funding from the Church of England, just to allay the fears of some who accuse fresh expressions of leeching resources that ‘should’ belong to the parishes! Nor do we pay Parish Share.)

As we are studying Ecclesiology at CMS on our Pioneer Leadership MA this term, I have been really fascinated to consider the question of when we stopped being a 'mission project' and became a church – indeed some people locally are still unconvinced we are a church at all! I guess I feel that at conception, at the twinkle in the eye of God when he planted the dream in a group of housewives, he saw this as a part of his body, and that it has been an almost six year journey for that to become consonant and allow us to grow towards it. For me, when the Bible is shared, along with prayer and Communion, then relationships start to grow and develop and by the Holy Spirit transform us and others, then that is church.

How this will work going forward, and what God will do with it, I am unsure. But we have journeyed along together, seeking to be open and follow the wind of the spirit and this is where we have unexpectedly found ourselves. When you are the servant of a call from God, you have no certainty it's going to go where you expect or want, but you have to keep saying yes, one step at a time, even when it really doesn't feel like what you signed up for. So, please pray for us as we embark on this next stage of the unexpected adventure!

(This article was first posted on the CMS pioneer mission leadership training website).

Kim Hartshorne uncovers what is hidden.

I recently went to a 'ReSource' weekend away for people interested in finding out more about mission in very different contexts. It involved going to a location with other practitioners and discovering what is happening on the ground. Based around a project or charity rooted in a local community, it was an experiential time offering opportunity for input, reflection and questions.

It was also a very sociable time with lots of eating and drinking, joking and messing about, confession and truth telling.

Weekends are run by a partnership of ACPI (Anglican Church Planting Initiatives), the CMS Pioneer Leadership training course and the Fresh Expressions team. This particular getaway was hosted by Streetspace and the Frontier Youth Trust.

The theme behind them seems to be incarnational, indigenous mission that bubbles up in a local area out of the soil of genuine relationships – rather than something imposed from outside by people who are not locals. It really helped me to get under the skin, understand and experience what these 'new forms of church' really look and feel like – a much better use of time than reading 1,000 books!

The experience energised me and I came home with a head full of thoughts, challenges and inspirations – and a new self-awareness about where I'm struggling and why. Here are a few of the things I learned, re-learned, remembered or caught a glimpse of:

• The real scope of the church is much larger, more varied and complex than the part we see that self identifies as the church (or the Church). Wherever relationships, mutuality, people becoming more fully human, expressing creativity, working for justice are seen; these are included in the scope/footprint/body of the church. The medium of human relationships is the fertile soil that the hidden church expands and grows in.
• Many more people are priestly than those who are ordained and recognised as such by the church. They manifest that via relationships; affirming and enabling the expansion of humanity in another – or the working of reconciliation or justice, or the creation of beauty and creativity. They uncover an enlarged reality and often name or map it for the first time. In these cases, the development of new language and means of expression is often a part of the work they offer.
• The parts of the body that are identified and uncovered are often unaware that they are not the whole church, and so at times they may behave like the hand that says to the body part that is unseen or unglamorous 'we do not have need of you'. Grace is needed, if you are the pancreas! By the same token, the newly minted parts may say to the old wrinkly parts, we are embarrassed by you. This isn't helpful either; each has different experience of parts of this sacramental road we all travel, and travelling together as guides and companions walking at different paces exposes the beauty we all share.
• At one point, we saw a plaque by a river that said, 'Uncovering what is hidden'. This sums up the work of pioneers for me but it's also the remit of all humans made in God's image. It includes the church as a part of what is hidden and needs to be seen in a new way, re-imagined for a new destiny.
• I remembered again that I am energised – as an extrovert and pioneer – by being in the thick of a crowd of similarly energised people. I need the banter, the pacey exchange of ideas and challenges, lots of jokes and messing about with those engaged in challenging situations on the edges of the map. I love being out and about, involved in direct work with people but am somewhat deadened by accounts, admin, management, insurance, form filling and box ticking. Sadly, part of being a grown up and running a safe project has to include some of this, but perhaps praying for others to share the tedious stuff would be wise.
• I learn most from experience, from being out in the context that is being explained and taught. I smell it, taste it, imbibe it and assimilate it, and then apply what I experience to other scenarios. I learned more than I have done in the entire academic year – as well as being more challenged and excited too. It reminded me of who I am in a way that the classroom never can.
• The real frontier of mission pushes us along the jagged edge of powerlessness, being a guest in another space, building relationships that grow into the creation of another, new space. Other names for this are a thin place, a third space, a liminal space, or the Kingdom of Heaven. We don't turn up with a solution that we invite others into, we open up spaces together that we build and create in together.
• When I submit to this powerlessness, I am the beneficiary of the mutual discovery in powerful ways that change and transform me. Perhaps more than those I am seeking to journey with, I need this exchange of life to revive and resurrect me! It’s like a blood transfusion.
• God is in the business of uncovering the hidden; discovering buried treasure. Often what is most precious is buried in us most deeply – we have protected it as a survival strategy when facing risk, danger or pain. This has been true for me. Encounter with others, sharing their pain, gives breakthroughs to the treasure seeker in each of us. Take the risk!