church of england Archives - Page 9 of 11

Sorted

Church Army evangelist Captain Andy Milne first launched Sorted in 2004. As a keen skateboarder he got to know the area's young skaters, many of whom went on to become founder members of the youth church in north Bradford. Now skateboarding is just one of many activities they enjoy every week, explains Andy.

We meet on Monday, Tuesday and Friday nights, and we'll see an average of 100 young people during that time. About 25 to 30 get together for the Monday youth congregation from 7.15 to 9pm but they are very active and help set up the equipment and run the whole thing really – including worship, teaching, prayer, and activities in between. The age range is 13 to 20.

On Tuesday night, we meet in a different place – at the Salvation Army – and have five different groups with anything up to 35 people there. Each group is led by two young people. Sometimes there is a discussion around a Bible passage and sometimes they work on a fund raising project but the idea is to try and provide a place where they can really talk about their faith and what they can do with that faith. It's more discipleship focused. When they get involved in leadership it really helps their understanding. If they run it themselves, they really own it and the energy triples.

Fridays will see us have a testimony, short talk for about five minutes and then different activities in the various rooms. Last year we asked the young people what they wanted to do at this session. We have to be facilitators in it – otherwise they are going to get bored. There's quite a wide age range for this one, it's about 11 to 20, and the older teens run it with some adults as well. We can get 40 or 50 people coming to that.

One room is used for things like live music sessions; there is also a café with a tuckshop, and games on offer like softball and table tennis. We have people doing dj-ing with mixing and that sort of stuff. It's amazing when you look back to see how things have grown since were first given use of a portakabin in the grounds of a school. Some of the young people have been coming to us ever since.

What tends to happen is that kids come through their friends or schools to Friday evening sessions because it's very open, accessible to anyone. Then they get to know people and when there is a bit more trust they tend to move into the other two groups.

When we started, one of the ways I was able to build relationships was through the skateboarding but it's quite a small part now. It has been good to see a lot of young people come from very different backgrounds to be part of this and I have been privileged to witness young people having experiences of God on a Monday night, come to faith and develop into leaders and disciples.

Some local churches realised they hadn't got the resources to do something similar themselves but felt they could support something that's Kingdom work by allowing us to use their buildings. They show their support for us in practical ways.

We are in the process of setting up Sorted 2 about a mile-and-a-half up the road because we realised that about 80% of those in Sorted 1 were from the same school of around 1200 pupils. The second school in the area is the sixth largest secondary in the country with about 1800 students but it is currently being extended so will be even bigger. It is multicultural and multiracial.

There was a real sense that God was asking us to go there. Then one lady had a picture of God giving us a key, opening up something that hadn't been open for some time. People were amazed when we were then invited to go in. As a result we started working with youngsters there and developing groups. We now see about 30 young people every week in Sorted 2. It’s a massive thing for us.

In the last year, a Church Army team has been drawn together to oversee the whole thing. People from local churches also act as adult volunteers for each Sorted, and it all makes a tremendous difference because the work through the schools is growing all the time.

Another exciting development for us is to be granted a Bishop's Mission Order. It means we are now seen as being on an equal footing with other churches and it also clarifies what Sorted is all about in this part of Bradford. The BMO was first mentioned about three years ago when it was noted that Sorted is not a seedbed for something else or an extension to another church. It's a church in its own right.

That could clearly be seen earlier this year when six of our teenagers were baptised by the then Bishop of Bradford, Rt Revd David James, in the River Wharfe. A further five then joined them to be confirmed and take Communion by the side of the river in Ilkley. We find that the young people often have an experience of God before they follow him. Rather than a gradual intellectual process, they often have an encounter with God and begin to make sense of it later.

Going back to where it all started, I have now written a book about skateboarding called The Skateboarders Guide to God in which I try to connect the Gospel with skateboarding mentality and language. I hope to get it published so that it may possibly help others along the way.

Kairos

The Kairos Centre has opened its doors as a building for the community in Grange Park, Northampton. It's a dream come true for project chairman Charlie Nobbs and the start of another chapter in the story of Grange Park Church. Anglican minister Charlie tells the tale.

It has been such an interesting journey for us all at Grange Park Church. What started off as a germ of an idea has become a reality in the shape of a central place where people can get together from all walks of the community for all sorts of reasons at the same time.

We have worked with many people along the way but, most recently with South Northamptonshire Council, to transform an empty shell of a building into a much-needed facility. It is the vision of Grange Park Church to follow the call of Jesus to be the good news to Grange Park and beyond – and the Kairos Centre will certainly help us in that.

As an Anglican and Baptist Church Local Ecumenical Partnership we meet together on Sunday mornings in Grange Park Community Centre in a nearby part of the village but the Kairos building, in a parade of shops opposite a doctors' surgery, is the base for our church office and coffee shop.

The Kairos Centre is not a church – it’s a place where people can have 'kairos' moments. Kairos is ancient Greek for a critical moment in time, a moment when God draws near and the opportunity to take new direction or restoration is available. Jesus uses the word in Mark to announce the drawing close of the Kingdom as he starts his ministry.

Our vision is for a place that provides facilities and a home for the existing church family, provides services and relationships with the wider community and ultimately will be home to future fresh expressions of church. We are just relaunching a café style evening service and hope to develop an after-school club fresh expression and maybe even a film church – as and when we are able.

The larger meeting room can take about 60 people and there is also a quiet room; a place where people can have 'kairos' or just find some peace from the hectic pace of life. The lounge area also has a coffee shop currently open four mornings a week as well as a small meeting room and the church office. These rooms can also be used for affordable conference/meeting facilities.

Lots of people these days are concerned that new housing areas run the risk of becoming soulless dormitory estates, but we are working hard to combat that. We also hope to develop a menu of wellbeing and lifestyle events, such as advice on debt management, counselling, social events for adults and children's and youth activities.

Looking back, and I was just coming to the end of my curacy in 2001 at St Giles Northampton when it was suggested I could maybe do a church plant in this new housing area.

I gathered a few people together but the Baptists had beaten us to it! They felt that God had called them to plant a cell church at Grange Park and we had a similar sense of calling to what God was doing so we joined forces and started to gather a team.

Just a few hundred houses had been built at the time; you could walk around the place in an hour or so and knock on every door. I joined the parish council, while my Baptist colleague helped to set up Neighbourhood Watch in the area and got involved when the primary school was being built.

Initially we were church planting with a traditional Sunday service plus small groups model rather than a fresh expression, but we were keen to connect with those who might not usually attend a traditional church and focused on young families.

To launch the first public worship, we did a holiday club type 'thing' called Kidzone. There was no building to have anything in and all the issues with child protection were getting to be a bit of a nightmare so we set up a 'camp' around one of the school playgrounds – we had lots of gazebos and each gazebo was an activity zone. Naively we thought that all the children and parents who flocked to Kidzone would also flock to church the following week. That didn't happen but what we did notice was that groups of parents would be chatting together while waiting for their children and the conversations would be along the lines of 'Where do you live?', 'O I'm just round the corner from there, come and have a coffee.' We had stumbled upon community building as a means of being good news to Grange Park!

Kidzone has continued and grown as an annual event and we usually get 400 to 500 children over three days in the last week of the summer holidays. As our aim is to be good news in the community, Kidzone is something that has worked very well in letting people know there is a church, that it is good to have it and begin to build relationships.

The other area in which we have seen very encouraging results is through the work of health care professionals. We got to know one of the health visitors and she said that all of the doctors' surgeries were over-run with depressed new mums. We suggested she use our home for appointments with the mums and so Talking Point got up and running on Thursday mornings. My wife Charlotte has been very instrumental in helping to develop something that has become phenomenally successful.

Visitors are offered tea, coffee, cake and a warm welcome. They just meet and chat in our lounge, comparing birth experiences and sleep patterns. The Health Visitors love it because they can see eight or more at a time; the mums love it because they make friends and realise they are not alone. There aren't many babies born in Grange Park that haven't been through our house!

The good news is that the Health Visitors believe Talking Point has significantly improved the mental health of struggling mums as it is a network which picks up different people. We now have various Talking Point groups in and around Grange Park. We use cell principles and organise a social night for the parents without their kids; it welds them together as a cohesive group.

Midwives in the area have also picked up on Talking Point, telling mums-to-be about it as a place to go after the birth. Things shifted again when one of the people coming along to the sessions asked about getting their baby baptised; another wanted to do an Alpha course.

The upshot of that is a group called Stepping Stones which we now run fortnightly on Tuesday mornings in the Community Centre. We make it clear that it is run by the church but it is all very informal; we offer a breakfast of croissants and orange juice for carers, mums and children, hear stories told from the Bible in creative ways, and provide a craft activity. We say it's an opportunity to take a stepping stone towards God. I would say Stepping Stones is a fresh expression of church; it has been going for nearly four years and we regularly get about 50 mums and their children.

That in turn has developed because several mums said they wanted to find out more; their children were asking questions they didn't know the answer to and the parents also thought of the Bible stories as being a 'good thing' to teach the little ones.

To meet that need, we offer a five-week introduction to Christianity course through a DVD series called Journeys. As a result, a number of people have come to faith, some continue in that faith and others disappear.

The Kairos Centre now offers further possibilities in our life together in this community. I believe God wants us to be blessed through it and in turn bless Grange Park and beyond.

Heyford Chapel

A church community on a former US air base turned housing estate has separate age-related congregations.

We are a growing, worshipping community and are thinking about the way and how we meet together,

says Ian Biscoe, Church Army officer and leader of Heyford Chapel since its foundation in 2002.

Each of the four congregations has its own leadership team.

Kidz Church, for any child up to the age of 11, meets on Sunday afternoons in the former military chapel used for much of Heyford Chapel's activities. Worship and prayer are mixed with games.

HeyU for younger teenagers meets in the chapel on early Wednesday evenings, while Revival, for older teens, meets in the chapel later on Wednesday evenings, with a half-hour gap between the two.

Unity church for adults meets in two cells on Tuesday and for worship and small groups on Thursday evenings, beginning with refreshments and chat. A social evening, Fusion, happens on Fridays.

This growing worshipping community of between 100 and 120 members is working out ways to meet the differing needs of its members whilst maintaining a sense of being part of a whole.

Riverforce

In just a few years, Riverforce has become an official staff support network in Merseyside Police. The workplace church is involved in the formulation of any policy before its implementation in the force.

It also receives funding from Merseyside Police and its leadership team has grown to six, covering virtually the whole of the force which provides policing services for the five local authority areas that make up Merseyside – Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens and the Wirral.

Recent developments at Riverforce have also seen the setting up of a counselling service. Weekly or fortnightly cells now operate in most areas of the force while joint celebrations at police headquarters in Liverpool city centre regularly bring together up to 90 officers.

Merseyside has a population of 1.4m, with the police workforce – as of December 2009 – standing at 7899 (including officers, staff and specials). A city-wide Christian prayer event at the waterfront Liverpool Echo Arena in 2009 saw 250 officers from Neighbourhood Policing Teams join the 4,500 audience. So successful was the Redeeming Our Communities launch that Merseyside Police requested a follow-up celebration in 2011.

Riverforce members have recently been going out to local churches to help them work more closely with the police. The first event attracted 150 people.

Chief Inspector Peter Owens, who launched Riverforce in 2006, has now retired but continues as a manager with the Occupational Health Team – and as chairman of the missional cell network. He is very encouraged by the developments:

We have had a lot of interest from other parts of the country and other organisations. On an individual level too there are some amazing testimonies. We will be running a force-wide Alpha course in the autumn. It's hard work but worth it.

Colin Brown

Just over a year ago Colin Brown moved to Cornwall to start a fresh expression of church amongst the artistic community. It's a slow, steady task but one Colin, Church Army and the Diocese of Truro are committed to.

It's not easy starting a fresh expression of church from scratch at the best of times, but when you are trying to engage with a dispersed community of artists on the south coast of Cornwall, it is even more difficult. Colin Brown knows he has his work cut out. "As well as the joys of being in a beautiful place, and doing what I love to do – painting – I find myself with a lot of questions", he said.

And it is quite a list: "How do I follow God's lead in this? Where do I put my energy today? How do I go about meeting people who don't go to church and help them to become aware of God in their lives… in their art? What might church look like for them, and what part do I play in developing that?"

But slowly and surely the way forward for Colin is beginning to emerge. He started with prayer, valuing the importance of listening, silence and space, and then realised God was leading him to meet certain people and opening certain doors. He was asked to help with chaplaincy work at the local art college, given the chance to mount an exhibition in a local pub, found a temporary studio space in a local vicarage and began to meet other artists at a weekly night class.

Colin is at the stage of building community amongst those he meets. It is something which he believes he needs to take slowly and gently, and is grateful that both Church Army and the Diocese of Truro, who support him, agree. "They have given me the freedom and the permission to be here, as an artist amongst fellow artists, to be inculturated in the artistic community, and to be accepted".

He is aware of the risks he is taking too. He has worked for the church for 15 years but his pioneering work in Cornwall seems to be much more fragile. He's realised how important it is to gather those around him who 'get it' but still admits that things may not work out.

"I know that in this particular moment I need to be faithful to my sense of where God is leading me, but it may be that it all just fizzles out. But I know that I have been true to myself and I know God is saying to me 'Colin, enjoy it, enjoy the journey and don't think too much about what is going to happen tomorrow'".

And deep down Colin has a dream – to see lots of artists in and around Falmouth discovering and expressing a deep sense of God coming through their work. "And who knows where that might lead," he wonders.

Tudeley Messy Church

Revd Pamela Ive is parish deacon at All Saints,Tudeley, and she is thrilled at the development of Messy Church in her area. She tells the story so far.

I attended the Fresh Expressions mission shaped ministry course from September 2008 to July 2009 in Rochester. It was really useful and made me rethink a lot of things about how we reach out to people and, in certain aspects, also helped me to be more realistic about which goals were achievable.

As a result we changed the style and format of midweek after-school activity we had been doing for quite a while and I have been surprised and delighted at the response we've had to it.

In the past we had a monthly meeting called Light on Thursday which was really a discussion time with a very few mums who had gone through confirmation, and a couple of others who had joined along the way. There was a minimal amount of worship while the children had tea but there was not much faith input for them. That folded after about four years when the volunteer helpers moved on.

I prayed with a member of a local Baptist Church about the direction in which we were meant to go. A third person came along from Christians Together in Capel and she had a vision that we should set up Messy Church so we decided to pool our resources and put our energies into that.

We are in a Local Ecumenical Partnership (Tudeley cum Capel with Five Oak Green), and Messy Church really came together because of the involvement of a number of churches. We also have an Ecumenical Church Council and they were happy to support it financially.

We are meeting on the fourth Sunday of the month at Five Oak Green United Church, and decided to schedule 10 Messy Churches for this year. Helpers come from the Baptists, the Anglican/URC LEP and a local charismatic Free Church.

We decided to stick to Sundays because we are quite close to London and a lot of dads don't get back until 7pm or 8pm from work during the week. If the children are aged five or six, that’s no good for them on a weekday, so we opted for Sunday from 4.45pm for an hour. I think that time of day is perfect. They have had their Sunday lunch and they may be on their way back home after time out somewhere, this is dead time and we fill the gap.

At our first meeting we catered for 40, buying two hotdogs for each person expected so we got 80. Then somebody reminded me that we might have vegetarians there so we got veggie versions as well. Thankfully we did, with a crowd of 65 on the day!

We have a very small church. When everyone is sitting down packed into rows, the maximum we can hold is about 100. It was a huge surprise to see who came because there were a number of people we had never come across before, and lots of husbands accompanied their wives so there were actually men under 40 there.

One mum said that her husband had decided not to come because he didn't think there would be any men – she couldn't wait to tell him that lots had turned up in the hope that he'd come along next time. We were just overwhelmed, it was wonderful chaos. The people who were there said they felt they could invite others to come, it was fantastic.

Creation was the theme. We had a table game and word searches, and told a story with drama involving the children. It was so packed and so noisy, we had to stand on chairs to be heard and seen.

Numbers now average about 45. This feels much more comfortable for the size of building we're meeting in – especially when we are being active. Many aspects have been very encouraging. Friends have invited others; we are building relationships within the community; and Christians who worship in different places are catching up with each other and working together (especially in the kitchen).

At our Palm Sunday Messy Church, we invited people to the Good Friday Family Service which was in a similar format. We started off by making Hot Cross buns and then baked them during the service, which meant we had a very sociable time afterwards! The service also brought different congregations together and we involved a small teenage after-school group in leading it.

As we knew that not everybody would be there on Easter Sunday we included the celebration of the Resurrection as part of that Good Friday service. There was a wonderful sense of having gone through Holy Week and to Easter with our Messy Church newcomers. We had linked things together for them in the previous Messy Church sessions by following the accounts of Creation, Noah and God’s promise, and then God’s Promise showing itself in the death and resurrection of Christ. A rainbow poster we made on our second session carried the theme through.

For Messy Church at Pentecost, we built a church with cake including gingerbread people to show that the Church is about the people – not the building itself. We then ate it!

Most people who came to the first Messy Church have been to a subsequent one and we've welcomed others too. The social aspect seems to be one of the most important to people – nobody's ever in a hurry to leave. We're very much looking forward to seeing what happens next.

St Luke’s in the High Street

St Luke's-in-the-High-Street focuses around the weekly Walthamstow Farmers Market in north-east London. It is one of 40 Christian churches based in Walthamstow but team vicar, Revd Tony Cant, says it is a unique form of missional experiment in the diocese of Chelmsford.

The Sunday market opened here in September 2007 and we run our Holding out Hope community stall during trading hours from 10am to 2pm every week. I have the grand title of Market Manager.

Our main focus is on serving people outside traditional church life. Our own building is for sale, so we are now a fresh expression of church that has grown out of inherited church. Also on Sundays, if people want to chat with their children, they can join some of our crew for a late breakfast from 10.45am-11.45am at the Pop-in Café, which is located in the High Street.

St Luke’s-in-the-High-Street is part of The Parish of Walthamstow Team, which also includes St Gabriel's, St Mary's and St Stephen's. The churches all work differently, complementing each other in working for the common good and helping to shape the future for this area.

Tony continues:

We very much believe in participating in the life of the wider church by being involved in its traditional structures including Bishop's Council, Diocesan Synod, Diocesan Mission and Pastoral Committee, Deanery Synod and Clergy Chapter. These structures have been very supportive and really blessed us as a result.

As part of their discipleship in building their own faith, St Luke's meets at one of their members' homes on Wednesday evenings for reflection, prayer, Bible study, worship and Holy Communion. And the last Wednesday of the month is given over to enjoying a meal together.

Andy Campbell, an Ordained Pioneer Ministry candidate, based with St Luke's, adds:

At the moment we’re spending some time looking at the Fruits of the Spirit. Love, of course, is at the top of the list. At St Luke's, one of the simple ways that we express love for others is by offering free drinks to the other stall holders. Such a small thing, and by no means revolutionary or radical, but real and appreciated nonetheless – particularly on those cold and miserably wet days.

Why do we give free drinks? They are small gifts of love, given because God first loved us. These tokens, alongside our commitment to be present at the Market each week – whatever the weather, are significant because God is within them.

Tony says that some weeks St Luke's members find themselves simply huddled in the stall, looking out at the driving rain, and wondering just quite what it is that they are doing. Yet on other occasions have had hugely significant conversations with stall holders or customers about life, the universe and everything. Both extremes are expressions of love; both dependent on a willingness to be present; and (much more importantly), both resourced by the true source of all love that they have been grafted onto.

Sanctus1

Ben Edson shares the story of always-incomplete community building with Sanctus 1 in Manchester.

I recently gave a presentation to some Australian visitors about Sanctus1. When it came to the time for questions one of them asked: 'How do you manage so much change?' I hadn’t realised that we had been through so much change, but now as I look back on seven years of Sanctus1 I realise that change is part of our narrative.

We have moved from a Cathedral to a parish church and now moved again to an arts café. We have seen the community grow from four to fifty; then from fifty to twenty and currently from twenty back to fifty. We have experimented with mid-week groups, small groups, groups on Sundays and no groups. We have been involved in running club nights, in mind body spirit fayres, in art exhibitions and a night café. Change is part of our story.

And perhaps, it is this sense of change that sustains us. Sanctus1 has been established for longer than many fresh expressions of church and it seems that as soon as the change stops we being to go stale. Fluidity is kinetic and change involves movement. If a fresh expression is to remain fresh it must keep moving, keep changing, keep evolving.

Each new person that comes to Sanctus1 changes the community; their unique presence brings a new dynamic, a new set of experiences and new areas of wisdom. This 'openness to the wisdom of the new' means that the old is permanently being refreshed.

As I have continued to reflect on the question posed by our Antipodean visitors I have realised that Sanctus1 is always provisional and will always be journeying towards being church. This is particularly emphasised by our geographic location in the City centre of Manchester, and the demographic of this people group, but it is also an ecclesiological stance that says we will never fully arrive. It seems when we think that we have arrived we discover that we are further away than we thought and that we have simply taken one step on our journey.

This context of provisionality raises many questions regarding future vision and planning. How can you have a plan for the future if the present is always provisional? Provisionality can be an empowering place to be, it means that present certainty does not define future dreams, but that future dreams define an uncertain present. An uncertain present creates space for creative thinking and action as we realise that the dreams for the future are, in fact, the dreams of today.

However, within this positive stance to provisionality how do we ensure that the story of Sanctus1 is carried into the future? One way that we think this has been achieved has been through the defining of our values.

The values need to remain provisional so that each person who comes to Sanctus1 feels that they can influence them so that they reflect the current community. Further evidence of our desire to carry the story of Sanctus1 forward is our desire to be structurally recognised through a Bishop's Mission Order, (BMO). A BMO has provisionality built into it – initially a BMO is for five years with the maximum time being ten years – structured provisionality. A certain short-term future and a positive stance to provisionality means that the present becomes an opportunity for missional engagement and connectivity with Christ.

Within this culture of provisionality the story-tellers and the story-carriers become very important as people who carry the narrative of Sanctus1 with them so that when the future is planned it remains consistent with the story of the past. It is often the case that the leader of a community becomes the central story-teller, however a less dependent and mores sustainable way is for the community to become a story-telling community.

When a community shares and lives the story they then they will go on to write the story, to start a new sentence and dream the next chapter. This has happened within Sanctus1 by the leadership being shared between a team of up to five people, with that team being a mix of clergy and laity; male and female. This team aims to be fluid enabling people to commit to it for an appropriate time-period rather than indefinitely. The story-tellers of Sanctus1 are then not only the leadership team but everyone involved in living the story of the community and serving the city centre of Manchester. To carry the story means to carry the centrality of word and sacrament, the affirmative yet critical approach to contemporary culture and mission as being central to our existence. There is of course a provisionality to this all, knowing that we are still journeying, still incomplete, still trying, still becoming church…

Exeter Network Church

Jon and Jo Soper tell us the story of Exeter Network Church, in the Church of England Diocese of Exeter. This network church is soon to make history as one of the first fresh expressions of church to become a Church of England Bishop's Mission Order. Jon and Jo explain all.

In August 2004 my wife Jo and I moved to Exeter from London to pursue a clear call from God to start a mission shaped charismatic church. We knew one couple there who knew others who were eager to do something. Our first gathering was a party in a garden and then we found a place to meet in the old dry house on the quay opposite a nightclub. We launched ourselves properly as the Exeter Network Church, (ENC) in January 2005.

Our approach has been to develop an outward focused culture and wean people off dependency on traditional pastoral leadership. We are doing this by encouraging everyone to be in a network. A network is a group of people with a name and a God-purpose and which is radically open to the people they are aiming to connect with. These can be very diverse; one of the first networks to get going is called 'Women Who Work For Themselves' (it does what it says on the tin) who meet once a month in a hotel and who support one another in the businesses in which they are involved. Most in the network are not part of church.

Many networks are social networks where you bring friends – salsa, surfing, poker; some are social action networks, such as the team which visits Dartmoor prison once a month; some are age related (children, teenagers, young adults); some are orientated towards discipling Christians, and a few are geographic, such as 'God and Chips', who showed Alpha DVDs in a chip shop during opening hours.

In addition to these, a few times a year we have 'Edge Sunday'. As a church we say we are aiming to be 'strong at the core, blurred at the edge'. On an 'Edge Sunday' we have no worship gatherings, but instead we go out into Exeter and around, looking to express the love of Jesus in creative ways.

At our last event we held a 'big giveaway' (instead of selling) at the car boot sale, which gave rise to interesting conversations, as well as having a team of people praying for people in the high street, cafes, and another team going to the prison. Some in ENC use 'Edge Sunday' to do their own personal blurred edge activity, like inviting their neighbour round for lunch which they have been meaning to do for months.

Networks and 'Edge Sunday' focus us on being intentional about seeing what the Spirit is doing around us and confidently joining in.

Since November 2007 we have been incorporated into the Diocese of Exeter and are about to be made a Bishop's Mission Order, (BMO). One of the most helpful aspects of the BMO is having a Visitor (ours is the Bishop of Crediton). He supports us, visits us at least twice a year and asks us pertinent questions which help us think through what we are doing.

Our prayer is always that God will raise up a confident, creative, passionate and determined church which will be good news to everyone who encounters it.

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