discipleship Archives - Page 2 of 3

Crossnet

Church of England minister Nick Crawley knew that he wanted his next post to be about mission not maintenance. So he wrote to the Bishop of Bristol to suggest launching a network church. After a series of meetings he began work on his new 'parish' of Bristol-based young adults in 2004.

We have no church building, no parish, no PCC, no inherited congregation,

Nick says.

I had no weddings or funerals to do so I was free to start from scratch.

An original team of three families drawn to the network church idea began meeting in Nick's family home in central Bristol. As the new church grew, it began to rent space in Starbucks. It now meets in a larger coffee house on Tuesday evenings attended by an average of 30 people who eat, worship, discuss and pray together. Roughly half of these were not previously attending or committed to a church.

One-to-ones and training teams continue the work of discipleship.

Nick attributes the growth of this network church, Crossnet, among students and young professionals to 'word of mouth'. The church has seen four conversions and others growing in their faith.

The two emphases are mission and discipleship,

says Nick.

There is no doubt that the commitment people have to loving one another is growing.

Crossnet aims to be self-funding by the end of 2009.

alive and kicking

alive and kicking is a fresh expression of church for young people of high school age in Kinver, South Staffordshire. Ben Clymo, one of the leadership team, explores how its history is shaping its future.

Kinver is a large rural village of about 6,800 people on the edge of the Black Country surrounded by farms, fields and beautiful greenbelt countryside but only two miles from the edge of the West Midlands urban conurbation.

It is a predominantly middle class, prosperous area though there are poorer pockets within the community. The population is largely middle- to old-age but, having hung on to the full range of schooling in the village, there are also a fair number of younger families.

The story of alive and kicking goes back to 1991 when the Methodist and Anglican churches in Kinver organised a week-long Rob Frost mission. Out of this came a drop-in event at the church hall called 'Hole in the Wall' for the young people who hung around the church premises in the evenings. Shortly after this, another group had to be started as an alternative for the church kids who felt threatened at Hole in the Wall and, in the end, the behaviour of young people at Hole in the Wall became such that it had to be stopped.

The group for the church kids continued. Led by members of both churches, meeting in their front rooms on a Sunday night, it was named 'alive and kicking' from a throwaway comment by one group member about how the church wasn’t…

alive and kicking was a great success as a church youth group – and indeed brought me to faith, baptism, church membership and later, leadership. At the end of the 90s, I and the last of the original members left for university and the original leaders gradually stepped back and handed over to a new team. The group continued to draw in new members, mostly from the churches' work with infant and junior-age groups, and still met in the leaders' homes.

That was to change when numbers got too big to continue in front rooms and the group moved into the church hall. However numbers were very soon low enough to move back into front rooms! So in 2001, we had a look at other possible venues and fixed on the newly-refurbished 'youth hut' – located on the edge of the school premises and run by the County Youth Services. They agreed to gives us free use of the building. We're now part of the management group set up to maintain and run the venue after the Youth Services let it go.

The move to a fixed, accessible venue familiar to the young people was a definite turning point. We make a big thing of meeting every week without fail (unless it's Christmas Day!) so that group members know they can turn up and we'll be there. At the same time we also started printing a termly programme as a reminder of what was on week in, week out.

Our pattern is that we open at 7pm – we'll usually have a ball or Frisbee to throw around though others will just chat with friends. Around 7.15pm we’ll have a whole-group game, preferably something which involves getting to know each other better or working as teams. Around 7.45pm we have a break for drinks and any notices and then 8-8.45pm we have a teaching and discussion time. This can be very varied but the main focus is on exploring a theme, topic or Bible passage in as creative a way as possible, with a strong emphasis on the young people being able to ask questions and explore the material in a way that is relevant to their lives.

We finish with a prayer time. Again, we try and vary the way we do this to give as broad an understanding of prayer as possible and allow people to find the way they can best build a relationship with God. One of the things we're keen to avoid is running a youth group and shoe-horning in a five-minute 'God slot'. Instead we want to try and model Christian community in all that we do; some of our best conversations about what it means to follow Jesus in our whole lives have come on the football pitch or over a drink.

Our young people come by word of mouth and invitation from friends. We do try and have a presence at the high school open evening, our village fair and other community events and we visit the junior school at the end of each school year. There we give out publicity fliers to all the school leavers inviting them to our welcome barbecue at the end of the summer – but one invite from a young person who feels that alive and kicking is 'their' community is worth 100 fliers.

Already in 2001 we were seeing fewer churched young people coming and more young people who were not regular churchgoers. Indeed we're now at the stage where the majority of young people who come don't go to church, a significant number have never been in a church and several have to go back to their grandparents for any church experience. It also became increasing obvious to us that, despite our best invitations, most of the young people who came along on a Sunday night would not make the transition to a Sunday morning church service. The key barriers seem to be didactic teaching with no opportunity to interact or question, not feeling valued or part of the community, the timing of services, and seeing it as irrelevant. As a result we have explored different ways of building elements of church amongst the alive and kicking community.

One of the biggest challenges of working with young people is the pace of change between groups. What is best for one group of 16-year-olds may not be best for a group of 13-year-olds and may not be best for those 13-year-olds when they reach 16 either. So we've evolved an approach of working with groups that emerge to put on something for a while that helps them deepen their faith whilst ensuring that it remains open to others – recognising that it may only be for a time.

We ran a couple of small groups for 17 to 18-year-olds where they could build friendships and explore more adult questions than were appropriate on a Sunday night. We've tried several different sung worship 'praise' events such as 'akpraise' and 'Worship on Wednesday' which were very good for a time. A Sunday morning event called 'eleven' also ran for a couple of years, attempting to bridge the gap between the Sunday morning congregations and the Sunday night alive and kicking. None of these were long-lasting, but all were extremely useful for those that were part of them, all of them helped people grow in discipleship (which couldn't have been done just as part of the Sunday night meeting) and all of them contributed to the ongoing story of building God's community.

Our year is structured around the school terms with summer holidays being given over to games and sports to give us a break from planning content. We run an annual weekend away which has proved critical to discipleship as an opportunity to take young people away and immerse them in fellowship, worship and teaching. An all-night event at Easter sees us share a meal, play games, have a midnight worship event and then walk to the top of the local beauty spot to share in a 6.30am 'son-rise' service with Christians from the two churches in the village and beyond.

One of the tensions around alive and kicking has always been its place in the Christian life of the village. We don't see alive and kicking as a church, but some of the young people who come would consider it their church. The two traditional congregations in Kinver have often struggled to understand how young people meeting off church premises can be part of the Church in the village and wondered why they're not seeing any new 'recruits' to the pews.

In terms of structure, we set up an independent Christian charity called ad33 to oversee the Church's work with young people in the village. It has a board of trustees drawn from the alive and kicking leaders and the two churches, giving the work a clear accountability and support structure which wasn't possible when trying to report to two different church councils at the same time. We have clear vision and values underpinning everything we do and potential new work is measured against that vision and values. A pastoral support and prayer team drawn from the two churches pray for the work and are available to the leadership team for whatever pastoral support is required.

Our current leadership team, nearly all of whom came to faith as young people through the work of alive and kicking, meet together for an evening every week to plan and prepare for the coming week's session and, equally importantly, to share in prayer, fellowship and food! One of the interesting things has been how community has developed amongst those who have been involved in leadership over the years. A couple of house groups now running started from these weekly leadership meetings.

Last year we appointed our first paid youth pastor. This full-time appointment, which took four years to put in place, runs for five years initially. Our volunteer team all have other jobs which meant that doing work in the village high school was very difficult despite a great eagerness on the part of the school for us to be involved in lessons, assemblies and lunchtime activities. We also recognised that we needed somebody who could focus on pastoral care and strengthening discipleship among the young people of the village. Having a full-time paid worker as part of a flat leadership team has brought its own set of challenges, both in terms of fundraising and team dynamics, but it has opened up new areas of work as well as strengthening our existing ones.

We know that alive and kicking will only ever reach some young people. Many just don't want to engage in organised groups for instance, and for them it's never going to scratch where they itch. For others, a games and discussion format doesn't engage them. Our current vision is to start a network of small activity-based groups alongside alive and kicking to broaden the ways young people can encounter God. We've started a photography group and there are plans for a drama group to start soon with several more in the pipeline. The aim of each of these groups is to explore what it means to encounter God through their activity – how, as people who really enjoy photography or drama or sport or cooking, can we relate that to God – and how can we relate God to that activity and our wider lives.

We want to explore how we use the things in our hands to glorify God and to serve him. We hope that young people will come both because they want to explore their existing faith more and enjoy the activity, but also that the activity will be something that brings friends and others along – and that connecting it to back to God will be something that draws people into new relationships with Jesus. We also want to explore doing some detached work amongst young people who congregate at the bus shelter and elsewhere in the village.

One of the dangers of having so many small groups is that they all head off in their own directions and we build a load of small ghettos so we want to connect everything with a new monthly gathering called 'breathing space', which draws together people from all the different small groups, from alive and kicking, from the leadership team, the house groups and the traditional congregations. We plan to meet over food in an informal setting to worship, to build relationships between groups and generations and to have fun. Whilst individual groups may only be for a particular niche, with breathing space we want to build a place were people from the whole diverse body of Christ can meet together.

We don't believe that breathing space will be a church on its own – nor the small groups, nor alive and kicking. But all together they are a fresh expression of church. It's messy, we don't have a strictly defined membership, groups change, people come and go. But (with the traditional churches in the village) we form a community of people – with some at the core, some on the edges – seeking to follow God.

As for the future, we're excited to see how the new small groups and 'breathing space' take off. No doubt some will last, some will change and some will be for a short time only. We also have a dream for a Christian youth drop-in space in the village somewhere – an idea which echoes the original 'Hole in the Wall'. It has not happened yet but the thinking and praying about that space is what shaped our vision and values, led to the pastoral support and prayer team, the establishing of a board of trustees and many other aspects of the work.

G2

Christian Selvaratnam, ordained pioneer minister at St Michael le Belfrey, York, oversees G2. He traces its development since it was first featured on expressions: the dvd – 2.

This has been a six year story so we’ve been around a while, we're well known, well recognised and we've grown – we regularly get over 100 at our Sunday meetings and not everyone comes every week so the number of people generally involved is probably something more like 200.

We've got more structure to our gatherings so we meet on Sundays but we also gather in the week in a variety of small groups, cell groups, clusters, student groups and mums and tots.

A major change was moving the venue of our meetings. We're no longer in our original venue at the gym because we outgrew that and had to find somewhere bigger so we now meet in a community centre. Moving from the gym was a big formative thing for us. There was a great positive association and we made a lot of it – fitness for the soul and that kind of thing – and connecting with people at leisure. A few years on though, we’ve got our maturity, we've got our base and so I think we accommodated that move fairly well. In that first year it might have been really hard to move because G2 was all about being in the gym; now we're a community with a name and an activity so the place where we meet perhaps is not so critical.

We've moved our meeting time too. We used to get together in the morning which seemed the natural time when we started but we now meet in the afternoon because we find that it's a better time for the people who come and it's a better mission opportunity for us to be available then.

In terms of people coming to faith and their discipleship, our thinking has developed over the years. What we know we have done really well is to connect with people on the fringe, people who have got a bit of church in their background – perhaps they went as a child or years ago – and a lot of those people find the church building an off-putting threshold to cross. As a result we have got a lot of stories of people who have really seen their faith come alive, some have come back to faith and they've connected with us while others have returned to faith and then connected back to their local church.

We have seen amazing things happen with students, many of whom have seen their faith refreshed through G2. We have also had some connection with people of no church background but we recognise that is an increasingly large group and, for them, we think that the point of contact will not be on a Sunday. They can come to the meeting of course but to a degree there are the elements of church taking place – there is a talk, there is worship, people might pray, it might feel like church to them even in a very nice café style package. So midweek clusters have become our main investment in connecting with the very large group of people who don't have an interest in church but probably have an interest in issues of faith.

On Sundays, in many ways, we're trying to balance both those that are coming in with the core of people for whom this is their sustaining faith experience week by week so we need to be faithful to that. We also need to be thinking about what are we teaching from the Scripture. We have Communion once a month now and that's really important to us, and to many people who come. We need to have worship that’s not only accessible to somebody who walks in off the street but is actually meaningful to somebody who already is a committed follower of Jesus.

Behind the scenes there's lots of discipleship. We've used very simple one-to-one models – that may mean an hour a week in a coffee shop with somebody, maybe using a Christian book, working through a chapter a week as the basis of your discussion. That works very well; we've found a lot of people are happy to make time to do that and it pays great dividends. We try and apprentice people in leadership, public ministry and ministry roles and we just use a simple apprenticeship model where somebody watches somebody else do it, they talk about it, then they have a go with somebody there supporting and then maybe it gets handed on to them in time. It's not so much based on training courses and that kind of thing – valuable though those are – we try to focus instead on the very simple person to person approach.

We originally had one team whose work consisted of all the practicalities and all the blue sky thinking too. We now have two – the core team have got the overview of everything while there's also a larger group called the leadership team and everyone on that team has one, and only one, responsibility. They have quite a focused role. So far we've got about 14 people in that team and probably another seven to eight posts to fill as we find the right people.

We've tried to take a very high affirmation and accountability but low control and high support kind of approach to release them in their work – not so much a 'this is what we want you to do for us' but rather, 'here's the area, what would you like to do and how can we help you do it?' Already we've found that's enormously helpful in that it has really helped us grow and get that balance between getting things done really well and actually having an eye on the future as well because it's very fluid. We don’t want to stall or stagnate.

The big thing looking forward is that G2 itself needs to multiply because we recognise that we weren't just planted to stop, we were planted in order to plant out and that entrepreneurial, missional impetus that God has started, and is in us now, I think needs to spread further. Now that's a bit scary because you've got the dream team, it's just grown, you've got the buzz and you don't want to break it up but I think the right thing is that we've got our eye on this multiplying so that's what we're praying about at the moment.

At the moment it's early days for cluster groups, we've got two of them operating with a third just developing. The cluster is the outside profile and then they also meet as cells so there’s a community and discipleship focus behind that. One of the clusters is specifically for students; that's going really well and focuses very naturally on York University campus which is very near to where we meet.

We've got an emerging cluster that will probably focus on families with younger children and will connect with people at that age and stage. We've also got another cluster that's looking at other opportunities; for example we've had cell groups that have been formed through football. Guys that meet together, play football once a week, have a great time, then they meet in the pub and discuss something and maybe pray. We've seen quite a few people come into the community through that, it's very low key, it's a very patient form of mission but I can think of a number of people who actually now are card-carrying Christians as a result of it.

The Ruth Project

The Ruth Project, part of the North West Durham Methodist Circuit, has been building community on an estate in South Stanley. Grace Cauldwell became its first project worker in September 2006. She explains how patience is a virtue when it comes to relationship building:

South Stanley is an ex-mining village in County Durham. It has seen some difficult times and I was employed in 2006 to come and live on an estate here. It is a very deprived area with a high rate of unemployment but there is such a very strong sense of community.

I settled in straight away and spent the first 12-18months just getting to know the area, joining in with what was already happening and becoming known in the community centres. My dog Jasper, a black and white labrador pointer cross, was absolutely key at the start of it all because I'd go out for a walk with him and many people would stop to say hello.

As a qualified youth and community worker we did loads of things when I first arrived, most of which were failures! People were asking us to do social things for their families so we started a family evening called Saturday Night Takeaway. After eight months the highest attendance for that was four families. After a while it became clear that when people said they wanted things to do with their kids, what they actually meant was, 'we want things for you to do with the kids so we don't have to'.

After a while, more relationship building, and various other failed 'events' we started something called Friday Fun Factory. At first we got 10 kids, then it was seven, then two, then six. At one point near Christmas we had just one child. When the New Year started, we republicised it – through all the local schools, shops and school assemblies and the children started to come. We visit all the families every week with a fun sheet to tell them what the children were doing as part of the Fun Factory (and with the hope of a prize on it's return!)– and that has been a really good way to get to know people.

We changed venue to another community centre. It was only about 150 yards over the road but that was a major shift in South Stanley because it was like crossing a boundary and some people weren't sure about the kids making that extra journey. We invited the parents to come with them, saying that we'd get the kettle on and give them tea and biscuits.

Since January 2010 we have had six to 12 parents and their friends coming along and they have been getting really involved in what has been going on. It has become a sort of family church with none of the hang-ups they see as being part of traditional church. We worship (without hymns or singing mostly!), have a silly Bible story with a life application, and enjoy a great time together with arty crafty stuff and a lot of games. In the last two or three months the children have started asking to pray. Praying is something we really believe in, but getting them to say prayers out loud in a circle seems very religious- however this has come directly from the children – they do it comfortably and it's something they asked to do! Spirituality in a lot of families has just started to blossom, with people meeting Jesus in very real ways.

Three kids petrified their mum by saying they wanted to be christened to be part of God's family. I offered a service in the community centre and a local minister was happy to come and do it but the mums said no, that the church up the road was 'where you went to be done' and they wanted it done 'properly'. So instead we all went up the hill to the chapel. It was about as informal as church services get, only half an hour, but the families were still a million miles out of their comfort zone. I don't think they will be going to a church building again in a hurry.

My post was originally for five years with promises of continuation funding for 10 but funding is sadly no longer available and I leave this summer. It's incredibly difficult; what's here at the moment is not self-sustaining and it's going to be at the very least another five years before it is. I am hoping we can try and keep something going because a lot of what I do is simply about being here, having a physical presence.

The big plus is that I am not a vicar or a minister, I am just a part of the community and I have never been labelled anything other than Grace. I live in a council house and I get to whinge with everyone else. The most 'religious' description of me in my time here has been, 'This is Grace, she works for the church'.

It's the people I will miss; people like Joe, his wife and daughter. Joe is clearly a man of God but doesn't quite know how to put that into words because he would say a Christian is boring, wears a suit and is rude to people. Raising indigenous leadership is difficult but Joe now volunteers for everything we do. He started coming to us to make our refreshments; he now looks after our registration and acts as 'security man'. Getting him to have the confidence to do that was difficult enough without asking him to take on leadership. You can't expect to raise up a confident and humble leader in a short period of time.

People don't feel empowered to do it. They have always been told, often since they were at school, that they are not clever enough or good enough. The most outspoken people are not usually the best for shepherding a flock, people like Joe are not going to share the Gospel like our local preachers and understand the depth of transition theology but they can share their faith, in a way that makes sense to those around them – but they must be given time to grow and be discipled.

Many people I've come across here do not read often, sometimes they can only read with great difficulty so it's about making discipleship that's right for them. So many resources are too text based, and often speak into a middle class situation, and so providing suitable and relevant teaching and discipleship is not an easy task.

As a minister's daughter I know how to pack my stuff up and move on, I know you just have to let go, but for the people here I am fearful that they will be forgotten. Those of us in the Church need to remember it takes a long time before anything begins to look like a Christian community.

At my last get-together with the kids they didn't know I was leaving. The theme happened to be The Last Supper; we baked bread and then ate it and drank squash together. We talked about Jesus saying goodbye to his friends and the kids were really touched. They were really quiet and had obviously met with God again – something that usually happens when I least expect it.

There were 12 kids there aged 5-11, plus parents and volunteers. I shall miss them but I know that God is bigger than all the ins and outs of church life here, and he will look after them.

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.

Dream

Richard White traces the story of dream.

Dream was born in 2002 when a group of young adults began meeting together to experiment with worship and discuss what 'church' might look like for their peers. Since then it has grown to a network of groups in the Northwest of England with a much wider age spread. Of the five current groups, one meets at Liverpool University, another at an artist's studio, two in churches, and the fifth at an NHS primary care trust. While diverse in their styles, the groups all seek to express four 'CORE' values through being:

Christ-centred: We seek to develop a spirituality centred on Jesus, and lives that are formed by following him.

Open: We welcome and seek to include anyone who is seeking Christ or exploring spirituality.

Relational: Building communities rather than putting on worship events.

Experimental: Seeking to re-imagine church through creative experimentation and exploration.

Three of the highlights of the past year have been:

Seeing the network grow

Especially among groups who may not have had the confidence to start a fresh expression of this sort without the support and resources that the network brings.

Increasing numbers of formerly unchurched or dechurched people

Who now count one of the Dream groups as their spiritual home.

Opportunities to take 'Dream' into the market place over the past year

Including:

A Dream marquee with café and labyrinth at the St Helens show, where we had over 1000 participants.

The Faith zone at Merseyfest, with chill out zone and installations for all ages.

Essence courses in homes, a health centre and a community centre.

Regular 'spiritual spaces' at two of the work places of members of the Dream community.

Perhaps our biggest challenge is now discovering what lasting discipleship looks like in this context.

Church for the Night

As a nightclub chaplain in Bournemouth, Michael French has always loved dance music and the club scene. He explains the many strands to his work in one of the UK's most popular clubbing areas.

A main focus of the work is to provide a listening ear and a helping hand to those in the club scene. We also have people going out on the streets to show kindness and love to the clubbers, and anyone else who may need some support.

The chaplaincy itself, part of the Night Outreach Work ecumenical charity set up here 10 years ago, is about helping people to explore faith and responding to needs. As part of that, we organise something every two months called Church for the Night which is an event at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, which runs from late evening to 4am.

The idea is not to 'pounce' on people when they walk through the door but to offer a free café art exhibition, and use projections, smoke machines, light ambient dance music, and a chilled out euphoric, atmosphere to help whoever comes in to find space with God.

Girls will often arrive in their stilettos and hot pants, kneel down at the front and cry, pray, hug their friends and then walk out without saying anything, but they’ve had some sort of encounter with God which is just incredible.

A new website, Spaces, is now offering us a wonderful opportunity to highlight all the Christian work that's going on in Bournemouth. There will also be an online calendar to help in the development of ongoing programmes.

I originally worked in children's services as a youth and community worker, then I spent three months in Ibiza with 24:7 Prayer – meeting up with others who have a similar love for club culture and God meant that everything changed.

I've been into dance music and dj-ing since I was 17, and involved in the club scene for the past 10. Lots of people think of the club scene as being completely bad but I would say there's a huge amount of life there; the music is amazing and the amount of creativity in terms of multimedia, people's expression of dance and the community life is incredible.

What we do in Nightclub Outreach Work is express our life in God in a different way. A lot of us have previously been members of various churches but this work is more about community – we just want to live life together, eat together, pray together, and get involved in social action with Worship, Word, and Witness.

It's going back to the roots of Christianity, having life and sharing life together – there is a lot of fear around about being controlled. That's why most people have rejected traditional church so we try to create environments where people can come together and pray without that sort of pressure. Our values are based on humility, servanthood, and accountability through the concept of D (discipleship) groups – these are three people that we meet with regularly and keep accountable to them.

All of this encourages me but I think it's not without opposition as well – personal struggles and issues are always there. In saying that, it's about actually learning from each other because I often find that my faith is strengthened by meeting with those who have an experience of spirituality in their own way but don't know where to place it.

Some of the things that happen are quite bizarre. A guy working on the door at a club in Boscombe jeered at me that I looked like a famous porn star called Ron Jeremy. All of his mates laughed, I did too (with slight embarrassment). I then got a call and had to head back to my car to collect a ticket for someone. On the way I realised I had a 'Jesus Loves Porn Stars' Bible in my car and recalled there was a story about Ron Jeremy inside.

As I went back into the club, I handed the Bible to the door man with my business card in the page that said 'Jesus Loves Ron Jeremy'. The guy was astounded, saying, 'What are the chances of that?' He told me he would read the Bible and let me in anytime for free. Result!

We are created to create; we are creative beings and looking at those things which give you passion and life are those things which I would encourage people to start. I wouldn't say it was a good idea for people to start club ministry if they're not into clubbing or dance music, for instance.

We don't discourage people from going to traditional churches. If people want to find God there then we'll take them along but the fact is that we view ourselves as church. We love God and, as people meet with us – whether it's in a nightclub, out and about, or in someone's home; God is in the club, God is in the home, God is in the streets, God is everywhere.

People tend to have a certain image of clubbers but I encounter all sorts of people on the club scene, from those in their late teens to their 50s.

We go to a dance class with teenagers and we are also linked with Christian DJs from Clean Time Sound System who work with a bunch of recovering drug and alcohol addicts. That's what I love about this job: you come across different classes, different races, different ages, different everything – it’s brilliant.

re:generation

Emma Garrow reports exciting developments at re:generation youth church (2009).

I don't come from a Christian background, I never knew about God… Going to re:generation was a new experience for me. For the first time in a long time I felt accepted… I've recently joined the worship band which has helped me grow in my faith.

I immediately saw that re:generation was different to my previous church. The people here actually wanted to worship God and I was welcomed as if I was a long lost friend.

These are the voices of two teenagers, members of re:generation youth church in Romford, Essex, a church that provides a spiritual home to around 50 young people aged 13 to 21, both churched and unchurched, and with a wide range of cultural styles. At re:generation, young people from diverse backgrounds get along very well.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't happen, but because of their love for Christ these boundaries are crossed over,

says leader, Jamie Poch.

re:generation has grown since its beginnings in 2004 out of a core of 20 young people drawn from a Methodist Circuit of 13 churches. A programme of fun events led to a drama group, a confirmation course, residentials, Bible studies and youth services. Spontaneously, members began to invite their friends and now about a quarter of its members were previously unchurched.

They were excited, because it was meeting their need,

Jamie believes.

So now young people come along and become Christians who've never been to church before. It's quite exciting how it's growing in that way.

Another reason for this growth is the church's key value of friendliness and welcome, and a desire to encourage a sense of belonging to all comers, 'whether Christian or not'.

A welcome team rota, 'Be a Blessing', involves all the members in this ministry. A shortage of adult helpers when Jamie and his wife, Ruth, were setting up the youth church bred a necessity which has proved a blessing in itself. The young people had to get involved in practical ways such as administration, setting up and clearing away, leading small groups.

It made sense,

says Jamie.

Because they're doing it, they're owning it, which is a wonderful thing. They're the ones on the door.

The church meets in a dedicated space in one of the Circuit churches and has several meetings through the week, including a main Sunday evening service. Members are in 'PODS', which encourage friendship and discipleship.

Within the last year, a few adults have started attending, including some parents, something which Jamie views as an opportunity.

It could be rather exciting to see how to deal with the interested parents,

he reflects.

We could have a youth congregation planting an adult congregation.

We're always looking to the future and saying, "Okay, God, now what?" It evolves and we don't necessarily know what it's going to be and that's an adventure.

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…

Solace

Wendy Sanderson, Night Club Chaplain, Church Army Evangelist, Lay Pioneer Minister and co-founder of Solace tells the story of this unusual fresh expression of church in South Wales.

Two years ago, I co-founded Solace with James Karran, an assistant Baptist minister. Solace is a new form of church that meets weekly in a bar in central Cardiff on Sunday evenings.

From the beginning we met a lot of people who were into clubbing who were interested in Jesus, God and faith but often, not traditional expressions of church. So we began on April Fools Day 2007 aiming at people who were searching for something. I am 32, and clubbing is part of my life, so Solace has grown out of our lives as clubbing people. On our launch night over one hundred people turned up, mostly I am sure out of curiosity, and now on Sundays we draw on approximately fifteen to twenty people a week. When the Archbishops of Canterbury and Wales came, of course numbers rocketed. We like guest speakers!!

In an attempt to make church accessible and relevant to clubbers, we broke it down into four different elements, which we do on four different Sundays a month. Each month we focus on a theme, and deliberately target difficult issues such as sex, relationships, debt and other issues that really matter to clubbers. The first Sunday each month tends to have a guest speaker and three of our regulars take a bible verse and say what they think about it with questions afterwards. On the second Sunday we have an entertainment night and people bring their friends. On the third Sunday we hold a debate night and recently looked at the issue of sweatshops and how we can be more active in the fight against exploitation. On the fourth Sunday, we have Agapé, based round the symbolism of Communion, and using the arts and other elements in an alternative worship style event enabling those attending to express themselves.

We engage with the de- and un-churched – in fact anyone who is interested in exploring faith. We have wanted to break down the negative stereotype that many hold concerning Christians and Church. Most of the other churches in the area are geared up to the needs of young families with children, but we are uncompromisingly focused on the many younger adults who are single. There are many, many single clubbers in their twenties and thirties who do not relate to forms of church which seem to over-focus on families. In many ways, Solace is a spiritual community, a society of friends where clubbing is an important part of our lives, and most of us are single. We are pleased that Solace has developed into a place of hope, a place of peace and safety. Some have said they value it as a place where you can be completely yourself and be accepted unconditionally and where people are non-judgmental.

When it comes to discipleship, we specifically work on a one-to-one basis, where the themes and discussions on Sunday nights encourage people to explore or re-imagine spiritual things. We allow people to challenge each other on Sunday nights, and encourage people to dig deep with the Christian faith and the stuff of life. This is learning about the faith through proactive engagement in activity. Something like an Alpha Course or Emmaus just would not work in a clubbing context.

We hope that people will increasingly explore the Christian faith starting where many are – a long way away from it. Through a strongly relational mission we hope that Solace will continue to grow a very strong community of people who 'are and who are not yet' Christian. We are also now looking for our own building, to house not only the Solace Sunday nights, but the many social outreach initiatives we have started, which need developing by having a permanent space.

Joe's Story

I’ve been a Christian for a number of years, but never fitted into 'traditional' church; feeling like an outsider and never quite connecting. This feeling of detachment has meant that I have undergone long period without attending Church. I felt disconnected from God, mainly because I was trying to be someone that I wasn't and it was just too hard emotionally to keep that level of pretense up for long periods. One of my closest friends felt the same way and so we decided to look for an alternative form of church.

In March 2008 we found Solace on the internet. The first meeting we went to, was discussing the issue of debt and making it relevant to my life! For once I found somewhere that made my faith relevant, with like minded people, who rather than judge, accepted me, flaws and all. The biggest and best difference Solace has made is that I am now a Christian 24:7 rather than just on Sundays or in front of other Christians. Solace is a place of acceptance and hope which makes my relationship with God relevant and effective, Solace is somewhere that my God given gifts are needed, used and developed for the glory of God and I will always be thankful to God for guiding me to it!