family Archives - Page 4 of 5

Holy Commotion

The parish church of Truro, St Paul's, closed in November 2007 but the parish of St Paul continues to exist and worship is now based at Archbishop Benson CofE School. Parish priest, Father Christopher, describes how it is also home to… Holy Commotion!

On alternate Wednesdays during term time, we get together in the school hall – a licensed place of worship – for a short, informal act of worship with songs, a prayer, a reading and lots of fun. Everyone is welcome and we always tells people that if they don't fancy formal Sunday church but want to explore the Christian faith in a familiar and 'safe' environment, Holy Commotion! could be just the thing.

Emphasis is on informality and the involvement of children. As a result we have a regular kids club with activities designed specifically for them. For those wanting to explore their own spirituality or beliefs, or specific aspects of the Christian faith, we run an Emmaus course.

Sometimes we have theme evenings at Holy Commotion when we get involved in other activities as part of our act of worship. Truro Methodist Church's Speaking in Drums group has visited us a couple of times.

As well as our regular Wednesday evening gatherings we also have social events for adults and/or children. It has come a long way since it first got off the ground a few years ago. I arrived here in 2003 and noticed that Christingle services always brought in so many people who would never otherwise come to one of our services. In 2006 the church was absolutely heaving with people; it was so packed we were putting visitors in the choir stalls and there was still standing room only at the back.

Afterwards I thought, 'This is incredible, where do all these people come from and where do they all go? Why are they happy to come to Christmas services but not at any other time?'

The answer, of course, was because they knew nothing 'strange' was going to happen. Even allowing for the fact that St Paul's is fairly strong Anglo Catholic – and people may not be familiar with that tradition – there was obviously a very different 'feel' about those Christingle services. People felt comfortable in coming to them.

In digging a little deeper about the whys and wherefores of it all we came to some serious conclusions about things we tend to take for granted in church circles:

The day: Sundays are not good days to get to a service for many people;

The place: Church buildings can be quite intimidating;

The time: 10am is useless if you're taking your children to play football or some other sport; or arranging to transport them from one place to another if they're going to see a parent who no longer lives in the same home as they do;

The formality of it all: Radical reassessment was needed because this thing called 'church' does not attract people in the same way these days. I have found that people of all ages, and whatever family or age bracket they happen to be in, are not averse to religion and spirituality but they don't like the way it is contextualised in institutional church.

So we decided to launch Holy Commotion! in the school hall. We now have a very committed bunch of people and the way we break it down generally is that I do the 'bits' that requires someone with a dog collar and they do the 'commotion'. It's very informal and, to my mind, combines the best of both worlds to establish some kind of early church model.

There was quite a milestone recently when we had our first ever baptism which means that people are now seeing that school hall as a holy, sacred place. They may not necessarily see themselves as Christians but they are interested in finding out about that thing called religion.

We worship, we pray, we sing, I talk to the children but the 'shape' of it is never quite the same! We also have a Eucharist from time to time. Holy Commotion! is all delivered on PowerPoint so people don't get mounds of books given to them; there is nothing scary about it. I find that if we take the scariness away, people really do open up.

We have children up to the age of 14 but don't seem to attract the older teenagers. In saying that, it has been successful beyond my wildest dreams in drawing people into the Christian family.

One of its wider effects can be seen in the number of baptisms having increased phenomenally across the benefice – most of whom are people who have come through Holy Commotion! and then fed back into other churches. It has also had an impact on my other congregations, we have introduced a fourth Sunday family service because the 9am Mass attracted one kind of clientele but it wasn't right for people with families. Now, after the Mass, the 9am crowd sit down for breakfast with the congregation arriving for the 10.30am service.

There have been some rumbles of 'It's all very nice but when are they going to come to proper church?' Well, Holy Commotion! is church and the fact is that these people simply will not come to what many think of as a church service. If they didn't go to Holy Commotion! they wouldn't go to church anywhere else – Wednesday has become the new Sunday for us.

I'm a high churchman and I was very much stepping out of my comfort zone when we first started – now I find it all hugely encouraging. The wonderful thing is that the people who come are here because they want to be here, not because they feel they should be here for whatever reason. Perhaps more importantly they tend not to come with any baggage, politics or prejudices associated with church life.

Holy Commotion! is quite intensive in terms of energy and resources – and of course I have the life of the wider parish to look after as well but thankfully, because this is 21st century, I can communicate with the Holy Commotion! people extensively via email, text or Facebook.

There's no doubt that we really need to be doing this, we need to be doing both fresh expression of church and traditional church. It's the only way forward. When we started I was quite keen that whatever was to be presented had to have some kind of liturgical structure. That wasn't so much based on a deep theological reasoning, more that it was a complete experiment so I just stuck to what I knew and put together a service that was sort of familiar in structure. This included a welcome, gathering prayer, hymn or song and a reading from Scripture – I wanted it to be recognisable as church rather than just a social gathering.

People didn't find it off-putting. Instead they took to it all immediately because we forget how unusual it all is – they have not heard the Bible read so it's great to see their reaction to something like the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Also to have teaching is unusual because they don't know about Jesus. To me, that's what it's all about, a fulfilling life with a spiritual dimension. On the whole they are truly intrigued by it all because they see it as something incredibly relevant to today.

It could have such a different story on the first evening… we got to about 6.25pm and there were only three of us there. I was just about to say, 'Oh well it was worth a try but that's that' and then suddenly everyone came in through the door and there were about 36 people in the room. Our age range is from newborn to a lady in her 80s, the number fluctuates – for our harvest social there were more than 70 but I would say we have a core of 50.

Perhaps a testing time next year will be when I take a six-week sabbatical in March. I've tried to do my very best to get the message across that Holy Commotion! isn't me, it's them. My own personal resources are limited and one of the struggles is to try and think of new things to do, coming up with the ideas is tricky.

We need to resource it with people from either Holy Commotion! itself or other local churches. There are sufficient numbers of them to do that and the shape and form of it can continue in my absence because they now have a template to work from but they can develop it in different ways.

Footsteps

Mary Styles, an ordinand with the CofE Diocese in Europe, is a Reader at All Saints Church, Rome. For the past nine years she has led Footsteps, a fresh expression of church meeting in two areas of the city.

Rome is the base for three United Nations agency headquarters and many international companies so there is a large English-speaking community here. Hospitality, friendship and fellowship are the basis of our ministry and, as a cosmopolitan group, understanding and celebrating other ways and cultures are hugely important.

When I first arrived in Italy I really noticed the difference in people's openness to talk about things other than the weather! In England it had been very difficult to talk about spiritual matters and no-one really wanted to engage with that. However, when people are away from their home 'territory' they are far more willing to discuss all sorts of matters.

Footsteps started because I was aware of the gap between these sort of discussions and the opportunity or space to follow them up. Since that time, some of those who have been part of Footsteps are churchgoers who have lapsed, others have been involved in church life for quite a while and there are also those who are not interested at all in attending a traditional church.

Whilst there is a good choice of established churches in the city centre, it became clear that there was no opportunity for worship in English in the suburbs and beyond (from where it can take one to two hours to reach the heart of Rome). It was also notable that many who expressed an interest in learning more about the Christian faith or coming together to worship were either not interested in – or disillusioned with – inherited church.

Footsteps now meets in both a northern and a southern suburb, Casal Palocco and La Storta, for informal worship in English and runs weekly Bible study groups and occasional Alpha courses open to all. We meet in people's homes, as families and individuals, to serve and reach out to our neighbours. Our mission is 'knowing and growing in Jesus, following in His footsteps and putting His love into action.'

We are all English speakers but that doesn't mean we are all British. Instead we have got people from every continent and denomination and as a result we have been very enriched by our Orthodox and Catholic members.

Dealing with ex-pats means there are large fluctuations in numbers because our community is particularly mobile; quite a lot are highly skilled professionals and they may be with us for anything from six months to two years before they fly off again. We generally tend to attract families with children; there aren't too many people of grandparent age.

We have what would broadly be recognised as a Liturgy of the Word where we sing songs, read the Bible and talk about what relevance the Bible has for us. We may also have a forum or discussion with different people leading it. People have come along through word of mouth 'advertising', in the past there have been very good mother evangelists at the school gate but we don't have many of those people at the moment so we are having to rethink how we get the message out. There is no big strategic plan; we do what we do depending on who is around at the time.

We try to keep the actual worship to an hour but there is always a time of fellowship afterwards with coffee and pastries. I have had lots of support from the local Baptist pastor and Methodist minister and my parish priest at All Saints has been very supportive too – though there has been the inevitable tension from some people in the community who say that we should bringing regulars from Footsteps into All Saints. On the positive side of things, we have got vicars and ministers who want to help us lead interdenominational worship because we are not linked to any one tradition. The only link is through me – who happens to be an Anglican Reader.

If I could go back and start it all over again I'd say it would have been better if we had put a proper authority structure in place; otherwise there's a danger of Footsteps becoming 'Mary Styles Incorporated' and I'd never want that.

I have been trying to prepare people for a handover in leadership but, due to the transient nature of the congregation, everybody I have trained as possible new leaders has left. As a result I am now trying to forge links with churches with a good organisational structure in order to help make the big decisions about the way we are going.

I have a leadership team and every now and we do gather as a group to try to discern prayerfully what we should be doing. The big challenge is for me eventually to leave Footsteps as something that is sustainable, something that continues with a life and energy and purpose.

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.

Church at Innsworth

Troops from across the world are living 'on the doorstep' of Revd Debbie Forman, Curate and Pioneer Minister for Innsworth, Gloucestershire. How is she working on her own estate and with people serving in NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC)?

Imjin Barracks in Innsworth welcomed almost 1,000 servicemen and women and their families to swell the ranks at the ARRC base this summer. In all about 520 new families from 15 countries came to Innsworth, some are living on the camp itself and others on the estate just outside.

There are lots of facilities on the base and they also have a padre but people are encouraged to worship outside the camp at churches in the town, there is no provision for church worship on the base itself. This can be quite difficult for people to access in an unknown place so I see part of my role as being that of a welcomer. I speak several languages, including French, German and Italian so I'm hoping that I can make myself understood when the time is right! The influx of people comes from all over the place, including Italy, Poland, Portugal, Turkey and Spain. The whole world appears to be on my doorstep.

This is an estate of mixed housing stock: some Ministry of Defence, some social housing, some owner occupied, with other property comprising ex-military housing that has been sold off. It's quite isolated as an area – on the one side we have the base and on the other we have a flyover over the ring road.

It's not a huge estate, the original houses were prefabs and the ones in the middle of the estate are in the process of being bricked up. People came to work on the then RAF Innsworth camp after World War Two when the houses were new. There is a significant elderly population because those who came at that time are now in their 70s, 80s and even 90s.

Alongside them we do get some younger families but we haven't got as many in the middle age group. I am curate at St John the Evangelist (Churchdown and Innsworth) but there wasn't a church presence actually on the estate which meant that people could feel a bit isolated from the rest of the parish – part of a Local Ecumenical Partnership which supports the Pioneer Minister work.

We have a Council of Reference which contains a representative from each of the churches involved in that LEP. They were running a little service in the Innsworth community hall when I arrived. It now happens twice a month and the clientele has changed – there are now two or three who support us from St John's but I'm glad to say it's now largely people from Innsworth itself. The largest number we have would be 17-20 and sometimes it's fewer than that but the balance has definitely shifted.

The estate definitely needed a bit of tender loving care. To reflect that in The Church at Innsworth services, I work with a group of three others, one lady who lives on the estate and a couple who live on a neighbouring estate. We decide on a theme, such as the Church's year, but we always attempt to put some sort of creative aspect in the middle of it. I'd probably go a little further with it as I've been part of an alternative worship group but we have to maintain what can sometimes be a tricky balance between a challenge and a comfort.

To get the message out I do something very old-fashioned and deliver to every property on the estate, that's over 700 houses. I'm a well known figure because I cycle everywhere and when I first arrived I did quite a bit of cold calling. In the past I would never have done that but it just goes to show how God moves us on. In the first year I delivered a flyer for every service that happened; now I deliver a programme. I also put up notices on the Parish Council noticeboard and write a regular feature in a magazine for Innsworth.

During Holy Week I put up installations on the green spaces in the community. It was quite funny getting permission; I went into the police station and said, 'Can I have some police incident tape? I would like to create a scene of arrest.' They agreed but said they thought it would be vandalised. I was putting it up when a car full of young lads came to a screeching halt alongside me. They asked if there had been a crime, I said no but it was meant to remind people of a man who was wrongly arrested for what he did for us. 'Can we help?' they said. I asked them to make sure it stayed safe. I don't know what they did – or didn't – do but it never got vandalised.

In other public places around and about I had a Pilate judgement seat and, for the Last Supper, I super-glued plates and cups to a groundsheet on the green – it was like a mini art installation really.

This year during Lent, I got people to think of three things – Kindness, Giving, Generosity and we put out a public challenge to 'do something nice for somebody today'. I've also hung Advent boxes on the trees and put things in them to tell the Christmas story.

But what I am actually doing for most of the time is basic pastoral ministry. It's all about being known and being trusted. People will ring me up if they want their child baptised or if they want to get married. I feel well supported; I have a lovely training incumbent who has allowed me to have as much rope as I wanted. I also have accountability to the Diocesan Missioner and that's very valuable. There are four designated Pioneer Ministers in Gloucester and we are going to meet together for mutual support.

What I suppose is lacking at the moment is people emerging from the community to be leaders but it's early days yet. When people want things 'done' – like baptism or a wedding – they actually still tend to look for a tower or spire but for those who are unchurched, a church building and a normal church service is too much. I'm not in the business of forcing people to come into traditional church.

In another development, Age Concern used to run a weekly lunch club in the community hall but said they would have to close it because of cutbacks so I stepped out in faith and said the church would keep it going. I now have a team of helpers so I go there to cook, complete with dog collar and apron! We have up to 20 regulars – where would they have gone if the club had disappeared? It has been good to see where God is already at work in Innsworth and join in with it, who knows what will happen next.

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.

X-Site

Church Army New Zealand runs a successful bus ministry called Canterbury Kids Coach. Captain Louise Weller tells how a new Christian community, X-Site, has developed to work alongside the mobile ministry to reach families in Rowley, a needy suburb of Christchurch.

We began three years ago, running a children's after school programme on board our Canterbury Kids Coach.

Every six months we move to three more locations. Two years ago, we were given the use of a community house so that we could encourage children who had been on our programme to be involved in something more permanent, and provide support and ongoing discipleship. We call this 'X-Site'.

Parents started coming along to 'X-Site' as well and this has now grown to an average attendance of about 30 children and 9 adults each week. We have not 'arrived' yet but we are well on the way.

The X-Site weekly sessions are from 3pm-5pm every Friday and follow a similar pattern each week. Leaders and other adults from the community arrive from 2.15pm and we stop to pray at 2.45pm. The children arrive from the nearby local school and are given a drink and games to play and we sit around and chat.

At 3.30pm we start our session proper with singing, prayer and a Bible reading. The children themselves lead the prayer and Bible reading while parents are all encouraged to be involved. We then have one of our puppets introduce the theme for the day and then the mums with children of preschool age leave for their own special programme while the others have their separate teaching time. We use lots of different creative ways to encourage the development of faith, including mime, drama, crafts, games with purpose, teaching of puppetry and even learning how to play the ukulele! We usually follow a theme that lasts for 10 weeks.

Refreshments are provided and meals arranged at the end of each term. We carry out visits and follow-up work to help meet material needs and address neglect, truancy and abuse. This is much more than just a bus; it is bringing Church to the people.

Our organisation aims to keep the following values at the heart of all our work:

fully rely on God;

encourage the development of Christian values: sharing, honesty, responsibility, honouring of relationships, serving others, making wise choices and respect;

break down the barriers of isolation and racial disharmony;

see where the Holy Spirit is working and join in;

remain outward focused – seeing the needs in the community and continually looking to 'take new ground'

following the example of Jesus, we seek to love and serve each other, and encourage others to do the same.

Three team leaders are members of the local Anglican Church and two are from the nearest Baptist Church; teenagers help as junior leaders. Although we are a Church Army initiative, we also have the support and encouragement of our local parish and some families have now started attending services on Sunday.

Our goal is however, to encourage the local people to find faith in Christ and grow to become leaders of their own community. This is beginning. For those that come, this is Church.

We are a registered charity funded from trusts and donations from individuals. To spread the vision about what we’re doing we undertake speaking engagements, networking and sharing stories of good practice through the media and our own publications. We understand the value of working together with other organisations, agencies and community groups and work at discovering what is happening in order to encourage one another. It is important to enable people to network together, learn from one another and exercise responsible oversight.

We want to see lives transformed and communities grow. I didn't have an opportunity as a child to hear about Jesus, so I had to struggle alone during my tough teenage years. Consequently I desperately want others to have opportunities to hear about, experience and grow in the love of Jesus, and be equipped to reach their full potential.

It is our hope that parents will take ownership of this and begin to disciple others. With a group of 10 mums, we recently started to organise midweek morning sessions for parents. We hope that these sessions will be a time to focus on being there for these mums and helping them to grow in faith. We are taking things a step at a time, learning as we go, and listening to the needs of the community and to what God is saying. Watch this space!

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.

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.

The ARK

The ARK is a place where children and their families can learn about Jesus and explore their faith. Established in 2007 in Newmains, The ARK has since grown significantly and is aiming to make a real difference to the people of the area. Shona Stirling explains more.

We currently have 80 kids on our register and also run something called Oasis for adults, and a youth cell group for those in the first three years of secondary school. Plans are also in the pipeline for a new community project focussed on out of school support.

Oasis runs alongside The ARK in a cafe church style to give everyone the opportunity to learn about God's love, have fellowship and meet new friends over a cuppa.

Our support churches are Coltness Memorial Church and Bonkle Church; they are linked churches in that they have one minister but two of everything else. There has always been a real history of kids' work here but, over the last 10 years or so that work had started to decline. There were all sorts of reasons – changes in family life, different pressures on families, regulars getting older and a decline in the number of young families attending.

I was trying to make things more family friendly but was banging my head against a brick wall. Why did the numbers drop? Basically because we didn't have any influence at all with the kids in the village. As a result we decided to run a holiday club and see what happened, on the back of that we ran a kids' Alpha in the church at the same time as the adult course.

From that we established a core congregation of kids who were really interested, or who had come to faith from Alpha. We launched The ARK as a Tuesday night congregation, but from the beginning we made it clear that this was not an outreach from those meeting on a Sunday morning.

Sundays were definitely not the best time for something new as we've got a lot of single parent families in the area, and kids are either with the other parent at the weekend or the parent wanted to take them somewhere else. As everywhere now, there are also a lot of football clubs and sports clubs so there were lots of tired parents about. They were running around six days a week and, quite understandably, didn’t want to get up early on a Sunday.

It wasn't long before the Tuesday night sessions at Coltness Memorial Hall also had some of the parents coming along as well. They were using The ARK to dip their toe in the water, with the result that we had increasing numbers of adults there.

After another tranche of Alpha on a Tuesday, several parents formed a group to meet on a Tuesday night. For the children, we started off as being for five to 12-year-olds; then it became five to 13, and now it’s five to 14. We have grown up with them!

A particular challenge is trying to bridge the gap for kids between singing and worship. Traditionally we are very strong on sung worship in church but not everyone likes to sing. I do teach sung worship to kids and I do expect that we should sing but I also recognise that there are lots of people who express themselves differently.

We went on to introduce flags because some of our boys who hate singing really love flags. We are not getting it 100% right all the time by any means but we do talk about worship as a response to Jesus, and emphasise that worship can be done in a variety of ways. We say that if we want to respond by singing quietly, that’s fine, but there are all sorts of other expressions too. Some of our boys breakdance and some choose to just sit quietly or to use sign language instead of singing.

At least once a term we also have an all age get-together when we ask the children to invite anyone who lives in their house. The format there is a bit like Messy Church where there is some kind of teaching as well as craft activity.

We use the whole building at Coltness Memorial Church. For a while we did meet in a local café and developed great links with the Muslim owner and his family. Sadly his business faced real difficulties and we couldn’t use the café any more but our friendship with him goes on.

In the next stage we aim to have premises of our own. The church is currently on the periphery of the parish, which has about 3,500 people. Our vision is to move The ARK lock, stock and barrel into the middle of the village from where we could run a community venture, and provide other groups for children’s activities – both spiritual and otherwise. ARK is also working closely with Newmains Primary School and Morningside Primary School to offer a number of clubs for children and their parents.

We have a building in mind so we've been working on a feasibility study and business plan. Both churches are very closely involved in the future plans, and it’s exciting to see!

Fresh expressions of church have always been there but in our traditional congregations we have often become so comfortable with what we're doing that we forget there is any other valid way to 'do' church. As far as we're concerned, the whole fresh expressions thing is about blessing the community, not trying to do the hard sell and convince them that we know what’s best but simply to demonstrate the love of Jesus to those currently outside traditional church circles.

Messy Church, Cowplain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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