Garden-City

Tim Nash is a pioneer minister with the Methodist Church's VentureFX pioneering ministries scheme. He, and his wife Hannah, have been developing a community called Garden-City for the past 18 months.

I started with VentureFX in September 2011 and am based in Sherwood, just north of Nottingham city centre. The first few months were a frustrating time as I was keen to do something; an event, a project, anything! Instead we sensed God calling us to let go of all our ideas, agendas and dreams and pray and discern what he was already doing in the area. So we prayer walked (and cycled) every street in the area a number of times, keeping our eyes and ears open to what God might be up to.

We slowly began to develop a picture of a place that was very open to spirituality, but one that at the same time was very suspicious of anything formal, organised, and in particular anything that appeared religious.

We then began to sense God giving us a way into this community. We felt God telling us to 'love your neighbour'. This took us by surprise a bit as it seemed so obvious, but we came to appreciate that there was something inauthentic about going out and about 'doing' mission in the area if we didn't even know the people we lived next door to. As a result we began to organise street parties and house parties for Christmas, Easter, the Jubilee or anything other excuse we could come up with. Then slowly we began to invite people round to explore spirituality in informal and creative ways.

Garden-City - Christmas

Another thing we sensed quite strongly was the need to embody the gospel. Again we knew we were meant to do this, but we began to realise that in order to do this authentically we needed to open up our lives to the people around us. Although by nature, me and my wife are quite introverted and like our own space, we began to open ourselves up by making sure that at least three or four times a week we'd eat with other people, invite people to join us on holidays, invite people round for Christmas or to simply join in with whatever we were doing. We also learnt the importance of not trying to put a gloss on our lives, but to allow people to be a part of our struggles; our mourning as well as our celebrations. That's when people really seemed to be looking at what difference our faith made.

We also came to realise that in our particular context what we offered people needed to be experiential. As I spoke to people involved in the New Spiritualities, it was clear they were involved because of a spiritual encounter of some sort. I also met a number of people who had left the church to explore the New Spiritualities because they hadn't found a sense of an authentic, experiential spiritual journey in the church. So we began to create spaces for people to experience Jesus, regularly putting on creative, meditative evenings in our home, community centre and the pub. We've seen God use these spaces to touch people in really deep ways, even if their initial experience wasn't a positive one.

At one of our gatherings, for example, we took a small group of people through a guided meditation that ended by encouraging them to engage in a conversation with Jesus. One man, who had been brought along by his partner, began to experience a deep sense of darkness and fear. Rather than putting him off, however, this encounter with (what he described as) evil convinced him there must be something good and loving out there. All his previous intellectual objections to the faith disappeared and he began to pursue Jesus. We recently baptised him – just four months after that initial encounter.

Garden-City - retreat

We also quickly realised that we had to offer an holistic faith. Any hint of a sacred/secular divide was a big turn off for people. As we reflected on this we felt God draw our attention to Jesus's summary of the law as a framework for our faith journey – to love God (Father, Son and Spirit), to love ourselves (mind, body and spirit) and to love our neighbour (humans, animals and the Earth).

One of the many ways we've gone about expressing this is through sharing an allotment. Every weekend a group of us can be found there digging, weeding and planting, as we explore what it means to live more in tune with the seasons. The local allotment association has been so impressed with what we've been up to they're allowing us to turn another plot into a community garden to create a sense of community among the other allotment holders.

This journey has led to the formation of a community called Garden-City. We chose the name because humanity is said to have originated in a garden (Eden) and will find its fulfilment in a city (the New Jerusalem). We live in the 'in-between' time, the hyphen of Garden-City. It also seemed quite apt as our community lives in a city but we spent a lot of our free time in our garden/allotment.

There are 15 of us, plus children (and a small group of people still on the fringes checking us out). Although we're increasingly exploring the idea of mission as a community, our present growth seems to be happening through 'attractive discipleship', as people in our social networks show an interest in the lifestyle we're committing ourselves to.

We recently celebrated Garden-City's first birthday by going on a retreat for the day. To help us reflect on the journey we'd been on we made a timeline on which everyone wrote something about what being part of the community has meant to them. One of the main themes that emerged was people's thankfulness for the sense of family they've found in Garden-City. That was a sign to me that we are seeing a 'church' emerge – a Jesus-centred, spiritual family.

Garden-City - meal

Although relationships are at the heart of Garden-City, a pattern of gatherings has emerged to help us on our discipleship journey.

On the first Monday of the month we all meet together in a pub function room to explore the life of Jesus. This is a very informal, discussion-based evening, where we look at an aspect of Jesus's life, and then commit ourselves to living it.

On the second Monday we meet in groups of twos or threes. This is where we get deeper into each other's lives, and hold each other accountable to loving God, loving ourselves and loving our neighbours.

On the third Monday we're all together again in the pub function room where we explore creative prayer and meditation. We've found this to be a good place to bring new people who are interested in exploring spirituality.

On the fourth Monday we meet in two groups to simply catch up, share how our journey is going, or to go deeper into any issues that have emerged at the previous gatherings.

We also all meet together one Sunday afternoon a month to share a meal.

What really strikes me as I look back over the last 18 months is that it is Jesus who is building this church. All we've done is commit ourselves to prayer and to giving ourselves to the people we've come into contact with, and sharing with them what Jesus has done for us. Out of this, Garden-City has emerged. That's not to say it hasn't been really hard work or that everything has been easy, we've certainly had our challenges, but there has been a very real sense that Jesus is going ahead of us, and we're simply trying to keep up!

Reverb

Dave Saunders tells how his faith journey led him from England's south coast to become a VentureFX pioneer in Scotland.

It all goes back to walking along Eastbourne beach with my church leader, pouring my heart out with frustration at the fact that my schoolmates didn't want anything to do with Church. He then asked, 'What would Church look like for young people?'

After going on to help establish a youth church, which flopped after about six months, I decided to take a year out with Youth for Christ. I had no idea where I might be living following my YFC training but I was looking for the sunniest location, preferably near to Eastbourne. When I heard that YFC was working with the Methodist Church to help plant a youth church, I knew that was where I was to go. I then found out they were doing it in Inverness; I put that down to God's sense of humour!

Reverb - give wayI was 18 when I came to Inverness for my year out. Nine years later I'm still here. I knew when I first arrived that I loved this city and felt called to the young people who don't 'do' church or want anything to do with Christianity. My heart broke for the young people I met and that we had failed, as church, to communicate the great message of hope to them. In some ways I would say I was angry with the church because of that.

I was placed in a Methodist church. This was completely foreign to what I was used to but I was struck by Peter Howson's deep passion, as minister, to help young people engage with God and life in a way they could understand. He wasn't about getting young people into his service; it was about giving young people a chance to meet their creator.

So Revolution youth church was born and after two years I was asked to be its leader (even though I have had no formal theological training). I had gone from feeling hurt and frustrated by Church to being passionate about what it can be: a force for peace and justice, and a family that truly loves God and the communities around it.

We enjoyed four great years as Revolution and then had a radical rethink. As a result we went from being a programme-led Sunday evening service to being a group of people called to serve all the people of Merkinch and Dalneigh in Inverness. Merkinch is known locally as The Ferry, an area which is in the top 3% of deprived areas of Scotland.

Reverb logoWe changed our name from 'Revolution' to 'Reverb' because we want to reverberate the love of God in the community around us.

We are now a group of 8 – with about 25 or so in a larger core group – and between us we have many connections with the community; including all the young people, now in their twenties, who I met while working in the school.

We hold a written 'evolving covenant' which we call the 'invisible bond' with each other to help us to be clear that we only exist to serve God and to share His love and justice with the community around us. Every Sunday we check that this remains our priority before we then try to work out together how we can be better at it. The conversation over dinner is about what opportunities God gave us during that week, what scripture says about it and how we can learn from each other's experience of God in the world. It's where faith and life collide.

We have several local expressions of love:

  • Reverb - glovesdig your heart out. Local businesses and churches sponsor garden makeovers for deserving local people and we get involved in this practical expression of love for the community;
  • wash your heart out. This is based on Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet as a way to get to know people. We're willing to be there to get to know people better by saying, 'If you tell us who you are, we'll wash your car';
  • sing your heart out. This took place last Christmas when we organised a carol service in the football field.
  • path people. A phone number that anyone disadvantaged can ring over the winter months to ask us to clear their path of snow and ice.

This is all relationship-driven ministry, not personality-driven. Looking to the future, I would say failure would involve everything depending on me and all falling apart if I moved on. It's important not to follow me but to follow Christ.

'Success' would involve inspiring people to love God and love their neighbour the best they can in small pockets of churches, maybe 10 communities of 10 members.

Reverb - tableHowever it shapes up, the crucial thing is to have small groups engaged in conversation and meeting over a meal.  You don't need a large group to achieve huge difference.  It's easy to engage in the 'attractional model' of large events, it's an entirely different ball game to create missional disciples.

Reverb's mission is to instigate and cause holy mischief and I pray that will continue and grow as we see what God is doing in this area.

The missional life is not easy! But the challenges and opportunities it throws up reminds me of St Paul's words,

We can rejoice when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. For we know how dearly God loves us.

Romans 5.3-4

River Community Church

River Community Church - Steve KellySteve Kelly, of River Community Church, is Assistant Rural Dean in Telford Deanery and fresh expressions advisor in the Diocese of Lichfield. He would never have described himself as a pioneer.

My wife Maggie and I have always had a sense of adventure and we like to travel light. That means we've always been willing to 'get up and go' wherever God leads us. After hearing a calling from God in 2003, I left my career in the car industry to train to be a vicar. I have always had a heart for evangelism and outreach and after my training as a curate had been completed in 2008, Bishop Alan Smith approached me with an idea for my first post.

He asked me if he would be interested in drawing on fresh expressions' methodology to explore the possibilities of a church plant in Telford. My main brief was to reach those who weren't connecting with the established church.

My exposure to fresh expressions had been churches doing it on the side. Most of these were expressions of outreach from churches seeking to engage in mission and outreach. The opportunity in Telford was to grow a new church in a new community and it wouldn't be part of any existing church.

I was given a blank sheet of paper to engage with a community of 150 houses that would increase to over 3,500 in the next few years.

River Community Church - tableIn 2008, we moved to Telford and became part of the community. Initially there wasn't a place within the community people could gather – no pubs, no cafes – so we worked with others in the development of a community garden. We slowly began to build relationships with others who also had a heart for community. The garden provided a place for people to meet each other and we ran a series of outdoor family events for those in the neighbourhood.

In Christmas 2008 the neighbours asked if we could organise something called 'carols on the green'. It was an informal outdoor carol service which over 100 people came to. After the popularity of the event, we ran a 'taster event' in the local school and asked people for their views about the timing and style of a community worship event. It was decided that a café-style event at the local primary school would be most welcomed.

A hybrid of café church, Messy Church and charismatic church, we were delighted that people came. It started quite small but that monthly event has remained as an enduring feature of what we do.

River Community Church - bannerJust over a year later, River Community Church was officially launched in June 2010. It is a church community which has a real mixture of people at its heart. The church has drawn some who already have a strong faith, some who have come to faith, some who have returned to their childhood faith and some who have seen what's happened and are thinking about the next step.

Right from the start, the leadership team have been excited by a 'kingdom vision', a vision of the growth, transformation and healing that comes when God's love and power begin to touch people's lives. We have tried to keep the church community focused on incarnational mission. Whilst some aspects of church life are 'attractional' by their very nature, we have continually emphasised the need to be outward-looking, bringing blessing to our neighbours and the local community.

River Community Church - coupleLike Paul, we believe that God is able to do much more than we can dare to ask or imagine. As we have prayed about this, we have been inspired by the vision in Ezekiel chapter 47. In this prophetic vision, the River flows out from the place of worship (the temple) and out into the desert. We read that trees spring up on the banks of the River. These trees remind us of the vision we have of our church – rooted, flourishing and fruitful. We believe that this is also vision of what God can do today – in Telford! The River speaks of the life and power of the Holy Spirit. So we have given our church the name River Community Church. It expresses our desire to be a church OF the River, a community BY the River, a people IN the River… and that's what we're praying for!

Living Place Project

Revd Chris Lewis tells how Mount Zion Baptist Chapel has turned a piece of its ground into a training garden as part of a Living Place Project. This project is generating 'spin offs' which are helping Chapel members to begin reconnecting with the community.

Mount Zion is still called 'the Mission'. Founded after World War I as a daughter church of a nearby Welsh language chapel, Mount Zion was designed to have a more missionary emphasis in catering for the growing English-speaking population of this part of east Swansea.

Living Place - diggingLike many chapels it dwindled but about three years ago we had an opportunity to apply for funding from the Welsh Government to improve the overgrown and rubbish-strewn area behind the chapel to make a training garden. This would be used to encourage people in our relatively deprived area to grow their own vegetables and improve their diets.

Working on the garden caught the imagination of a local secondary school head teacher. Soon, parties of young people began to get involved as part of the 'community service element' in their Welsh Baccalaureate programme. Some came in their own time and have since started attending our fairly informal Sunday afternoon services.

The garden has taken three years to create and now further funding from Health Challenge Wales will enable us to run courses linked with it. Local adults who were previously involved with Mount Zion through Girls and Boys Brigade hold it in some affection and the word is gradually getting around that the apparently quiet little chapel is still alive.

Living Place - toolsThere are not many of us – we make double figures on a good day – but we're beginning to be approached about hosting community events. These include a performance of short plays written by the school pupils, a craft evening, a community archive evening and a 'visioning workshop' by the Transition Swansea organisation. We hope we might also become an outlet for the Trussell Trust food bank.

Slowly but steadily our network is re-growing. Our approach is not about preaching but it is about incarnation, befriending and responding. Incarnational ministry is reflected in our immersion in, and solidarity with, the area and its distinctive culture. Our pattern of ministry draws on the values of service represented in the church. One member, for instance, is a long serving councillor while others have had trade union and other community connections.

Our project definitely has a missional purpose but exactly how it will work out is not clear yet. The base is a small and traditional Welsh chapel congregation which may continue in parallel with a new congregation. To some extent, we are legally constrained by our governing document (the Baptist Union model document) but there are clauses within it which encourage the advancement of education and befriending of young people; it's on the basis of these that we're going ahead with this particular aspect of the work. Our underlying strategy is incarnational and is not necessarily therefore aimed at creating an institution but to be, in some sense, transformational in the lives of those associated with it. Transition Swansea recognises our project as one run on Transition principles – and its members, with or without church connections, visit us.

Living Place - stepsThe result might be a classed as a 'para church'. As someone who spent a considerable part of my ministry in what used to be called 'Industrial Mission', I am reminded of the work of Ted Wickham as Industrial Chaplain in the Diocese of Sheffield many years ago. The then-Bishop of Sheffield, Leslie Hunter, had appointed Ted Wickham to further the Bishop's "vision of a revitalised Church and a Church re-established among the industrial working class."

Ted gathered together working people who were alienated from the institutional church. Their meetings were informal and he used to say that the job of the church was not to fish in the dirty waters of the world in order to transfer people to the clean waters of the church but to work to clean up the dirty waters.

That is what we are doing here In Swansea. According to government indices, we are operating in what is recognised as a deprived area. The training garden aims to address some of the resulting issues and later this year we hope to add the food bank. We are also looking to try and find opportunities for our growing number of teenagers to express themselves in arts and performance as they have a lot of interest, quite a bit of talent and a great deal of goodwill!

Cre8

Cre8 is a fresh expression for children, young people and their families, at Carlton Colville Methodist Church, Lowestoft. Deacon Ian Cartwright explains how the range of activities include a gardening club, health and fitness programme and special events.

Our purpose is to build lives and build community and to serve beyond our gatherings. Cre8 has been going for about three years around a flexible mix of activities in our church building based on a very large, private housing estate. Among the most popular is a cinema and film club where the children choose the movie to be screened and dish out the popcorn and everything else!

Before launching Cre8, we wanted to try and find out what the community wanted rather than what we thought they wanted. Our first piece of research, done in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, started with focus groups from which we developed questionnaires. We asked things like, 'Would you like to meet?', 'If so, what time would you like to meet?', 'What activities would you like to see in this area?' The questionnaires went out to 6,000 homes and nearly 1,000 of them were completed and returned.

The overwhelming response was for health and fitness opportunities and things for young people to do. The next step was to ask the children and young people themselves whether they wanted to have such activities. Questionnaires went out to the six schools which serve this area: two Lower, two Middle and two Upper. Thanks to the schools' support, we were able to classify the children and young people into postcode areas.

Cre8 - drinkThe research was carried out by groups from within the schools themselves while Christian Research did all the analysis. It mirrored our first research results and also told us that what they meant by 'activities' was really a good place just to chill out and relax, somewhere they could go to play with their PlayStations and Wii. As health and fitness was such a big theme, we got in touch with The Leisure Database Company which provides data, analysis and advice for the sports and leisure industries.

They draw up what's called a Mosaic map, a sort of jigsaw puzzle, of the people in your area. They can analyse the socio-demographic breakdown of a place and tell you things like how many 0-15s there are, the type of families they come from based on income, and eventually build a profile of the area and classification of those who live there. From that they can delve deeper to tell you how many people are members of gyms, what the competition is for health and fitness provision, and so on. They told us there was a latent demand of about 1,000 people in the area we serve.

A sport and leisure trust called Active Luton acted as our consultants in this and they said 1,000 was a good number to make things add up commercially. Cre8 came about as a result of that research and we built up a small team to get things off the ground, including someone who worked with the Schools Partnership Agency.

We started off with the kids taking part in shows. Adults would come along with them on Saturday mornings for rehearsals and have a bite of breakfast with us. At that time the Christian input was very small because we were at the stage of simply wanting to build up relationships with the children and their parents.

It was at that exploring sort of stage that we began to see the development of a holistic ministry, where people's Christian spirituality is very much seen as part of their physical, social, mental and emotional health and wellbeing.

Cre8 - climbingThe spiritual dimension is there in all we do because of our desire for God to be at the heart of it all, involved in every aspect of it – and for the glory to go to Him. It is also there because of who we are and the values we apply. They shape and form us into the community we are and what we hope to be. We see these as being Worship, Pray, Create, Learn, Enjoy Abundant Life, Transform, Influence, Give, Celebrate, and Be inclusive.

A family service once a month is done in a very informal way. This month it will be aimed at blokes as part of the Father's Day theme – there'll be bacon sandwiches to eat, a Yorkie bar challenge; a clip from a Rob Bell DVD, and a lot of bunting and a banner made by the kids!

In the past we've also had very low-key Communion with them. At one such Communion, we looked at the meaning of symbols; starting off by looking at McDonald's, Nike and KFC – what did their 'symbols', their logos, say about them? We then moved on to the symbolic meaning of the bread and wine. It was all consecrated properly but we served the wine in paper cups and gave half slices of sliced bread like the people would eat at home. It was all familiar to them.

Fridays@7 is another development – a café church environment in our building where men chill out to eat, drink coffee, watch films, enjoy music and explore what faith in Jesus is all about.

It's amazing what has happened there. One guy loves Shakespeare and he went out to buy himself a King James Bible because he sees parallels between the two; there were a lot of the programmes on radio and TV at the time about the King James' 400th anniversary and he was fascinated by it.

I went to register at the local gym and met a guy who couldn't get along with traditional church services at all but now he's working at a rehabilitation and recovery centre and brings some of his clients along to us on a Friday night.

Cre8 group

Established for nearly four years, we are members of the Willow Creek Association and use materials from a variety if sources including Christian Vision for Men and Rob Bell. We are currently making whole life discipleship our priority. There is also crossover with CRE8 with two of the Fridays@7 guys running our gardening club.

The group wants to stay small, about 10 to 12 at the moment, and develop a new offshoot on Thursdays called Thursdays @ 7. From time to time we meet at a local pub. We call this evening 'Who Let the Dads Out?'. We also go karting, walking, and other fun things that men enjoy and encourage our non-church friends to join us on these occasions. 

In all of this, there have – of course – been struggles along the way and it hasn't come together easily but the church and community wrestled with issues together to find a way forward and develop things. This has certainly been a painful process at times.

Now I think the mixed economy works very well here because we have mechanisms in place for communication between the inherited church and the fresh expressions. We meet once a quarter when representatives from the different areas of church life come together to plan and discuss. The fresh expressions group is very firm in saying that it is as much 'their' church as inherited church but they also know that it is all about working together for the good of the Kingdom. Sometimes there are difficult conversations because these are part and parcel of what it means to be church – we know that's what it means to work out the mixed economy in reality. Not always an easy journey.