housing estate Archives - Page 2 of 4

Sunningdale sheltered housing

Sunningdale is a community of 108 self-contained, warden-assisted flats all occupied by elderly people. Lesley Bailey, a lay-reader at Christchurch, with four others began church services here eighteen months ago.

Lesley says she is well known now among the residents. Some will join in for the end of worship cup of tea even though they don’t attend the rest of the worship. Others will ask for prayer.

There is much to give thanks for at this stage:

over ten percent of the community are already in the congregation;

members are fully involved in the worship;

the entire community being personally invited to each service.

Some members of the congregation are able to lead prayers and others feel comfortable reading the Bible. They may not have done this in a larger church.

Several have rediscovered their faith since services began at Sunningdale. One struggled for several months to overcome her agoraphobia so she could attend the services that are held in the residents' lounge. Now she reads the lesson with enthusiasm and commitment.

Lesley is very excited about how the church is developing. She hopes the next step will be a more in-depth study of the Bible for those who are interested.

Discovery Days

In 2003, Church of England minister Penny Joyce moved to a growing new housing estate in Witney, Oxfordshire, to start a community project funded by the Diocese of Oxford. She spent the first three months of her new role, which followed a curacy, 'getting to know people', in particular local churches and the school.

At the end of those three months, she sent a newsletter to every house identifying herself as a community worker and inviting residents to a meeting with the local planner. Around 50 people from the 250 houses then established on the estate turned up. This residents' meeting continues to take place once every three months, attracting 50 to 80 people at a time to its community discussions around wine and cheese. It is particularly valued by newcomers to the estate, which has now grown to 960 houses.

The estate is home, Penny says, to 'a huge cross section of people'. Social housing, young families, home-based workers and early retirees all live together on what, in its early years, has been a building site as well as a place in which to build community. Through the community project, Discovery Days, headed by Penny, these different types of people are able to come together in their own groups at different social and Christian-themed events. Events are advertised on a monthly community newsletter written by Penny and delivered by volunteers.

She spent the first three months getting to know people

The need for various activities is exemplified by an encounter Penny had early on in her ministry to the estate. While out and about she bumped into a young mother walking, looking for someone to talk to. Following this, a mother and toddler group was set up which attracts around 40 women each week.

Other regular events run by Discovery Days are a mixture of social activities and those with a Christian flavour. Families meet for Sunday tea and Christian-based activities. Men meet for football. Readers meet in a book group. Home-based workers meet for lunch. Christians on the estate meet in one of two weekly small groups, Discovery 1 and 2, while a second kind of Discovery group happens for seekers. More generally interested residents of the estate may attend Breathe, a social evening with wine, chat, and the possibility of moving through a series of stations provoking reflection on a life issue.

Christians are present at all the different events and activities whether social or Christian-focused. Penny sees evangelism in terms of a line of 10 to 1 (the Engel scale), on which individuals may be at the Christian end or the disinterested end.

I place events along that line so that people can choose,

she says.

If you're journeying at 8 or 9 you won't want to come to straight into a church situation, but you might want to come to something which looks at the basics of Christianity. We journey spiritually with someone and don't expect them to travel from a nine to a one in one leap.

By listening to the needs of the different groups of people within the community, Discovery Days offers a chance for everyone to discover faith and friendship.

Springfield Church

Will Cookson is minister of a 'church that was a fresh expression before the term was invented'. He tells how important it is for fresh expressions of church to keep on reinventing themselves.

Watch Will Cookson and Sue Bosley discuss multiplication not duplication (transcript available on the update Oct12 link to the right).

Springfield Church was originally set up by Holy Trinity Wallington in 1992 to reach out to the community. In 2002 it became what is known as an Extra-Parochial Place (EPP) in Southwark Diocese which meant we had no 'official' parish and no church building. Our two key objectives were, and are, mission and worship and we now have about 400 people of whom about 40% are under the age of 18.

Springfield's two congregations meet in different places in Wallington on Sundays at 10.30am. The larger one gets together at Wallington High School for Girls while our second is the Springfield@Roundshaw cafe church which meets at St Paul's church on the Roundshaw estate.

The thing about a fresh expression is that over time it can become regularised in the way it does things so it has to re-discover itself. To an extent, when I came here almost 10 years ago that was what had happened to Springfield; it had got set in its ways. The thing that cried out to me was to go to a cell church model because everything has to be relational if it's going to 'speak' to people outside inherited church.

We are doing this through a whole series of different things, such as a Christian club at a local school (Xplore), Messy Church in the same venue (Footsteps), parent and toddler group transformed into Messy Church format, as well as cell groups and various ministries – such as an English conversation class – planted in the community. When we were asked by the vicar at Roundshaw estate to plant a new congregation in that area, we sent out 25 people and now average about 40 at the café church. Most of those who have joined come from the estate itself.

We have a huge focus on relationships and building events and ministries that reinforce and complement each other. To my mind, too many Messy Churches have focused on trying to get the numbers in and getting the event done efficiently. We concentrate on the relationships that people can make there and – as a result – have seen friendships growing, families joining us for other events, parents getting involved to help and some becoming part of Sunday congregations, cell groups and taking part in Alpha courses. The social events organised by those different cell groups look to encourage community and it may take one, two or three years for people to get involved to that level – but that's OK, it all takes time.

The common problem for many churches is that they have some great ministries but they are stand-alone and don't benefit from the relational overlap. So, for example, children come to Xplore on Mondays after school with their families invited to our monthly Messy Church. Those in Year Six are given invitations to our youth outreach The Mix, again every month, at a local community centre. The larger-scale events we put on are never officially advertised; we prefer to use word of mouth and ask people and families if they'd like to come along. Feast in the Field attracts about 600 people as a community event with laser quest, assault courses, Scalextric and face painting among other things. We also take up to 600 people to the cinema at Christmas. If we advertised I am sure that we could get larger crowds in but we would lose out on relationship building. We find that the more that we overlap and inter-connect what we do, the more that people are interested and able to take the next step in their faith journey.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will be visiting Springfield Church to help us celebrate our 20th anniversary next year by preaching and presiding at our Sunday morning service on 18 March. It's a wonderful recognition that churches such as ours are now integral parts of the Church of England and no longer an oddity! The Archbishop's visit is a practical sign of his enthusiasm for this mixed economy and a huge encouragement for us.

Springfield has always been a different sort of church. We were a fresh expression before the term was invented! The thing with many fresh expressions is that as their communities mature then it's all too easy for them to revert to 'normal' church mode.

We really emphasise to our leaders that the focus shouldn't be on the task but on the people they're seeking to serve and reach for Christ. This has led to a real depth of community with a very high level of participation; about 80% of our congregation is involved in something.

The important thing for anyone involved in a fresh expression to remember is that we're here to reach the unchurched. The disenchanted Christian and dechurched Christian will also come our way but keeping that outward focus is vital if we're going to continue in our true calling.

Priorslee

Licensed as Pioneer Minister in Priorslee, Telford, Tim Carter outlines the launch of this Bishop's Mission Order in the Diocese of Lichfield.

There has been a lot of development around Telford in recent years. To the northeast of the town an area of around 1,800 houses have been built over the last 20 years. There is still land earmarked for development within this area with space for another approx. 500 houses. Within the area there are two primary schools, two small rows of shops, two doctor's surgeries and two pubs. The area shares a name with the original village of Priorslee, but there seems to be little feeling of it being continuous with it in any real sense.

The result is an affluent commuter area with many of the residents working in Wolverhampton and Birmingham because most of these houses are within a few minutes drive of the M54 junction.

This area has been identified as a mission priority over the last 5-10 years and various things tried along the way but then a strategic decision was taken to recruit someone to come and live on the estate and plant a church.

This BMO, the first in the diocese, is slightly unusual in that it doesn't cross any parish boundaries but the legislation is seen here as releasing the Pioneer Minister from expectations of involvement in inherited parochial ministry.

The aim of the BMO is for a church to grow in this area, with the shape of that church (gathered or network or something else to be discerned) but the achievement of that aim feels like quite a long way away. The BMO mechanism allowed the diocese to create some space in order to explore that.

I am employed by the Diocesan Board of Finance, which provides administrative support and a governance framework in these early days of the ministry. My licence allows me to operate freely within a geographical area defined by the BMO and by invitation anywhere in the Diocese. The BMO is time limited with a review period and the licence is linked to the BMO so is valid as long as the BMO is in place.

I am linked to what are known as two 'supporting' churches in the wider area – All Saints, Wellington and St Andrew's, Shifnal. We are still exploring exactly what that means though currently they are providing a place for my family to worship and be part of and be sustained by whilst, and until, the plant is able to sustain us. They are also providing some prayer support. This strategy has been implemented with the aim of guarding against the sense of isolation experienced by so many pioneers.

I was licensed on September 6 and diocesan officers worked hard to get us into the house, purchased by the diocese on the estate, in time for my children to get into the local school for the start of term. We still need to work out how we get involved in this community and the school, for instance, is very open to us.

We're at very early stages and at the moment it's all about talking to people and having neighbours around for endless cups of tea!

Breakfast @ 9

Families are flocking to the church centre in Dorset, for a breakfast with a difference but there's more than bacon butties and sizzling sausages on the menu – says Chris Tebbutt, Rector of Canford Magna Church.

I'd been at Canford for about a year when I thought, 'How can we attract young families into our excellent but rather "mature" 1030am service?'

Years ago this was a sleepy little place but in 1971, at a time of charismatic revival, John Collins became our Vicar. He was prepared to take a few risks and before long this church became a huge magnet for people. At that time many hi-tech industries were coming into Poole and two very large housing estates were built close by. As a result the parish grew from 500 to 12,000 and we planted two daughter churches, The Lantern at Merley and St Barnabas, Bearwood.

So when I came here as team rector, I knew that Canford Magna was a special place but I really did wonder how we could rebalance the age profile of the church. What could we do?

I went to a Deanery Chapter meeting where someone from the outlying villages talked about their monthly Breakfast Church. What a great idea I thought – I can nick that! So I discussed it with my wife Sandra and Children's Worker, Sharon, and we worked with a design agency on a logo. It was then that Sandra came up with the name Breakfast@9, deliberately not mentioning 'church' because we didn't want to put people off. We also decided that rather than re-instituting the 8am Book of Common Prayer service every week – which had become monthly during the interregnum – we should instead hold a new service at 9am in our Church Centre and call it Breakfast@9.

We started off by inviting mums attending the church's playgroup with their children and it's just grown from there. Unlike Messy Church, which tends to run monthly, we wanted Breakfast@9 to take place every Sunday because if you miss a Messy Church session it means you don't see the Messy Church community for eight weeks. We wanted to avoid that and instead build a community of people who regularly met together.

So far, it's going a storm with whole families coming regularly, about 40 to 50 parents and children each week. In the first week of August, traditionally such a quiet time, we peaked at 67 mums, dads and their children.

We set everything up the night before and have three cooking teams. The helpers and worship team get together after setting up to pray. Then the team on duty arrive at about 8am on the Sunday and they then start preparing those all important bacon butties and sausages. We also bought an espresso machine to make sure the coffee was as good as it could be – and we have croissants, fruit, toast and cereals available. By about 8.50am the first people begin to drift in and the great thing is that we are consistently getting Dads along as well – I'm not sure whether the bacon butties have got something to do with that!

We have tables in café style though we now put tables together because we noticed that people weren't talking to each other. By putting two tables side by side, the families began to chat a lot more. We also have members of our congregation who are simply there to sit and chat and lend a helping hand, particularly with those mums who are maybe struggling to cope with kids on their own.

Breakfast is from 9am to 9.20, then I'll welcome everybody. We generally have one or two new people there every week. I'll also mention what the theme of the service is; we're using E100 by Scripture Union, 100 essential readings from the Bible.

We cover the Old Testament in the autumn term beginning with our creator God and on to the coming of Christ when we encourage people to come along to a Christmas Eve crib service. In the New Year we move to the story of Jesus and then after Easter the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church – yes, eventually we do use the 'church' word!

After hearing the theme for the day, we then have three worship songs. All the info is on a big 50" plasma screen with a young person operating the laptop. Music is quite important to us and we tend to do a selection of lively songs that are a mixture of popular contemporary worship songs with one 'kids-friendly' song. The main thing is that all – both young and old – can clap or use our selection of percussion instruments to shake along to the music.

After a reading, the service leader will then do a five minute thought for the day – it may be me or it may be one of the people running Breakfast@9. We try to make it interactive but, whatever we do, we don't pull any punches and we don't try to apologise. So the breakdown of each session is 10 minutes of music, five minute reading, five minute talk, 10 minute craft topic, followed by a short 'show and tell' if applicable, short prayer – about thought for the day and prayer for other people – then a final worship song and a blessing. It's all over by 10am on the dot. We never overrun. That's important. We will encourage people to stay and pray or chat but there's no pressure to do so.

In what was an exciting development, we put on an Exploring Baptism event and showed a DVD about baptism to a number of interested families. We chatted individually to people to ask if that was what they wanted or whether they would prefer to have a thanksgiving service. One mum said she wanted to get baptised (and confirmed) herself so that was arranged – in Salisbury Cathedral no less – and the day afterwards her son was one of two children baptised in the parish church. She and her family were thrilled by that event and a number of Breakfast@9 families came to the service. That mum is now one of those who does readings at Breakfast@9.

There is no magic formula as to what's happening. We're just taking it one step at a time and are looking to form a Breakfast@9 housegroup led by a young Christian couple who have become very much part of the team.

I am so blessed because members of the parish church have been so supportive. The people are amazing; they are serving, helping, putting money in and not necessarily seeing a return. This sort of thing is a big investment.

Others looking to start something like this might ask themselves, 'Have you got people with a real heart to reach out to the unchurched?' I'm impressed by the way the Canford folk both serve in teams and are prepared to bankroll the costs of running Breakfast@9 in the Church Centre even though they don't see these new people in the pews in the 1,000 year old Parish Church.

Many would love to see all those families in the pews but I think they now realise that Breakfast@9 really is church to those families. However we do try and encourage our Breakfast@9 families to come together with the main church and the daughter churches for the bigger festivals because it reminds them that they are part of something much bigger.

Our primary objective is to form a completely new community as most of our attendees are unchurched or people who have had a church experience before but drifted away. On the few occasions where we've mixed the services – Breakfast@9 and 10.30 – it hasn't really worked. So we feel the Holy Spirit is saying that we should press on with something completely new.

GLO

GLO Church in Offerton, near Stockport, was awarded a Bishop's Mission Order earlier this year – the first BMO in the Diocese of Chester. Its licensed lay workers Gareth and Lizzy Robinson give an update on how it's getting on.

The consultation process to become a BMO had been going on for over a year. In March, the Bishop of Stockport, Rt Revd Robert Atwell, issued the Order on behalf of the Bishop of Chester, Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster and he commissioned a team of eight to work with us. GLO (God Loves Offerton) is a mission project from All Saints' Marple, and our team will reinforce the ministry in two large housing estates as we look to establish a Christian community there.

GLO's commissioning service took place at All Saints and it was great to see it publicly welcomed by vicar Ian Parkinson; Alan Bell, Rural Dean of Stockport; Mrs Lois Haslam, lay chair of Stockport Deanery Synod – as well as a local police inspector and a community worker.

The Bishop of Stockport said that we need to encourage mission partnerships across traditional Anglican boundaries of parishes and deaneries. It is all credit to him for really getting the whole thing off the ground because he saw that something needed to happen and made the decision to go for it.

Our focus is to the east of Offerton where the two housing estates have completely separate cultures and identities – in many ways. One estate is made up of some social and some private housing and the other comprises privately owned housing stock; there isn't even a road to link them together.

We meet for worship on a Sunday afternoon in a local primary school but GLO Church is offering lots of different sorts of opportunities to be involved in it and build community as a result. One such opportunity is The Young Mums Way – a group for Offerton mums under 21 years old. It runs every Wednesday afternoon during term time at a local Children's Centre.

We also provide New Life Packs, including nappies, wipes and babygrows, as our way of saying welcome to the world for newborns. The Garage is developing into our freecycle project, a place where unwanted but useful things can find a home until someone needs them. The idea is that if you need something and we have it, you're welcome to it. We hope to make it useful for anyone and everyone.

In August we organised a Serve Week so that we could serve the community of Offerton through things like car washing, gardening, litter picking and sorting The Garage. We feel very privileged to be working alongside the police and the council; they are extremely supportive of GLO. We were invited as 'stakeholders' in Offerton to be part of a meeting with all of the interested agencies to look at the Urban Priority Area plan. I was amazed to see that all of the Plan's aims could clearly be seen as signs of God's Kingdom. It was also amazing to know that we arrived just as the local authority started to draw in the community's 'leaders' to change the face of this area and improve it as a place to live. They know that we at GLO are an extremely motivated volunteer force and that has to be a good thing! We've had the opportunity to pray and talk with council workers; I would never have expected that.

Another very positive step forward has been the approval of our application for charitable status. We have also had planning permission granted for a coffee shop; the idea being to establish GLO Coffee as a place in the heart of Offerton for people to gather as community, train for employment, provide internet access for homework clubs and more. We're just waiting to see what's going to happen with the extremely run down precinct where the coffee shop would be. There are all sorts of discussions going on as to its future and we want to be wise as to the right thing to do next.

From the start we have been blessed with a fantastic team. A number of people, with very different gifts and skills, had previously been in touch with All Saints' to say they felt called to be part of something similar to The Message Trust's Eden network but wanted to serve the wider community rather than focusing solely on young people. As a result, we had a team on hand from the offset; people who come from the area – or moved into it – all of whom want to be part of this new thing of God.

As far as we are concerned we are doing Kingdom work. If people become Christians as a result of it, I don't mind where they go to church because if it's with us, great, if it's with another church that will disciple them, that's great too.

All I want to do is make sure that anyone who responds to the Gospel through us has the opportunity to become part of a discipling community. What I'm concerned about is that we are faithful to honour Christ in our worship and all we do but our time of worship in itself is not going to be primarily missional at all. You can't disciple somebody solely in public worship.

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.

The 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.

The 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.

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.

SOURCE

As a Christian community based in the Hythe area of Colchester, members of SOURCE spend a lot of their time in the area's pubs, bars, coffee shops and cafes – says Church Army evangelist Nikki Foster-Kruczek.

Thirteen years ago the parish of New Town and the Hythe began to pray for God to show them how to respond to a part of the parish undergoing a massive regeneration. The Hythe, the old port area of Colchester, is still being redeveloped but it already looks very different to the way it was when work first got underway.

It was decided that a worker should be appointed, dedicated to living and working in the Hythe. The money was raised, interviews were held and I took on the post in May last year. I'm funded jointly by the Church Commissioners (Mission in New Housing Developments) and the Church Army. The local parish also gives to the work. I am on a fixed-term five year contract with Church Army acting as my employer but the expectation is that eventually the post will become self sustaining.

Within a few weeks of me arriving, a small group of people from the local church had offered to help with the 'mission to the Hythe'. But the question was – how do we mission such a place?

The Hythe is now a marina and the boats moored at the quays are homes rather than commercial vessels. Hundreds of new houses and flats have been built and many people have moved into the area. The old pockets of heavy industry have almost gone to be replaced by call centres and offices. For us, a picture began to form an octopus, a central resourcing core with tentacles that reached out to the different parts of the Hythe.

There are few connections between the various small estates – thanks to a couple of main roads and the River Colne cutting across the area. A few muddy footpaths are used as short cuts but people generally live in their own small estates and rarely visit another part of the Hythe unless it is to go to a large supermarket or DIY store.

People commute to work in different parts of Colchester and Chelmsford, Ipswich and London. The Hythe has no parks, very little green space, no rubbish bins, no GP surgery and no school. Not every residential area has a play space for children and where such spaces are included they have very limited appeal to any child above the age of six. On the edge of the Hythe is the main campus for the University of Essex and many students live in the Hythe itself.

A small group began to prayer walk around the area regularly and 'notice' things. We saw the two pubs trying to attract more customers, a newly-opened wine bar, local businesses struggling to stay afloat and the coffee shops, cafes and benches where people ate their lunch. We also saw rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish. All over the Hythe, people had just dropped their litter.

So our first attempt at something 'missional' was to begin to take care of our local environment by organising a litter pick and clearing up one area of the Hythe. We also began to gather together to share food in someone's home once twice each month, to eat and pray and talk and see where God might lead us. This was a vital time in our formation as a small Christian community.

We felt that God was asking us to be visible and present in the Hythe, so we started to go to the different places and just 'hang out'. The coffee shops, cafes and pubs became places where we met to eat, drink, chat and above all listen to other people. Simply by being present in these places and willing to listen, we discovered that people had a lot to say and through those conversations God spoke loudly to us about caring for the area and being willing to walk with its people.

One day we saw a poster for a quiz night to be held at the local wine bar, a place we had heard was aimed at a gay clientele. In all honesty, we had mixed emotions about going there but when we went in, we were made welcome and have been going to the bar regularly ever since. We are known as people who like to have fun but are deeply spiritual.

Our decision to formally become the SOURCE community happened gradually. We talked about how we could function in the Hythe on a much more effective basis if we committed to being there full time. People began to pray about their calling to be part of what was emerging. Our name came from our meditations on the image of the river, our physical river and the image of water used throughout the Bible. God has become for us our 'source' of sustaining as we depend on Him to lead us in all we do.

SOURCE was launched on January 30 this year at St Stephen's Church in Colchester. We wanted to make it a clear moment when we ceased to be members of St Stephen's and formally became committed members of SOURCE with a call to the Hythe. It was in the context of the weekly communion service and we wrote a special liturgy. There was a time of listening to God and people shared pictures, bits of Scripture and thoughts, we were anointed with oil and prayed with. We had a party afterwards, sharing lunch and fun together and the next evening SOURCE met for our first worship space, known as CENTRE.

Since then we have continued to love and serve God and our area and we are learning to love and serve one another in community together. We meet weekly on Monday evenings for CENTRE and we continue to pick up the litter, run a clothes swap and do lots of other things – such as bake cakes and give them to local businesses as a gift for the staff.

CENTRE is held in the home of one of our members who lives in the Hythe. We start by offering a simple meal at 7pm as some folk come straight from work and they need some food. It also helps to break the ice a bit. CENTRE keeps us focussed on God in the midst of life. We often sing, anything from ancient hymns to Hillsong, we focus ourselves on God, there is a time of reflection and sharing where the question 'Where have we seen God at work?' is asked. We usually look at the Bible together and then talk about it. Recently we read about the Sabbath and had a conversation about how we find our rest. We often hold some period of silence for people to just be with God. We bring intercessions in different ways and usually end with the Grace or the SOURCE community prayer. People usually leave by 9.30pm.

We would see SOURCE very much as an ecclesial community in its own right and are working with the Parish Church to keep that message clear. This is not always easy. SOURCE is learning together what it means to 'track God' both outwardly in mission and inwardly in our own spiritual journey. We still have more questions than answers and have no idea where God will take us next, but we're still praying and walking and hoping… and we're still looking for ways to engage with the people in the Hythe with a particular emphasis on those with little or no connection to church.

Immanuel Church

Graylingwell Chapel, in the centre of an 85-acre former hospital site in Sussex, had been derelict for years when Steve and Sarah Flashman first saw it. Now – as home to Immanuel Church – it's on course to be the spiritual heart of a landmark eco-friendly housing development. Ministers Steve and Sarah discuss the turnaround in fortune.

Immanuel Church was actually born fifteen years ago, long before we were on the scene, when a group of people in Chichester started meeting in someone's home. The church soon grew and people felt that God was calling them to work in partnership with St Paul's Church in the Winterbourne Road area of the city. Meeting at St Michael's Hall, the church outgrew the facilities there and after a long period of consultation and negotiation moved into Graylingwell Chapel. The idea was to create a vibrant new community base open to all.

Immanuel Church at Graylingwell Chapel is not a Parish Church. We are in the parish of St Paul's, Chichester but we are becoming a Bishop's Mission Order and have been given a special brief as a 'network church' and 'missional community' to live out our Christian faith in ways that connect with people in this area. This means we can develop new forms of church whilst respecting Anglican traditions.

Seven hundred homes will be built on this site over the next seven years. Graylingwell Chapel had been disused for eleven years by the time we first saw it; previously this late Victorian building had only been used by staff and patients of the NHS hospital here.

We came to Immanuel Church as ministers four years ago to live on the Winterbourne estate which is a mix of social housing and student lets. We chose to live on the estate because we felt it was really important for us to be incarnational and live with the people we serve, our home is right by what is currently a fence surrounding the Graylingwell site. It is possible to see the Chapel from where we live – though it was a bit difficult to do that initially.

When we first drove up to Graylingwell, the whole area was a mess and you couldn't really access the chapel building at all but we managed to make our way through the foliage to get to it and we could see the vision even then.

As a result we started to establish a relationship with the developers, Linden Homes, and also got in touch with the architects and the site's owner English Partnerships (which became part of the Homes and Communities Agency in December 2008). A public consultation was held before moving forward with the development and some 200 people came to the site's old theatre building.

Plans were outlined for what will be the UK's largest carbon neutral development. All the homes are planned as energy efficient with heating supplied by a central heating and power plant as part of an on-site energy centre. The idea is that it would be a benchmark for future sustainable developments across the country.

The architects put up big sheets of paper and they asked us all to write our own dreams and visions for this site. We wrote that our dream was that Graylingwell Chapel would become the community's spiritual heart.

Later, during the consultation, the development team stood up in front of this packed crowd and said that when first researching their design ideas, they came to Chichester and could see the centre of the city was in the shape of a cross with roads from north, south, east and west meeting at the Market Cross near the cathedral. They had then drawn a line through the centre of a map showing the Graylingwell site and discovered – from aerial photos – that the Chapel building was at the centre of it all. They then said they hoped it would become the spiritual heart of Graylingwell and they drew a heart around the Chapel on their PowerPoint map.

We were astounded that they used the same phrase as we had written down a little while earlier! The image of the heart has since become the church's logo.

The developers and architects also emphasised that they wanted to connect Graylingwell with Winterbourne, saying the communities needed to be interwoven. To illustrate this they drew a line to show where the cycle paths were scheduled to run – one was a direct route through what had been an old orchard from our front door directly to the chapel door. We took it as such an encouragement that this was definitely where God had called us and wanted us to be.

It helped us in developing relationship with all of these key people that we could point to the community work we were already involved in. Our Winterbourne Wonderland event on the streets of the estate involves games for the children, refreshments, food, a live band and a specially built grotto for Father Christmas.

And in the middle of the summer, we bring the seaside to Winterbourne Road with our Summersdale Seaside Special. We bring in sand, a huge Hawaiian backdrop and 'beachside' cocktails. Apart from the street parties, we also run a fellowship group in an elderly care home; have a social outreach clear-up group, and lots of other things.

There is no focus to the community around here. We only have one shop on the estate and it's the place where people meet – and kids loiter outside. At the time of building relationship we knew we couldn't develop a geographic focus but we could create a focus for something good. It was, and still is, important that the community feel they can 'own' what we do. Thankfully there has certainly been proof of that along the way.

When we moved in to the chapel building in Easter 2010, all the church turned up to clean the place and we came across a lady we didn't know doing the hoovering! It turned out that the church had helped her to clear and tidy up her garden and she wanted to give something in return.

We also have a New Community Rock Choir. Fifty eight people signed up for it and only a handful has any link at all with church but this is most definitely 'their' chapel.

The fact is that since moving in here we've had one miracle after another. Linden Homes put in a temporary electricity supply but didn't have permanent lighting. Then a member of our church was driving along when he saw lights being put into a skip. It turned out a school was being refurbished. He asked if he could have them for the church and he drove off again with all the lighting we needed.

A couple of weeks before we were due to move in, it was suggested that we might have to pay £10,000 a year to use the place! Some of our people were not at all sure about continuing with the whole thing but we said, 'This is the vision that God has given us and we will still move in on Easter weekend. If He wants us here, he will provide what we need.' The Monday before moving day one of the directors of the development company contacted us to say, 'We have decided we are not going to charge that figure. For the next two years you can use it for £1 a year.'

We are developing relationship as well as developing trust both with the community and those involved in delivering this scheme. We were able to put together quite detailed business plans for what was then English Partnerships and this really helped them to recognise that we were serious about the whole thing.

The idea of denominations or different streams of church is completely incomprehensible to many. If you mention to a lot of people in this area that we are from the Church of England, many wouldn't really know – or care – what that means. If people do have a view of what Christians were like, it would tend to be a stereotypical one of 'wet fish handshakes' and blue anoraks. There is no expectation of anything different.

It was at the Bishop of Chichester's invitation that we started on the route of becoming a Bishop's Mission Order. There had been difficult times before Immanuel Church was formed, its beginning was born out of pain, but Immanuel wasn't formed as an alternative to another congregation. Its growth was very organic and developed naturally. It had also always remained within the CofE's Canon law so the BMO offered an opportunity to embark on a new stage of Immanuel's journey.

Immanuel Church, in all but its direct governance, is sympathetic to the CofE and the BMO acknowledges that some churches are seeking a form of official recognition that falls into the Order's bracket. It’s all about restoration, reconciliation and healing.

We are very missional with Graylingwell and since we have moved here, the culture of the church has significantly changed. About 120 adults are now part of the church with attendances of roughly 100 on Sunday, plus children. We're now praying for new growth from people coming in as converts and there are good signs for future relationship building. Linden Homes has set up a Community Development Trust and a community development worker is using the Chapel for parties for new residents. Our youth and children's work currently takes place in a double decker bus parked alongside the Chapel. We bought it on eBay and later this year we do hope to go on the road with it.

The building itself will be restored by Linden Homes at an estimated cost of £300,000. They will start to do that when 150 houses have been built – 70 have gone up so far. We will remain in the Chapel while works continue, all of which will be in line with the carbon neutral development around it.

In thinking about the fresh expressions way of being incarnational in a setting rather than being attractional and bringing people back into a church building, it's all about knowing your context. For us here we recognise that one of the things that draws people in is the Chapel itself because they are curious to see what it's like. You can't always work to a formula of getting out and staying out. Many are coming to the church because of its community arts emphasis. You have got to know your own community and recognise where people are at as well as having a real Spirit-inspired vision.

Graylingwell Chapel is the new community venue in Chichester but we can see a time, as the site develops, when additional communities could well become those little churches that are very typical of fresh expressions. This might be seen as 'Chapel Central' to a network of churches.

We still find it amazing that it was the secular community of architects and developers that set Graylingwell Chapel's agenda as the spiritual heart. They want to create something that is very contemporary, very alive. In turn, people have picked up on the welcome, the friendship, the atmosphere of the place. It is easy to become concerned that they will be put off by liturgy, the way we worship, what we say in a sermon or whatever but we shouldn't assume that these things are barriers. Instead, friends and friendship are often the keys to them coming in the first place and then coming back for more. We have got to live community and give people a glimpse as to what that means – that's the heart of the Trinity after all isn't it?

Reside

Reside is a Christian project evolving in response to growing housing developments to the south of Loughborough. It is led by Methodist Deacon Ellie Griffin, Reside's full-time paid worker.

The original vision for a worker on the development came from the Loughborough Churches Partnership and is mainly funded by the Anglican and Methodist Church. The rest of Reside's team is made up of volunteers from a range of denominations, most of whom live in the housing developments we serve.

I have been here for just over three-and-a-half years and am based on the Fairmeadows estate but also work on the new Grange Park housing development. Generally I attempt to co-ordinate the various activities of Reside and enthuse people to get involved.

Our vision is to be an evolving Christian network that provides safe and welcoming places, explores the Christian faith, cares for the community and collectively expresses each element of Church.

This is an affluent estate but we are in the parish of the Good Shepherd CofE Church which is based in a far more socially deprived area. In saying that, they still provide part of the funding for Reside and the vicar, Eric Whitley, is on our steering group. In some ways it's quite difficult to be taking support from a church with such limited resources themselves but, as often happens, it's those with less who tend to give more. They saw the vision of what we were trying to do and have gone for it – and we're very grateful for that.

It was only 25 years ago that the whole of the Fairmeadows estate was nothing more than a farmer's field. Eventually the community will consist of about 1600 homes. When the original plans for this development (known as Grange Park) were first set in place, the churches in Loughborough saw the need for the potential community to be developed and so looked to appointing a full time worker to live on the estate. I moved here with my family in September 2007.

It wasn't long before Reside was 'born'. We aim to contribute to community by enabling residents to be actively engaged in developing the area in which they live – whether that's through the residents’ association, involvement with schools, Neighbourhood Watch, litter picks or working with children and young people. The opportunities really are endless and the range of skills needed is diverse.

We want to get people excited about getting to know their neighbours and to provide opportunities for building relationships. There aren't many meeting places on the estate and so we are trying to be imaginative in how we address this so that all groups within the community can interact more with each other. Recently we made a trip to see a project near Malton which uses a council-funded facility called the 'Ryepod'. It is a converted mobile home hired out to various organisations for a range of purposes. This is the very beginning of our explorations but we are excited by the possibilities.

In some ways, Loughborough has got quite a lot of pioneering stuff going on from Pioneer Network, New Frontiers International, student work and a huge variety of other churches. In saying that there is still an idea or expectation as to what 'real' church looks like; trying to convince those part of inherited models of church that Reside really is church can be quite difficult. Even if people can cope with Reside not having a building as a base they will still ask, 'why aren't you gathering for worship every week?' It can be so difficult for them to grasp that Reside may never have a big gathering for worship but it's very much church in a different way.

Reside cares about every aspect of community life and the individual lives of the residents who make up this community. This comes from our belief that God cares about every aspect of lives too and that the Christian faith has something to offer in each situation.

So far Reside has been involved in the Haddon Way Residents Association working with them to listen to the community's needs or concerns and hosting Community Fun Days, a Big Tidy Up event and an outdoor Christmas Carol service. We have also hosted Easter Fun Days on the Grange Park housing development two years running giving the families opportunity to meet their neighbours and have fun together.

Through support from SOaR (Schools Outreach and Resources) we have been part of a prayer group for Outwoods Edge Primary School, led assemblies and delivered Easter lessons. Leading on from this we have been invited to lead the school community in celebrating harvest and Christmas and are currently exploring further ways of engaging with the school.

Offering the opportunity to ask questions about God and faith, we ran a six- week exploration course. In small discussion groups we used film clips, news articles and other medium to stir debate offering insight from biblical teaching and Christian thought. Reside has also hosted craft sessions, parties, a police drop-in, quiet space and Open House, all providing a variety of opportunities for residents in the area. All of our activities are provided free of charge as a gift to the community to express God's abundant, no-strings-attached love.

The Residents' Association was one of the first links we made into the community. At first they thought it a bit odd that someone from the church turned up and they wondered what we wanted from them. It was also a little confusing because I didn't 'fit' their idea as to what a church leader looked like! Once they became accustomed to the fact that I was attending as a resident and not just as a church representative, everything was fine.

It was interesting that after a community event run jointly by the Association and Reside, the chairman said to me,

I still don’t know what you're after. The church has bought the house you're living in and they're paying your wages for five years, what are they getting out of it?

It had taken him three years to ask that question directly and it was only because we'd built up such a good working relationship that he felt able to ask it at all. In turn I could tell him there was no catch; that it was all a gift to this community because God loves this area and the people who live here.

Over the next 12 months we hope to:

Develop the work we do with the local schools;

Explore the possibilities for a mobile meeting place;

Provide opportunities for residents to get to know one another;

Network those already actively serving this community;

Provide opportunities to explore the Christian faith;

Grow a number of 'Cell' groups;

Plan for long term sustainability of Reside.

We are very much developing cells at the moment and we're just starting a pilot cell of people who will be leaders in different cell groups. We have got lots of good contacts now on the edges of the community but how can we take it a bit further? I think the cell church model, tweaked to this context, would be a very good model for us. I pray that it will take off and that the trust between groups will become stronger.

The work with the primary school has been awesome because initially it was closed to what we were offering to do. The vicar would go in for standard assemblies at key times of the year though they were a bit worried about taking anything further than that. Slowly they have begun to open up and this Easter we are working with them to host an exhibition of Hope where members of both the school and wider community can creatively offer their Hope for the future.

Again this has all taken time. Thanks to the gradual building up of relationship they invited me to be on their governing body and now they approach us to do things rather than the other way round. It's amazing to think that when I started here there was no link between anyone on the estate or anywhere to go so I used to sit at home praying, then walk around the streets and pray a bit more.

I was pregnant when I took up the post so that did mean I could meet other mums as a way of getting to know people. It also meant that any immediate expectations were lifted as to what I was to 'achieve' in the role; otherwise the aim was that I'd be involved in building a community centre by now because that was one of the points in my job description! The developers of the estate are providing space for a community centre of some description and I'm hoping that Reside and the residents will be able to work together on creating a special space where all sorts of activities can take place.

A five-year funding plan was put in place for us so we are now at the stage of looking at how things can be sustained in future. We are already starting to get some income from the local community but it's nowhere near enough for us to be financially sustainable – and that's in an affluent area! How can people hope to achieve that sustainability in poorer areas?

Also, the context has changed so much here in just a few years. Lots more people have moved in, mainly young families, but many head out for work early in the morning in their cars and the estate's almost dead in the daytime. The nearest shop is nearly a mile away and all of this can combine to incredible isolation for those left behind. There are actually quite a few older people here as well and the community – on the surface predominantly white and middle class – is actually quite a diverse one.

In serving them, Reside will never look like a 'normal' church. I think it will always be messy, an evolving network continually listening and continually responding to the needs of the community. I think that's why many traditional churches have come to a halt – because they stopped listening.

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