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Boring Wells

Boring Wells is a network of fresh expressions of church in and around Belfast. Each has a very different flavour but all share the same vision and core values. Adrian McCartney explains more.

Genesis 26 tells the story of Isaac who pursued the vision passed to him by his father, Abraham of re-opening old wells and digging new wells, sources of life and prosperity for anyone who chose to live close to them.

The collective vision of Boring Wells is to continue the legacy of faith in the Church of Ireland, to re-open old wells in old places of faith and to open new wells where there are signs that a new community could be expressed. The hope is to bring life and the presence of Christ to local communities who may have difficulty connecting with church.

Our ideas of what the church is like are fairly well culturally shaped and even when we apply scripture to them we tend to default back to something like it has always been. Wells is no different mostly. We are trying to be the family of God. If there is any difference it is that we want to be shaped by the mission and by those whom we engage with rather than predetermining the result.

We originally thought that we were to reopen old wells but then we found that we were re-digging wells where the church had gone a bit dead. Since then the main emphasis has been to try and open up new wells.

I am a Church of Ireland minister but I came out of parish ministry in 2003 when the Bishop of Down and Dromore gave me permission to plant a church in a commuter village on the outskirts of Belfast. We quickly discovered that trying to do that among unchurched people just didn't work in that area.

I had taken a year to recruit a group of people. Initially there were 35 of us who started meeting in a pub in Moneyrea. We organised a Sunday service but not one unchurched person ever came to it! We threw everything at that service; we had projectors and sound and lovely coffee and nice things to eat. We also had lots of visitors from other parishes, saying, 'O we'd love to do this' though there was always the underlying thought, 'This just looks like we are moving the existing church around.'

Then we read the Mission-shaped Church report and we began to consider how we do church and it became something that wasn't quite what the bishop or any of us had expected. Questions like 'when are you going to build the buildings?' became irrelevant. We had to say that we weren't going to be doing it that way any longer. Defining ourselves in a way that can be accommodated within a diocese when we cross parochial boundaries, and even diocesan boundaries, has been an ongoing challenge both for us and the diocesan head office.

Our main problem was, and is, that people find it difficult to recognise anything except the parish. We don't have the equivalent of a Bishop's Mission Order in the Church of Ireland so most people see us as something between a parish and a mission agency. The way we have moved forward is to become a company limited by guarantee with a charitable basis. We have a board of directors and have to submit our audited accounts to the Charity Commission. This allows us to have charity number but it doesn't give us any status within the Church of Ireland even though we would very much like to be part of the diocese. Representation at Synod and financial support are ongoing discussions.

Five wells, our attempts at creating mission shaped communities, go to make up the Boring Wells network. We found that people had a sense of call in different sorts of areas – not geographical as such but among certain groups of people. The wells each decide how they express church individually but we have a general sense of how the whole family of Wells expresses their love of God together. The wells are called Tinys, Resound, Shankill, Elk and Networks.

Within a year of us starting, we set up Tinys. It all happened when we were running that service in the pub; one night we simply came across a crowd of teenagers drinking on the windowsills of a row of shops. In time, we rented one of the retail units as a coffee shop for young people; there was no way those youngsters would or could transfer to the Networks church – then known as Moneyrea Wells. We needed to let them do something to express their experience of Christ where they were in their own way. That was quite a learning curve for the first group of people who had thought that what they were originally offering was a fresh expression of church only to discover that something very different was happening with the people who actually lived in the place.

We released some people to go and make Tinys their spiritual home. The original group of people now call themselves Networks. They have a non-local sense of connecting primarily with their natural contacts in work and through friendships. Members of Networks are now praying about the possibility of gathering somewhere closer to the city.

The bishop gave me an opportunity to work in two inner city parishes part-time. These small congregations are very elderly but we have found that the Networks group (about 30 of them) have been very supportive of those congregations who have actually come to like them.

Resound was originally a small outreach in an interface community comprising two working class estates on opposite side of a main road in Dunmurry on the outskirts of Belfast. There are two large secondary schools, one Catholic and one Protestant, and some community facilities that have been made available to Resound for youth activities. In the summer we have a fortnight of non-stop activities; the first week is aimed at primary school children – this year we had 400 children and young people every day with 73 leaders. In the second week we had over 100 teens daily. The regular Resound meetings, comprising a Sunday night session and drop-in stuff during the week, are organised by the late teens/early 20s.

The Shankill well is all about people serving in the area, a place at the heart of sectarian paramilitarianism. The Summer Madness festival started Streetreach to offer an opportunity of service to the community. Every summer for five years we used to take teams of people to do street cleaning and gardening in different parts of the city. Growing out of that was a group of people who had a strong sense of call to go and serve in Shankill itself. One couple have moved to live there.

Shankill well has a meal together every Monday evening. They are trying to be very simple in what they do, developing friendships from around the area and trying to incarnate the gospel in natural ways.

Elk well meets in my local pub in Dundonald, not far from Stormont. Our team get together on Thursdays to join the weekly quiz night. Friendships have grown and relationships have developed in a away that has allowed for many opportunities to share in prayer and care for this growing group of people.

All of our network team leaders are pioneer types and so are now really struggling with what to do when communities do start to grow. Launching out in mission has an excitement about it. Discipleship and pastoral care are the balance. The challenge for this autumn is come up with a better support system for those who make up the mission teams and the new family members who are becoming part of us. We presently organise a monthly gathering for worship and teaching supported by resources for small groups. None of this is easy and everything always feels quite fragile. As St Paul said, 'I am certain that He who began this good work in you will bring it to completion…' I pray that the Lord will help us to keep going.

Norwich Christian Meditation Centre

Norwich Christian Meditation Centre has given rise to an ecclesial community with Eucharist, worship, discipleship nurturing and community building at its heart. Developing Consciousness, an 8-week introductory course on spirituality, has played an important part in the Centre's development. Rev Nicholas Vesey, vicar of St Augustine's, Norwich, explains more.

St Augustine's Church pioneered the Developing Consciousness course as a means of connecting ancient Christian truths and practices with contemporary spirituality. The result is the Norwich Christian Meditation Centre.

Developing Consciousness, and the follow-up 'Into Christ Consciousness', attracts people who are seeking to deepen their personal spirituality and explore Christian faith.

St Augustine's meets as a church on a Sunday but it now offers a lot more than that. The church itself dates from 1163. In 1993 the congregation, some 40 to 50 people, moved out of the church because the roof was dangerous. About £80,000 was raised to renovate the church hall for worship. In 1999, during a long period without a vicar, the old church was declared redundant. By then our numbers had dropped to about 25.

We wanted to grow from there and identified quite a strong 'alternative' community living in our area, and made a decision to be less churchy. New signage encouraged people to 'come and develop your spiritual life'. Then, after surveying newer members to find out what attracted them to St Augustine's, we created the Developing Consciousness course which now runs twice a year.

We re-ordered the building to make it more attractive and rebranded ourselves as the Norwich Christian Meditation Centre – with the blessing of our bishop. Using modern marketing and advertising techniques to publicise our events, we encouraged the development of a community group to include those on the local estate, and organised a regular garden party for all local residents to create a village feel, although we are near a city centre.

Once in contact with the Centre, individuals can connect with the Christian community through our many expressions of worship, spiritual practice and community life: Ambient Wonder (alternative worship community), weekly Christian Meditation group, learning events, Sunday morning services, small groups meeting in people's homes and local community projects.

We are rarely, if ever, all gathered together but our values are to provide space for people to express themselves, connecting with their own creativity in pursuit of our Creator. We are committed to learning from each other and using the skills and talents God has given us to explore new understandings and cement our spiritual experiences into our everyday lives. We know we are called to be in our contemporary culture but not 'of it', and so we aim that what we do together enables us to authentically reflect God's presence in us.

As our community evolves we are working to increase the cross-over between the different groups under the umbrella of the Meditation Centre. We have a database of those who have attended the courses and invite them to guest events with interesting visiting speakers. We finance the entire venture through the speaker programme. So far we have held conferences featuring Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault. John Bell has just run a two day intensive course for us entitled Moving the Contemplative Heart to Action. This means people can belong without having to pay for the privilege of belonging. We feel that this template could work for any church in any town or city in the UK, so long as there is an interest in meditation among the church members.

The Centre has also launched a programme for men in and around the Norwich area. Soul Brothers is a group formed out of the experience of those learning from the American Franciscan Richard Rohr's teaching on the role of men within a spiritual context. At the moment we hope there will be a large group meeting once every couple of months, with an opportunity to be a part of a smaller group of men (about 10) to get together more regularly. Our next meeting will be in October.

We aim to be a liquid network, with each event or group acting as an access point to belonging in our spiritual community. People can find their home in one or more activities and we journey together towards God, not assuming that we all start from the same place but knowing that we're heading towards a deeper knowledge of divine love and freedom in Christ.

The problem is that churches today are finding it difficult to find a niche within contemporary society. What we see as part of the solution is that many such churches fit naturally into some part of the contemplative tradition and there is a hunger in contemporary society for 'spirituality' or the cultivation of a sensitive and rewarding relationship with eternal truth and love. These churches could institute local Christian Meditation Centres to teach the contemplative tradition, and so appeal to those in search of spirituality. In support of that vision, a book is about to be published which includes all the contents of the Developing Consciousness course.

The Meditation Centre now has 1000 'members' with a small group programme and church at the centre. This provides access points through a culturally relevant structure, enabling people to participate in a Christ-centred community, promoting the purpose of God and the practice of the presence of God.

Dream

Richard White traces the story of dream.

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

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

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

Relational: Building communities rather than putting on worship events.

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

Three of the highlights of the past year have been:

Seeing the network grow

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

Increasing numbers of formerly unchurched or dechurched people

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

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

Including:

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

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

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

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

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

Riverforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exeter Network Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Sanctuary

Moving out of a church building into a tower block may not be everyone's idea of progress but The Sunday Sanctuary in Portsmouth is proving to be a hit with newcomers to this fresh expression of church.

Revd Mark Rodel, Portsmouth's city centre pioneer minister and associate priest at St Luke's Somerstown, Southsea, led the way when the 20-strong congregation set up base at Wilmcote House to encourage newcomers. And encourage them they did. In the first month, 24 extra people came to get-togethers at the 11-storey high-rise. Mark is encouraged but aware of the challenges ahead.

This is about taking seriously the call to be where people already are, rather than expecting them to come to us. We often expect people to cross the threshold of our churches and immediately start singing or speaking words that they don't yet believe or understand. Our gathering is much more conversation-based.

We don't always judge our success or failure on the basis of numbers, as the quality of relationships is also important. But I'm very encouraged; we moved locations specifically to encourage local people to join us, and they have. Several of them have been more than once. And the people we're meeting seem to be genuinely open to what it is that we're doing.

In fact, we had thought people might pop in and out for just a few minutes of our morning get-togethers. In fact, many of them have stayed for the entire morning.

We had a trial run at Wilmcote House on four successive Sundays earlier in the year. As a result of that, one family – who live in Wilmcote House – decided to join us. At Christmas we had the Wilmcote House Nativity. All ages were welcome and children had the chance to dress as an angel or shepherd to hear the Christmas story, enjoy a free breakfast and take part in some craft sessions.

Our vision is to be a mission community that plants congregations, and ultimately we'd like to see a network of small, local congregations in this area. In the meantime, this is a massive step and there is excitement and trepidation. We recognise that it's a risk, but we think it's a risk worth taking.

Worship is continuing at St Luke's church building from Monday to Saturday, and the venue is still being used by community groups. There are lots of other things going on in the area too. Across Portsmouth diocese, there are multi-media 'Blessed' Eucharists at St Thomas's Church, Elson, in Gosport; Messy Church at St Wilfrid's Church, Cowplain; meditative alternative worship called 'Ethos' at St Nicholas Church, North End; and a Café Church will launch in Waterlooville's Costa Coffee from January 2010.

I have also started a new thing on Sunday nights when I offer a chance for 'spiritual-but-not-religious' people to meet up at a local pub to talk about faith, spirituality and life over beer.

Weatherspoon's kindly set aside a table for me at the Isambard Kingdom Brunel pub from 8pm-10pm. The evenings are called 'Sanctuary' and are publicised as 'spirited conversation and skinny ritual'.

It isn't a church in a pub. There's no worship or preaching involved. It's just a chance for people who would feel uncomfortable in church to talk and think a bit more deeply about what they do believe. My aim isn't to get them into church, but simply to give them space to explore these issues. So far I've chosen some fairly broad discussion topics, like life after death, or what things we might regret.

Emmanuel Café Church

A fresh expression of church that is 'fuelled by coffee'… Matt Ward, a chaplain at the University of Leeds, takes us behind the scenes at Emmanuel Café Church.

In the days before Café Church, students would meet for a fairly traditional Sunday afternoon service. By the time I arrived at the university, I felt it wasn't engaging them and it certainly wasn't engaging anyone else.

I inherited a number of struggling worship events and was told, 'You sort it out!' but I knew the first thing to do was not to jump to do anything at all. Instead we wanted to listen to God. For the first term-and-a-half we just met together and prayed together, asking what we thought Church was, and where God's work could be found on the campus.

It didn't take us long to realise that sharing faith tended to happen around coffee and cake! Emmanuel Café Church grew from that, and we're now in our fourth year.

It's easy to fall into the numbers' game. How many people are attending, how regular is their attendance, and can we chart growth in what we have been doing? The fact is that we have got quite a large number of people who would say they are members of Café Church. They may not come week in, week out, they may only have been once but they feel a connection, and see themselves as a part of what we do.

We work in a number of ways to keep those connections. These include:

having a regular place to meet;

a Facebook page;

sending a weekly electronic list saying what we did last week and what is coming up next week;

texting people to say, 'How are you? What's happening for you?'.

The networking continues with students who have left the university. It's one of our key issues at the moment. How do they move on from our fresh expression of church into new places? They may grow in faith and confidence as students here, so how do we help and encourage them in that transition stage?

Some ex-students keep connected for a considerable period of time, particularly if they have ended up working in quite isolated or dangerous areas of the world. They want to share what is happening with what they see as 'their' community.

Café Church operates in 10-week bursts during term-time. Obviously, as we operate in a university environment, we always miss the major festivals. That's a bit of a challenge for a church community… but there are still ways to celebrate 'together', even when we're not in the same place at the same time.

In previous years, I have sent a sermon by text on Christmas morning. You have just 168 characters in a text. What can you say about the Incarnation within those sort of limits?! I don't know about doing that via Twitter with 140 characters. That really would be a challenge.

We've had some very successful one-off events, but we usually meet from 5 on a Sunday evening, and it's very deliberate timing. It's the end of a weekend so if students have been working they can come out afterwards, and if they have had friends to stay or been away themselves, they will generally be back by then. It's extremely informal and very much a 'drift in and out' idea. People may get involved with the discussion starters we leave about the place, take a look at the stations that could be around the room, or perhaps simply catch up with others and have a chat about how the week has gone.

Towards the end of our time together they usually have another drink because the whole thing is fuelled by coffee. They leave at about 6.30 to 7pm.

The idea that people who go to church at a certain time on a certain day does not connect with these students at all. Instead it's a continuous process. I see people on campus through the week, maybe in a queue for yet more caffeine, with others meeting to have meals or drinks together. In Acts 2, the sharing of lives and the sharing of things in common with each other is seen as important and I think that pastoral thing, that growing thing, that making of disciples, is key to Café Church, as it should be for every type of church.

Every year has seen quite a sense of growth in the life of the church, and in the lives of those who have come and found faith or confidence in their faith. My hope for the future is that Café Church continues to be shaped in a way that serves the needs of the students who come in and reaches out to students who don't. If it looks the same in 12 months as it does now, it won't be doing that.

Cafechurch Network

Ian Mobsby talks to Cid Latty, Network Leader for Cafechurch Network.

What is cafechurch?

That is a very good question. I think we sometimes forget how far away many people are from ever coming to church. Cafechurch is all about creating a context for people who do not go to 'church', but are interested in God. It is about providing a comfortable setting for people to consider issues from a faith perspective. It is also a way to develop a community that people are happy to be a part of. All this is based on good incarnational theology.

How did it begin for you?

Three years ago I was Senior Minister of a Baptist Church in Welwyn Garden City that asked the question 'how can we engage with our community more effectively?' We could see that there were many people who might never enter a traditional church building. So we looked at our community and could see how a thriving café culture was rapidly developing. Coffee shops were opening up everywhere and this was happening right across the UK too. In fact a staggering 50% of the UK adult population visits a coffee shop. We found that many members of the church already used a coffee shop as a 'third place' between home and work. So we asked our local Costa Coffee if we could meet there and were amazed when they said yes.

How did you run your café church?

What we designed was a themed event with quizzes, a short talk, discussion and live music – all with the added benefit of being served by friendly staff. Our purpose was to help people engage with issues like debt, parenting or the environment from a faith perspective. We called it 'coffee with a conscience'. People would not only be invited to enjoy a lively evening of chat, hope and humour but we would offer them resources and prayer support that would help them engage with the issue after the event.

So how did the national organization begin?

What we ran on that first night proved to be so popular that I began discussions with Costa Coffee senior management and a few cafechurches were piloted in other stores. Due to the success of these, Cafechurch Network was formed. This charity was later given the 'OK' to put a cafechurch in every suitable Costa Coffee store in the UK. Additionally Costa asked that all churches wanting to use their stores should come through the Cafechurch Network. Today other coffee shop chains have opened their doors to the Network too.

How does this benefit Costa and the church?

Stores benefit as cafechurch helps them to be part of the local community. There are great benefits for the church too, as people who would not go to a more traditional church setting interact with people who do. This may be one of the first steps for some towards 'going to church'. For others they may feel that cafechurch in a high street location is the kind of church they want to belong to. This challenges us then to re-imagine how we can help people develop their relationship with God in a café context.

If there was something you would say to the church what would it be?

This is a great opportunity for an adventure of faith. I currently have more store managers asking for a cafechurch than I have churches ready. So I would invite churches to attend a cafechurch training day and then join the Network after that. When they do, we will link them to their local store and provide resources to help them run a cafechurch.

B1

B1 church in Birmingham featured in the first Fresh Expressions DVD four years ago. Now Ed Mackenzie of the B1 council brings their story up to date.

B1 continues to be a community that seeks to reach out to the unchurched and dechurched within the city centre of Birmingham. Significant developments over the last few years have included the Breathe project and a 'recasting' of our vision and values.

The Breathe project began in early 2007 and aimed to 'help stimulate people's spiritual imaginations'. Based in a city-centre office space, the Breathe venue offered meeting spaces, spirituality discussion groups and a 'sanctuary space' for relaxation and reflection. The challenge has been to engage people within the busyness of a city centre environment, but significant relationships have developed throughout the project. Breathe has now moved into a new 'post-venue' phase where it will work closer with other churches and charities in the city centre.

B1 church also underwent a 'vision casting' process in 2007-2008. We articulated our vision as 'Living God, Living Differently, Living Community', and identified five values central to our life together: Attentiveness, Nurturing, Community, Acceptance and Equipping. We also developed a 'rhythm of life' with spiritual practices to help B1ers embody the five values within their lives – practices include intentional 'blessing', a daily or weekly prayer of review and regular Bible reading.

At the moment B1 church is in the process of recruiting a new leader to take us forward into the next stage of our church life.