GraceSpace in Bradford is 'a church for people who don't go to church'. Pioneer minister Colin Blake explains how the community has developed and why eating together is so important to them.
GraceSpace started life in 2007 when the then-minister Andy Bowerman was appointed as a Pioneer Minister, by the Bishop of Bradford. Eventually he and his wife Ali set up the Vicars Café in Saltaire as part of the vision to create a community in the Aire Valley.
The Café, which continues to operate today, provides a safe 'third space' where people can enjoy its hospitality and atmosphere while building relationships and sharing God with those who are interested in knowing more.
When Andy and Ali moved to Dorset, the Café became a social enterprise with a board of management and a project manager running it day by day. My wife Katy and I moved here two years ago. I have been in ministry for 27 years and, at 59, I am probably one of the oldest 'pioneer ministers' in CofE history!
It was an interesting start because we arrived having no idea what the project was for or how to take it forward. It was actually very difficult to get hold on it because it meant different things to different people. It was also difficult because there was a four month gap between Andy leaving in July and me arriving in November. The community dissipated to the extent that only about six or seven people turned up at the licensing service to represent GraceSpace.
Many people associated with the community travelled from all over the place in those early years because they related to Andy and Ali very strongly. That was wonderful but it was clear from the time we came on the scene that those people weren't actually relating to each other in the same sort of way. As a result we decided to draw our horns in and not get involved in lots of missional activities initially; instead we wanted to help people to get to know each other.
Mine is a five year appointment and we knew it was vital to get those strong building blocks of community in place right from the start. As a result we moved a lot of events away from Vicars Café and hosted them in our own home. We are fortunate in having a large dining room, kitchen and living room so we began to meet together as a group around meals. Food and drink became the staple of what we were doing and when people eat together, somehow there is a little heaven in the ordinary.
The number has now grown to 25 with many people coming who have either been bruised by church in the past or with no past experience of church at all. They range from families with teenage or adult children through to people in their 50s and 60s. We also have about 10 younger children, aged from two to 12, coming along with their parents. Some came as a result of personal invitation from a friend though many have turned up as a result of the information and publicity we put out through our website.
We believe in operating with a light touch. We don't have an 'official' structure, such as a PCC, but we all meet together every three months for a Summit meeting at which we decide the priorities for the next quarter.
A real turning point came when GraceSpace came up with the idea of having a different meal theme for each Sunday in the month. On the first Sunday we have Breakfast when people turn up at 10am to help us cook breakfast together; we will then organise a spiritual thought or reflection at some stage while we're eating. The whole thing can run for about three hours as people often want to stick around and discuss things.
The second Sunday is Lunch. This starts at 12.30 and people bring different foods around a theme so we might have a Chinese meal or what we call 'Yorkshire food' which means three types of curry! Everyone takes part; we don't offer separate things for different ages. The children particularly like it when there's a fifth Sunday in the month because that's when they choose what the adults have to do on that day and tell us what the spiritual element is going to be.
The third Sunday is Tea or 'Creativitea' at which we bring along cakes and biscuits and make big crafts together from 3pm. I'm a regional co-ordinator for Messy Church but we don't have enough space to run a Messy Church. However, Creativitea is a variation on the theme because we do have a celebration, activity and food as part of the mix. The adults are keen to join and they are happy to join in with cut and paste but generally they want to make things that will last, something with a purpose.
The fourth Sunday is based around supper time at about 6pm. It is called Ikon; this is more reflective and allows people to share what comes out of that time together. Typically they will have bread, soup, pate and cheese at that one.
We also offer Explore sessions during the week on either Tuesday or Wednesday nights. These are cell-church-like in structure but are really about Bible application rather than Bible study, giving the opportunity for a much more interactive approach. Coming from a charismatic, evangelical background myself this has been quite a learning curve for me too because it's all about giving people the freedom to have different opinions. It's no good saying, 'this is the only answer to this passage'. Instead I approach it as, 'I know what I think this passage is about but tell me, what do you think?' It's about trying to step back, not telling people what to think but allowing them to grow.
At the end of November 2011 I was diagnosed with temporal arteritis which meant that all the arteries in my body were inflamed. I have been having treatment for that and hope to be back at work in January but I have been very encouraged to see what has happened at GraceSpace while I've been out of action. The people have been brilliant, offering their homes and their skills to keep things moving along.
This illness has prompted the devolving, training, encouraging and mentoring of new people into leadership. For this fresh expression to develop we want to create another network of community, a second GraceSpace. For that, we need leaders, though we have also taken a long, hard look at our purpose in all of this. It can't just be to build community. How do we look outside and make a difference?
We have started to look at how we might do that by volunteering elsewhere. Perhaps we could give our support to a community or local Christian project rather than start one ourselves? We are just working out how that might be done because we are a fairly eclectic bunch and people travel from all over Bradford to come to us.
I have a line manager who offers me pastoral care while the Archdeacon of Bradford provides practical oversight of the project. I work alongside all the other local churches and I believe that my age has greatly helped me in building links with them; I'm clearly not a whizzkid and people seemed to have responded to that because I don't come over as threatening in any way. I'm also not seen as suggesting that GraceSpace has got it right and they've got it wrong. Far from it. We all need each other. Part of my time is spent as adviser on fresh expressions of church to the Bishop and I am a regular at wider diocesan meetings as well as being very much involved with the local churches in our area. Indeed I lead the marriage preparation course team for the local URC.
It's all part and parcel of trying to serve other churches in what we do here at GraceSpace. If we can let them know of the things that have gone well – and our failures too – we are helping them in their own mission. All we can do is be honest that we are working out our faith in fear and trembling and trust God for the rest.
It was a great success as it developed. People came and the events were of a good quality but then it became clear that many of those visitors were Christians fed up with their traditional churches. They wanted a community that seemed less structured and distant from the established church, even though The Lounge was born out of – and accountable to – a 'traditional' church.
It was really exciting doing Alpha at Costa as various people would wander in alongside a core who attended most sessions. It was particularly pleasing to have some older teenagers attend. An important step we took was to have a very small tight team and to say to the rest of the Church not to come unless the person they invited would only come if they did. As a reasonable sized church for our area we can easily fill Costa with Christians so we had to be very clear about this!
At the end of this month, on Sunday 28 August at 5pm we are having our first open 'The Lounge' which will include jazz music, DVD, short testimony and lots of relationship building. It is too early to call this a missional community and a couple from the Church is considering the possibility of taking on the leadership of The Lounge or whatever emerges. We also hope that some of those who were on the edge of Alpha@Costa might come along. We might even consider another Alpha course if that is what is required! These are exciting days. 'The Lounge' might become a pilot missional community but once again we are seeking to listen rather than impose.
St George's, Deal, faced a major challenge in 2002. Shiela Porter – who shares oversight and leadership of the church with Chris Spencer – looks back at how they dealt with that challenge and looks forward to new opportunities through the development of missional communities.
It is about mobilising everyone to be missionary disciples and we've got a whole variety of diverse networks that are being reached through these communities. People who previously were sitting in the pews – along the lines of a 'provider client' type of model – are now doing all kinds of things that they never dreamed they would be doing. As they've gone out and taken on these new roles with new responsibilities, they’ve discovered the need to depend upon God. As a result they've grown spiritually and in their discipleship as well. This has brought about a release of 40 new missional leaders – a real treasure trove of talent.
Another important new community to evolve has been at the Church Centre. As the centre continues to be an 'attractional model' with newcomers regularly arriving, this central community called 'Shoreline' is able to invite new people into it and give new people time to experience and understand the concept of missional communities before stepping into one that is meeting outside. Shoreline is also there to support the work of the other missional communities, being on the 'shoreline' to support them in their mission events and as they come back into the centre.
It used to be an industrial heartland but the Dartford Bridge area became ripe for redevelopment and housing schemes began to spring up on Thames Gateway sites previously dominated by factories and business. The Beacon came into being when the local Methodist Church appointed Bart Woodhouse as lay leader of a new church plant team.
As more and more people began to move on site, I was very keen to start a Residents' Association. We put letters through people's doors and organised an informal meeting in one of the new buildings; about 40 or 50 people come along to it.
We then stumbled on the national Big Lunch initiative which encourages communities to get together for food and activities. We had a very popular tug of war, a bouncy castle and a barbecue. We also got local people to bring along some home-made food that expressed something of them and their background – a kind of signature dish. As a result of that we had goat curry and many other wonderful things! About 60 or 70 people come which, from the small community that we are at the moment, was quite a big proportion of the people here.
We had quite a small group of people with us when we started and now there is about nine and 10 on a core team. They all have a real sense of call to be doing this kind of work but we are learning again what it means to be community and what it means to be church together. We've also got quite a large and growing fringe group and we are using things like the Y Course and other things to encourage that fringe to maybe explore the Christian faith and then hopefully transition into the cell life of the church.
We meet on a Tuesday evening in cell groups – or Beacon groups – and then on one Sunday in the month we all have a big meal together, maybe with some sort of interactive prayer time. The Dartford Bridge Learning and Community Campus has been built on site and we have a room there which is just the right size for us. We also launched a celebration service at the new school on the Bridge Development in January.
There are a number of challenges that I think we face in trying to shape a full and healthy Christian community here. One of them is that I'm a lay person in the Methodist Church and so I'm not able to preside at the Eucharist meal. I think there needs to be a real integrity about these new communities we're forming in being able to celebrate that meal – and all that it means – together.
Formerly Priest in Charge at St Mary's, I have been here for three years with the first being taken up by testing and seeing. Two years further down the line and there have been some really encouraging things along the way, not least the development of Kairos, but now we need to try and embed a new vision and work out how it looks to be in a way that's centralised – yet decentralised. We're in new territory here so things take time – but that's fine.
Ecumenical relations are very important to us and we welcomed quite a lot of church leaders from the area to our launch in October. Among the denominations there is a great deal of understanding and we get a lot of support as a deanery initiative.
The story of alive and kicking goes back to 1991 when the Methodist and Anglican churches in Kinver organised a week-long Rob Frost mission. Out of this came a drop-in event at the church hall called 'Hole in the Wall' for the young people who hung around the church premises in the evenings. Shortly after this, another group had to be started as an alternative for the church kids who felt threatened at Hole in the Wall and, in the end, the behaviour of young people at Hole in the Wall became such that it had to be stopped.
That was to change when numbers got too big to continue in front rooms and the group moved into the church hall. However numbers were very soon low enough to move back into front rooms! So in 2001, we had a look at other possible venues and fixed on the newly-refurbished 'youth hut' – located on the edge of the school premises and run by the County Youth Services. They agreed to gives us free use of the building. We're now part of the management group set up to maintain and run the venue after the Youth Services let it go.
We finish with a prayer time. Again, we try and vary the way we do this to give as broad an understanding of prayer as possible and allow people to find the way they can best build a relationship with God. One of the things we're keen to avoid is running a youth group and shoe-horning in a five-minute 'God slot'. Instead we want to try and model Christian community in all that we do; some of our best conversations about what it means to follow Jesus in our whole lives have come on the football pitch or over a drink.
Already in 2001 we were seeing fewer churched young people coming and more young people who were not regular churchgoers. Indeed we're now at the stage where the majority of young people who come don't go to church, a significant number have never been in a church and several have to go back to their grandparents for any church experience. It also became increasing obvious to us that, despite our best invitations, most of the young people who came along on a Sunday night would not make the transition to a Sunday morning church service. The key barriers seem to be didactic teaching with no opportunity to interact or question, not feeling valued or part of the community, the timing of services, and seeing it as irrelevant. As a result we have explored different ways of building elements of church amongst the alive and kicking community.
We ran a couple of small groups for 17 to 18-year-olds where they could build friendships and explore more adult questions than were appropriate on a Sunday night. We've tried several different sung worship 'praise' events such as 'akpraise' and 'Worship on Wednesday' which were very good for a time. A Sunday morning event called 'eleven' also ran for a couple of years, attempting to bridge the gap between the Sunday morning congregations and the Sunday night alive and kicking. None of these were long-lasting, but all were extremely useful for those that were part of them, all of them helped people grow in discipleship (which couldn't have been done just as part of the Sunday night meeting) and all of them contributed to the ongoing story of building God's community.
One of the tensions around alive and kicking has always been its place in the Christian life of the village. We don't see alive and kicking as a church, but some of the young people who come would consider it their church. The two traditional congregations in Kinver have often struggled to understand how young people meeting off church premises can be part of the Church in the village and wondered why they're not seeing any new 'recruits' to the pews.
Our current leadership team, nearly all of whom came to faith as young people through the work of alive and kicking, meet together for an evening every week to plan and prepare for the coming week's session and, equally importantly, to share in prayer, fellowship and food! One of the interesting things has been how community has developed amongst those who have been involved in leadership over the years. A couple of house groups now running started from these weekly leadership meetings.
We know that alive and kicking will only ever reach some young people. Many just don't want to engage in organised groups for instance, and for them it's never going to scratch where they itch. For others, a games and discussion format doesn't engage them. Our current vision is to start a network of small activity-based groups alongside alive and kicking to broaden the ways young people can encounter God. We've started a photography group and there are plans for a drama group to start soon with several more in the pipeline. The aim of each of these groups is to explore what it means to encounter God through their activity – how, as people who really enjoy photography or drama or sport or cooking, can we relate that to God – and how can we relate God to that activity and our wider lives.
One of the dangers of having so many small groups is that they all head off in their own directions and we build a load of small ghettos so we want to connect everything with a new monthly gathering called 'breathing space', which draws together people from all the different small groups, from alive and kicking, from the leadership team, the house groups and the traditional congregations. We plan to meet over food in an informal setting to worship, to build relationships between groups and generations and to have fun. Whilst individual groups may only be for a particular niche, with breathing space we want to build a place were people from the whole diverse body of Christ can meet together.
As for the future, we're excited to see how the new small groups and 'breathing space' take off. No doubt some will last, some will change and some will be for a short time only. We also have a dream for a Christian youth drop-in space in the village somewhere – an idea which echoes the original 'Hole in the Wall'. It has not happened yet but the thinking and praying about that space is what shaped our vision and values, led to the pastoral support and prayer team, the establishing of a board of trustees and many other aspects of the work.
Refresh, a fresh expression of church in the Scottish Borders, has grown out of the Church Army's Grafted project. Established in 2003 by Church Army officer Paul Little, Refresh continues to develop new ministries in the region.
They ranged from 12/13 year-olds up to 16 and were basically pre-prison status. It was an experimental last ditch programme and things have developed a lot more since then. Many of the young people I have met along the way are now in their early 20s and those relationships bring lots of opportunities.
Grafted (Giving Hope to those Without Hope) is known locally for its work with people struggling with drug and alcohol dependency. Using outdoor activities such as canoeing, mountain biking and mountaineering, Grafted's Window of Time project helps to develop leadership and self esteem in those with poor basic and social skills, or those with learning disabilities or emotional and behavioural difficulties.
We have an open access policy and anyone over 18 is welcome to attend.
Refresh Community Church in Newcastleton was the result of that period. About three quarters of the people who have come over all are non-Christians and we have grown to about 20 in number with some 60 people from the community involved in one way or another. There are also groups that meet under the banner of Refresh, all of which are missional because the people who make up the leadership are locals who have been through Alpha.
When we meet for Refresh, there is usually discussion and some sung worship. We don't have anybody at all who is ordained – we never have had on the leadership team. Children's work didn't really take place in the community when we started Refresh but it is flourishing now.
More recently, and as part of Refresh, Deeper was developed for 14 to 19-year-olds in the village. Deeper is a home group for teenagers, which meets each Sunday in a Church Army house we have here. The aim of the group is to disciple the young people who come along and encourage them to grow deeper in their relationship with God. The evening consists of games, a talk and discussion with food. On average 12 young people attend regularly. We see youth work as a priority so we are looking at new ways of developing youth work for 2011.
Mary Styles, an ordinand with the CofE Diocese in Europe, is a Reader at All Saints Church, Rome. For the past nine years she has led Footsteps, a fresh expression of church meeting in two areas of the city.
Footsteps started because I was aware of the gap between these sort of discussions and the opportunity or space to follow them up. Since that time, some of those who have been part of Footsteps are churchgoers who have lapsed, others have been involved in church life for quite a while and there are also those who are not interested at all in attending a traditional church.
Footsteps now meets in both a northern and a southern suburb, Casal Palocco and La Storta, for informal worship in English and runs weekly Bible study groups and occasional Alpha courses open to all. We meet in people's homes, as families and individuals, to serve and reach out to our neighbours. Our mission is 'knowing and growing in Jesus, following in His footsteps and putting His love into action.'
Dealing with ex-pats means there are large fluctuations in numbers because our community is particularly mobile; quite a lot are highly skilled professionals and they may be with us for anything from six months to two years before they fly off again. We generally tend to attract families with children; there aren't too many people of grandparent age.
We try to keep the actual worship to an hour but there is always a time of fellowship afterwards with coffee and pastries. I have had lots of support from the local Baptist pastor and Methodist minister and my parish priest at All Saints has been very supportive too – though there has been the inevitable tension from some people in the community who say that we should bringing regulars from Footsteps into All Saints. On the positive side of things, we have got vicars and ministers who want to help us lead interdenominational worship because we are not linked to any one tradition. The only link is through me – who happens to be an Anglican Reader.
I have been trying to prepare people for a handover in leadership but, due to the transient nature of the congregation, everybody I have trained as possible new leaders has left. As a result I am now trying to forge links with churches with a good organisational structure in order to help make the big decisions about the way we are going.
St Luke's-in-the-High-Street focuses around the weekly Walthamstow Farmers Market in north-east London. It is one of 40 Christian churches based in Walthamstow but team vicar, Revd Tony Cant, says it is a unique form of missional experiment in the diocese of Chelmsford.
St Luke’s-in-the-High-Street is part of The Parish of Walthamstow Team, which also includes St Gabriel's, St Mary's and St Stephen's. The churches all work differently, complementing each other in working for the common good and helping to shape the future for this area.
As part of their discipleship in building their own faith, St Luke's meets at one of their members' homes on Wednesday evenings for reflection, prayer, Bible study, worship and Holy Communion. And the last Wednesday of the month is given over to enjoying a meal together.
Tony says that some weeks St Luke's members find themselves simply huddled in the stall, looking out at the driving rain, and wondering just quite what it is that they are doing. Yet on other occasions have had hugely significant conversations with stall holders or customers about life, the universe and everything. Both extremes are expressions of love; both dependent on a willingness to be present; and (much more importantly), both resourced by the true source of all love that they have been grafted onto.