The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
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The Guide contains how-to-do-it advice on starting, developing and sustaining fresh expressions of church based on shared experiences.
More about The Guide
Everyone must face failure because the reality is everyone fails. Although it can be embarrassing, debilitating and lead to misunderstanding, it can also hasten maturity and bring breakthrough. It all depends on the way you look at it and respond to it. Thomas Edison famously once said: 'I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that will not work.' It is not that he avoided failure, rather he never let it stop him.
On Sundays, between 10am and midday, we now open what we're calling the Sunday Sanctuary. We provide breakfast and refreshments all morning and some sort of craft-based activity. Alongside that, we also offer one or two light, reflective activities. We've been describing it as a family drop-in in the publicity material. Is that what it's been?
Jesus welcomed the crowds, he taught them and he healed them, but then he dismissed them. He never invited them back or suggested that they return to him. He sent them away and got back to the important task of teaching and training his disciples, trusting the crowds to God.
When Andrew at Share asked me to write up my thoughts on this subject, I thought I'd scan through the previous blogs to get an idea of length, style, need for wit, wisdom, searing theological insight, blah blah ... and got as far back as the last 25 posts before I realised that only 5 of those 25 are written by women. In fact, casting your eyes back through the past 10 blogs, you'd be hard-pushed to see that women feature at all in fresh expressions. Does this matter to you? How would someone outside the church perceive fresh expressions as an organisation if they read the same part of the website as I did? More importantly, how would they perceive Jesus if we're his reflection, his ambassadors? And is this bias typical of fresh expressions as a whole?
I think there is no one answer to what maturity looks like, but I don't think it is achieved by giving up the purpose for which the fresh expression was intended. Maturity in fresh expressions of church means that we are doing what we set out to do and we are doing it better. In the process we have become self-governing, self-supporting, self-theologising and, hopefully, self-propagating.
