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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'We have failed,' said the panic-stricken voice of a café church leader on the other end of the phone. 'Our church has withdrawn their support of our café church because the people who come are not going to church.'
This raised all sorts of questions for me. How could we help them survive? What was it that quantified failure for the church? Why did the café church leaders want to give up? It led me to think about failure – is it a bad thing?
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.
Wisdom came as a result of failure, not because of success. Is this what the Apostle Paul meant when he said: 'when I am weak then I am strong'? (2 Corinthians 12.10). Setbacks may have acted like 'push backs' of an aeroplane, simply ushering him to greater levels of usefulness. Maybe we too should embrace failure like a friend.
This is not something we want to hear when we set sail in pioneering ministry. We want instant success with little or no risk. So we gravitate towards 'success stories' thinking that they will help us avoid failure. However, this 'quick fix' type of success is seductive and seldom lives up to our expectations. Maybe we fail to realise that the key to achievement is in our own hands. The question is will we learn from failure?
Cafechurch Network has been helping café churches set up in high street stores all over the UK. Most of these café churches are set up as a way for local churches to reach out to local communities. However, increasingly we have found people who share our values are asking for our help to form what I call 'café church congregations'. This is not just outreach, this is church.
So we have begun to respond. When one of the café church leaders called to say they had failed, we began to turn 'failure' towards forming a congregation. Their failure has become failure in the right direction.
If you want to be the kind of pioneer who rises after setbacks happen, here are a few pointers:
The Cross of Christ may look like failure to some but it was failing forward, for greater things came as a result of this event than could ever have been imagined. For the believer, it is this that gives us audacious pioneering hope that impacts history. At the end of a long presidential campaign full of setbacks, controversy, highs and lows, Oprah Winfrey stood in support of Barack Obama and said: 'I am standing on the right side of history.'
I wonder where failure will enable you to stand? Will it hinder your ability to pioneer or will it drive you onto greater things?
Rev Cid Latty, Cafechurch Network. With special thanks to Alison Latty, Rebecca Palfreman and Helen Petithuguenin.
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Karen Carter.
One month into our great adventure in Portsmouth. What has been going on? What have we learned?
On 22nd November, the tiny congregation who met in the parish church building of St Luke's, Southsea, said goodbye to that place. In a special service, we moved around the building, stopping at various points - the main entrance, the font, etc. At each 'station' we marked some feature or character of the church's life, symbolised by that particular piece of church furniture. We committed ourselves to carry that aspect of our common life forward into our new future.
Why did we do that? Because from then on, we were putting a stop to the 11am Sunday service in the church building and instead meeting in the community room attached to a nearby tower block. But it's not just a matter of geography. We haven't moved our Sunday service of Anglican liturgical worship. We've ended it.
The time for the intentionally Christian community's worship is now on a Tuesday evening as part of our home group. Each week we share a meal, a Eucharist and prayer and engagement with the Bible in my home.
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?
Already, we have experienced a steep learning curve. I anticipate that our Tuesday night gatherings will include some lively conversations from now on! The first surprise was that people stay all morning. We had been working on the assumption that people might come for 30 or 45 minutes and then go. One or two craft activities are sustainable for that length of time, but not if people are there for two hours. So we are having to think pretty rapidly about creating a broader range of things to do.
But at the forefront of our minds is the need to ensure that all we do is intentionally spiritual. It would be easy in lots of ways to resort to 'entertainment', but we aren't a youth or kids' club. We're a church operating a family drop-in. We're not about forcing anything on anyone. Everything is optional. But everything we offer comes from who we are - ourselves and our faith.
The difference between what we're doing here and a regular church service is that we're not expecting people to come to us and do what we do without space for question or doubt or just exploration in conversation. The activities we offer share some of the things that we have found meaningful. They invite others to imaginatively enter into that world of meaning - to 'try it on for size'. But we will always respect people's freedom and if they find themselves taking a different point of view, it will not affect our welcome of them. Watch this space...
Revd Mark Rodel, City Centre Pioneer Minister and Associate Priest, St Luke's Southsea
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Karen Carter.
December is a time when we prepare to meet the needs of the crowds who flock to the Christian story over Christmas. It's relatively easy to get a crowd over Christmas, and so often have I asked myself: 'How can I keep this crowd? How can I entice these people to come back to church more often?' Equally often I have looked at the numbers entered into the service register with a contented smile on my face.
I have not been thinking like Jesus.
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.
After being told by the Pharisees that he was attracting a bigger crowd then John the Baptist (John 4), Jesus left the area - I would have stayed for more 'success'. After the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6), Jesus dismissed the crowd, and moved on - I would have been on that same hillside the next week and the week after, while the crowd slowly dwindled.
Wherever it is that we welcome our crowds this Christmas, we must remember to dismiss them afterwards. It is not in the example of Jesus to try to hold onto them. If our mission-shaped church is to have a Jesus-shaped mission, we need to sit lightly to the crowds, and resist being seduced by rising numbers. Yes, we must welcome the crowds and teach them. But we must also dismiss them.
That leaves the question: what do we do with these crowds when they are with us? In a Jesus-shaped mission, we will tell them stories - wild stories, crazy stories, funny stories, but stories that are laced with the 100% proof love of God - and then dismiss them. In a Jesus-shaped mission we will send them back to their homes, not with answers but with questions, not with understanding in their heads but with the love of God in their hearts. And, finally - if we really want to be like Jesus - we will do so without ever asking them to come back.
Revd Robert Harrison, St John's Hillingdon
If you have something burning to say and want to contribute to the Share weekly guest blog, please contact Karen Carter.
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?
It can't be that women don't blog. It can't be that women aren't reflecting on fresh expressions as they lead them and belong to them. It could be that this 'one-fifth representation', together with the lack of women represented at the core of fresh expressions, is symptomatic of something deeper that needs addressing - and not just by women themselves.
You can get spectacles that filter out colours and force you to see the world in a particular way. If you put on metaphorical spectacles and look at the world through the eyes of gender equality, it soon becomes apparent that in fresh expressions / church planting / emerging church leadership there is still a huge gender imbalance. Sorry. I didn't want to believe it either as I love fresh expressions, but there it is. And yes, I feel very uncomfortable about raising this point as I want to get on with the fun of Messy Church, not get sidetracked into being labelled a bra-igniting Woman's Hour feminist, but who will raise this issue if I don't?
No, I don't like wearing these spectacles, also because I soon become unable to see more important issues as I'm too distracted by gender questions (so busy fuming at the lack of female speakers, lack of stories from women leaders, the lack of pictures that show women as well as men, and so on), that I find I haven't listened to the wisdom of my male colleagues - you get the picture.
But if we, as practitioners of fresh expressions or more simply just as Christians, are concerned with justice, reaching the marginalised, giving outsiders opportunities to grow in faith, surely we should be doubly conscious of injustices in our own front room and challenge each other to right these easily rightable wrongs - from the point of view of witness to the rest of society if nothing else! And how much more gracious it all becomes if those calling for justice are not the ones being marginalised; how much more powerful it would be if it was a man writing this blog? (Ah, no, that would make it 5/26.)
At a seminar recently at a church planting conference, Penny Marsh and I were asking the question: 'Is church planting just for blokes?' We managed to lure two genuine blokes in to join the women. (How? Cake.) Between us, we came up with a lot of meaty ideas as to the possible causes for this perception and possible responses to the state of play, and you can read more here.
Language, history, culture, having babies, leadership styles, structural blind spots and more come into it. Do have a gander.
And now, stamping on my smouldering underwear and grubbing around in the ashes for a pair of contact lenses, I shall return to the messiness of my real passion.
Lucy works for BRF as team leader of Messy Church, proud to be the single most prolific cake-consuming expression of church in the English- (and now Danish-) speaking world. You can find out more about the Messy interdenominational, international, intergenerational network on www.messychurch.org.uk.
What does it mean for a fresh expression of church to become mature?
Looking at this subject I thought about a word that in many Bible translations is translated as 'maturity', but in other translations is translated as 'perfection'. The Greek word in question is Τēλιος. Its basic meaning is 'the purpose for which a thing was designed'.
If a watch is τελιος it keeps perfect time; if a human being is τελιος, he, or she, is holy. But what does it mean for a church to be τελιος?
What is maturity?
What is the purpose for which the church was designed?
When is a fresh expression of church τελιος?
The purpose of fresh expressions is to reach people who are beyond the reach of inherited church. The reasoning is that we are in a missionary type of situation. So if we view the UK as a mission field and fresh expressions of church as the mission movement, how do we judge maturity?
Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn came up with the idea of the 'three selfs': self-government; self-support and self-propagation. A fourth self was added by David Bosch: self-theologising.
By that standard, a fresh expression of church is mature when it runs itself. It is self-governing. That doesn't mean when it has a fully functioning PCC or church council, complete with wardens or stewards or whatever. It's hard enough for inherited churches to find people to fill those positions. What it means is that there is a committee of sorts that is running the church and it has been recognised by the sending church as being grown up enough to make its own decisions – even if it makes a few wrong choices. The formerly unchurched are now running the fresh expression.
Self-supporting means that financially it can stand on its own feet. This doesn't lead to independence. It leads from dependence, through independence, to interdependence.
But it is mature when it is paying its own rent; providing its own resources, but maybe still receiving gifts from its parent(s).
And self-propagating! Have we got that far yet? Do we have fresh expressions of church starting even fresher expressions of church? 'The life cycle of all living things includes the creation of the next generation' (George Lings). Of course reproduction doesn't happen until a certain level of maturity has been achieved.
Then there is David Bosch's extra: self-theologising. We don't create our own doctrines, but we do need to become contextual theologians – interpreting what God is doing in our context and applying ourselves to that.
Steven Croft, in the early days, talked about going from 'fresh' to 'stale' expressions. I have come up with an alternative. In East Sussex there is a little village with its own Anglican church. The village is called Ripe and the church is called 'Ripe Church'.
I like to think in terms of τελιος. What does it mean for a fresh expression of church to fulfil its purpose?
Does it mean settling down to conformity?
When we have enough people to call ourselves 'proper' church is that when we are mature?
Or are we mature when we have achieved the three selfs? We can sustain ourselves, but we are still maintaining our purpose of reaching people who are beyond the reach of inherited church.
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.
Martin is minister of The Haven Church, Eastbourne. Haven, which he helped to plant in 2002 for unchurched young adults, meets at The Haven School in the town's Sovereign Harbour. It is a Methodist/Church of England Local Ecumenical Partnership.
