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
I think we often underestimate the power of language. The words we choose conjure up images of what we are describing, and sometimes these can have unintended consequences. I am increasingly seeing this happen when people use the phrase 'fresh expressions of church'; indeed, even more so when people talk of their mission as 'creating fresh expressions of church'.
A few years ago, when the working party for the best-selling Mission-shaped Church report asked questions about church-planting in a questionnaire, there was a less than enthusiastic response from rural areas. As one Church of England official wrote, 'With 648 churches in this diocese, there is little incentive to plant more.' This is understandable; in the countryside there are typically many more churches per head of population than in urban areas – and some of those congregations struggle to keep going. A person might well conclude we don't need any more.
During the last four years I have been involved with ReSource, developing training with pioneers starting churches in emerging culture. One of the themes we have revisited is: What makes something church? What is essential and what is negotiable? When given the chance to step back and think about what we do as church and what we believe about church, time and again people show genuine surprise at the amount of church practice which is habitual but not essential to what it means to be church.
In one of my all-time favourite TV shows, an American police sergeant used to send his officers out onto their beat with a: 'Now, make sure you do it to them before they do it to you!' I have lived and worked amongst Muslims in Britain for over five years now and there's a lot of talk about mission and church planting that sounds worryingly like that clarion call to arms. I wonder, though, whether you've ever considered mission as, primarily, a task of listening?
